Rearranging the Deck Chairs on the U.S.S. Yahoo

Sam Gustin finds it hard to get pumped up about Yahoo's resuscitation of Rocketmail and launch of Ymail, given that much the company's executive team appears to be heading for the exits faster than rats on a sinking ship.

Today, another round of top executives left the flailing company, including Brad Garlinghouse, who ran Yahoo Mail (maybe they could give him a Rocketmail account as a parting gift), Messenger, Groups and Flickr, (whose founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield also announced their intention to bail from Yahoo.)

Also fleeing: Vish Makhijani, the SVP and General Manager of Search, and Qi Lu, the EVP engineering for Search and Advertising Technology Group, are following their former boss Jeff Weiner out the door.

At Yahoo right now, there appear to be two types of executives. Those who are sticking around to rearrange the deck chairs, (Rocketmail, Ymail.com), and those who are getting the hell out of Dodge.

And who can blame them? Yahoo has lost the search ad wars and is in complete disarray.

But Sam does think that if his esteemed colleague Blaise Zerega wants to go really retro, (he can hear Miles and Gerry Mulligan playing on a phonograph somewhere in San Francisco), he should change his email domain to Rocketmail, launch a Geocities site, and sign up for AOL dial-up. Or barring that, how about Compuserve?