Bradley Horowitz Quits Yahoo! for Google

After laying off 1,000 of its employees, it seems Yahoo's own generals have begun jumping ships. What might be deemed as a blow to Yahoo, Bradley Horowitz, head of Yahoo's Advanced Technology Division has accepted a position with Google.

Horowitz will be working with Joe Kraus, director of product management and head of Google's OpenSocial initiative. However, till now there is no information available on the exact role that he will be playing at Google. Even in his blog he said that he will be working with a stellar team.

On being asked why did he leave Yahoo at this point, this is what he had to say, "The timing is a bit unfortunate. I wish I were leaving with Yahoo on top of the world… it'd still be the right thing for me personally. So while the timing may look "suspicious", please don't project your own assumptions onto my decisions. I thought that since so many people were leaving on Tuesday, it'd be a good day for me to slip out unnoticed too."

Further he added that, "When I joined 4 years ago, Yahoo was all about what transpired on "*.yahoo.com". That part of Yahoo now self-identifies as our "O&O" (owned and operated) division… In the context of Yahoo's larger ambitions, it's extremely helpful to be a principal in the publishing space (and not just a principal, but amongst the web's largest)… but Yahoo has transformed itself into a company that participates and embraces the open internet ecosystem at large. Yahoo "gets it." "

However, it is also true that his leaving Yahoo is a big blow to the company as most new products (at least the fun stuff) used to go through his group. And he is often the face of Yahoo at industry events. Bradley joined Yahoo in May 2004 as Director of Multimedia Search, and later worked on Yahoo Desktop Search and the Yahoo Toolbar. He was also key in getting the Flickr acquisition done.

With such an important person leaving Yahoo at this point surely means there is indeed more to the story that we still know nothing about.

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