Former Microsoft Exec Becomes Yahoo Chief Product Officer

By Geoff Duncan April 19, 2010

Earlier this month, Yahoo announced its chief product officer Ari Blaough would be leaving the company for personal reasons as of June 3, but the company hadn’t yet figured out who his successor would be. Today, the mystery is over: Yahoo’s new Chief Product Officer will be Blake Irving, the former head of Microsoft’s Windows Live services.

Irving will be responsible for all of Yahoo’s worldwide services aimed at both consumers and advertisers, and will report directly to Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz.

“Yahoo has an impressive product and technology portfolio that has provided unparalleled value to its customers at scale,” said Irving, in s statement. “I look forward to working with the team to bring forward more unique and highly personal experiences to Yahoo consumers, deliver on the company’s promise of Science, Art and Scale to Yahoo advertisers, and develop the amazing talent at the company so we may continue to deliver more and faster innovations to the market.”

Although Irving comes to Yahoo from a professorship at Pepperdine’s Graziado School of Business Management, before that he was a Microsoft corporate vice president responsible for the Windows Live Platform group after holding down a number of development and management positions at Microsoft. He came to Microsoft from Xerox.

Outgoing CTO Ari Balough will be on-hand to ease the transition to Irving through June 3.

Yahoo also announced that its Chief Scientist, Prabhakar Raghaven, will also now report directly to Bartz.

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