Wow, I get busy at work and miss all the fun. Seems like the pressure of the mainstream press, the “Peanut Butter Manifesto,” and a sinking stock price finally spurred Yahoo! and Terry Semel to start making some serious moves to look like… well, serious moves are being made (reported here at TechCrunch).

The short story is that Yahoo! will reorganize into three groups, focused on “audience, advertisers, and publishers.” In addition to that, the four objectives they’ll concentrate on are “customer-centric culture, creating leading social media environments, leading in next-generation advertising platforms, and driving organizational effectiveness and scale.”

Sounds pretty good to me. In various posts over the past few months, I’ve posted about how I feel Yahoo! is uncommunicative - their message is buried either through much better moves by their competition, or their own confusion across departments. They really need to start focusing on real products that people will actually use instead of having parties, writing memos and worrying about their stock price. They then need to figure out how to get the “buzz” that is so easy for Apple, Google, and even Microsoft to generate. Hopefully the buzz will come about if they just start pleasing their customers.

Take the recent launch of Yahoo! TV, showing a desire by Yahoo! to say “me too” with flashy web 2.0 at the expense of usability. I found it surprising that company with the resources of Yahoo! couldn’t even support video on my Mac without me having to install some previously unheard of “Flip4Mac” plug-in. No other site I visit makes me use this plug-in for video, and meanwhile, everyone else moves towards Flash Video. I see this as a usability failing.

Anyhow, the real test is if/when this reorganization actually starts showing results. This transition has to move quickly. Every future quarter that Google announces blowout earnings and Yahoo! doesn’t will embarrass the Yahoo! leadership even more, now that a reorg has been announced.

More reaction at paidContent, and The Prayer of Silicon Valley.

Note: Also, here’s a Yahoo! blog post reiterating the plan, from Terry Semel himself.

Disclosure: I own a tiny amount of Apple stock.

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