Last month, Yahoo SVP David Ku, who headed the company’s advertising products group, left the company. Yahoo has been hemorrhaging talent lately — including some high ranking executives — and Ku was an especially big loss because he’s been with the company since 2002. Now we’ve confirmed Ku’s next move: he’s joining Microsoft as Corporate Vice President, Online Services Division New Initiatives, effective October 29th, 2010.
We initially heard that Ku would be working directly on Bing (which is part of Microsoft’s’ Online Services Division) but a Microsoft spokesperson tell us that he’ll be involved with a range of initiatives across the division.
In addition to advertising experience, Ku has quite a bit of product experience as well: he was Yahoo’s VP Engineering, Search from April 2002 until December 2005. According to his LinkedIn profile, this included running Yahoo’s core search, social search, vertical search (images, video, shopping), Flickr, and more.
At Yahoo, Ku was replaced by Mark Morrissey who serves as SVP of Ad Platforms and Products (Yahoo consolidated its ad platforms under one exec).