Yahoo! Inc.'s 'realignment' to support core strategies by centralizing audience product development and forming a new U.S. region with three new groups reporting to President Sue Decker can be looked at from several viewpoints. But before we get into the why, let's clear out exactly what these changes mean for Yahoo! as an organization, and its employees and customers.

The company is creating three new teams that will report to President Sue Decker. An Audience Products Division will assume responsibility for companywide product strategy and product management. It will be led by Ash Patel who previously managed the company's Platforms & Infrastructure group. A U.S. region with accountability for all go-to-market activity in the U.S. will be led by Hilary Schneider, who previously headed the company's Global Partner Solutions group. Finally, an Insights Strategy team will assume responsibility for centralizing and executing a common strategy for the use of data and analysis across Yahoo!. The company plans to name this group's leader within the next few weeks.

"The changes we're making today will help deliver superior global products for users and enable faster and better decision-making," said President Sue Decker in a press statement. "This is a logical next step in light of our success last year in moving to a more centralized approach to developing world-class marketing products. We have planned these changes deliberately over the past several months to clarify responsibilities and to capitalize on the scale advantages while allowing for fine tuning to meet local market needs."

First, the media is attributing this reorganization to solely one reason - Post-Microsoft blues at Yahoo!. Meaning that Yang & Decker are desperately trying to push Yahoo! past the stage where people are focused on how good life under Steve Ballmer's leadership would have been. And this even as both companies fight persistent rumors about renewed merger talks - All attributed to 'unnamed sources' and 'insiders'.

Whether you agree that this reorganization is part of an attempt to move past Microsoft, or a long-awaited push to streamline operations and bring some change and innovation into operations, fact remains that all this is just cosmetic, unless these new groups actually start turning things around. Question is, will they get that much time?

For starters, Icahn is prowling on the edges, waiting for the Yahoo shareholder meeting on August 1. Second, even without Icahn, CEO Jerry Yang, and President Sue Decker by association, find their jobs endangered. There was near panic in Sunnyvale and all sorts of rumors flying about big changes at the company when Jerry Yang went out of contact for a couple of days last week. Yahoo's stock price has been going up and down like a yo-yo the last week based on blatant rumors about the Microsoft talks. And like we said here, executives who were the driving forces behind several big initiatives are quitting to avoid being swept into this quagmire.

For a company in such a state of upheavel, will some reorganization and shifting of responsibilities really be of any help? The fact is that Jerry Yang is the main, and probably the sole, cause of all this problems at Yahoo. Great man and a visonary he may be, in addition to being the co-founder of one of the greatest internet companies in the world. We'll write that on his wikipedia page. But for now, Yang needs to step aside, for the good of his beloved company. If not, he'll end up destroying the core value of something he's allegedly fighting so hard to preserve, and of which he is a big part - Yahoo!'s brain trust.