Mutiny onboard Yahoo! India?

MUMBAI, INDIA: Something seems to be amiss at the Yahoo! India head office in Bangalore.

For the past year or so senior executives in the company have been putting in their papers and joining rival companies or even starting off on their own.

The latest one is George Zacharias, managing director, Yahoo! India. He has left the company to “pursue his entrepreneurial interests”. Zacharias had been with the company since 2006. The strange thing is that he is certainly not the first one.

2006 was a year that Yahoo! India would like to forget in a hurry but cannot. It was a tough year for the Internet giant, as it revenues from domestic operations came under pressure as advertisers preferred desi Rediff and Indiatimes over the videshi company. Also, its launches like Yahoo! Answers in India did not really live up to all the hype.

But the biggest setback for Yahoo! India was from its employee itself. Neville Taraporewalla, country head of Yahoo! India, who was renowned for ‘localizing’ Yahoo! in India, quit the company.

It was the single biggest setback, as he was the public face of the company in India and also well known for his market suaveness. He joined media company Connecturf as a CEO.

Yahoo! India also lost another veteran Prasad Ram in 2006. Prasad was the CTO at Yahoo! India and responsible for quite many innovative projects in the company, especially on the mobile platform.

Prasad was lapped up by rival Google India and is currently employed there. This was not all, there were quite a few other high profile exits from Yahoo! India, for instance head of content Deepak Karambelkar left the company for AOL India.

And now, it is Zacharias. India operations will be now handled by Keith Nilsson, who is the vice president (International Emerging Markets) and based out of Singapore. It seems to be a stopgap arrangement, till a suitable replacement is found for Zacharias.

Ironically, Zacharias himself took on the reigns after Taraporewalla quit. The situation is quite reminiscent of 2002, when Yahoo! India’s country manager Deepak Chandnani had quit, followed by Arun Gupta, head of Business Development.

Followed by a few others. That time Taraporewalla had taken charge and steered the company. Who will it be this time?