We’ve just learned that Scott Dietzen, VP Applications at Yahoo who worked on key products such as Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Flickr, Answers, Groups, and Zimbra, has left the company. The surprising news comes on the same day the Sunnyvale company is announcing its not-too-bad yet not-excellent-either third quarter earnings.
Scott Dietzen joined Yahoo with the acquisition of open source email startup Zimbra, where he was President and CTO. Dietzen went on to replace Brad Garlinghouse, Yahoo’s former SVP of Communications & Communities, when he left the company in June 2008. He reported to Bryan Lamkin, the SVP of Applications who oversees the global strategy, development and performance for the products cited above.
Before Zimbra, the TechFellow Award winner was CTO of BEA Systems (now an Oracle company) where he was the principal architect of the technology strategy for the WebLogic product family.
So what’s next for him? Well for one thing he will be joining the Board of Directors of rPath, a venture-backed startup that develops solutions companies can use to automate application deployment and maintenance across physical, virtual and cloud environments. The company has posted a Q&A with Dietzen on its website which confirms the rumors of him having left Yahoo.
In the interview, Dietzen says he’s not thinking about what’s next yet, and that he considers himself to be on an open-ended sabbatical for now. He says he wants to ‘disconnect’ for a while to regain some work/life balance and spend more time with his family until he moves on to other things, which will most likely be a startup rather than a large corporation.
Another loss for Yahoo at the senior executive level, and a major one it is.