UPDATED 07:45 EDT / APRIL 29 2013

NEWS

Patent Dispute at the Heart of Yahoo’s Board Shakeup?

Yahoo!’s Chairman of the Board of Directors Fred Amoroso recently announced that he will be leaving the company in June, with rumors suggesting that Marissa Mayer’s appointment as CEO triggered his departure. Amoroso had previously voiced his support for Ross Levinsohn to take that position, and reportedly wasn’t too happy when Mayer was appointed over his head.

Does his departure signify distrust in the leadership skills of Mayer?  Joining Kristin Feledy once again in last week’s Live NewsDesk Show is SiliconANGLE Contributing Editor John Casaretto to give his Breaking Analysis on Amoroso’s sudden decision.

“Officially, on the record, Mayer had said, in part of that statement, that he was a wonderful chairman for Yahoo over the past year,” Casaretto stated.

“He, of course, had his statement where he released and said that it’s always his intention to serve as chairman for just that one year.  If you look at it, the Wall Street and investors are really the people that Yahoo has to answer to… Despite all the power struggles and things going on behind the scenes and whatevers going on in there, I think that ultimately that’s really going to be the big takeaway here when people look at this is that this appears to be a part of a grander shift in personnel there again.  The people that sit there have been there typically no longer than three years and I think that it’s just the beginning here – that it’s going on company wide and this is the direction forward.”

Amoroso, for his part, isn’t as clean as some might think.  There are suggestions that he played a huge part in driving Yahoo’s failed patent litigation case against Facebook for allegedly infringing 10-20 of its patents in advertising, the personalization of web sites, social networking and messaging, and sought to impose a licensing fee.  It was apparently brought upon by Amoroso’s close relations to patent troll Rovi. In response, Facebook filed its own patent case against Yahoo for allegedly infringing its patents covering display advertising, content personalization and photo sharing which accounted for almost 80 percent or $4 billion of Yahoo’s revenue f0r 2011.  In the end, the two settled for cross-licensing deals.

As for Mayer, she also joined the board of wireless gadget-maker Jawbone.

For more of Casaretto’s Breaking Analysis on Amoroso’s departure from Yahoo, check out the segment on NewsDesk below:


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