The metaphor of rats leaving a sinking ship does not cover the quality of the people that have put Yahoo! behind, but it is very good for explaining the mass exodus from the Sunnyvale-based company. Joining the long and stunning list is Tim Cadogan, Senior Vice President of Search, Listings and Display Marketplaces.

Apparently, he got the boot, as one of Valleywag's tipsters provided an email that circulated internally: "Tim Cadogan has decided to leave Yahoo! after nine years in the Yahoo/Overture/GoTo family. I have been talking with Tim for some time about his interest to do something different with his career, and over the last couple of weeks he decided to move on to new challenges." Don't be fooled by the seemingly nice tone of the message, were he to leave at his own accord, he could have written his own goodbye email.

An alternative to that would be that somebody else at Yahoo! wrote it because they wouldn't want his staffers to quit alongside him and wanted to minimize his communication with the team. Either way, it's something fishy about the whole deal and some more details will probably surface in the following weeks, once his future position will be announced at some other company. From what information was available, apparently Tim Cadogan was one of the most liked people over at Yahoo! and even engineers are said to have respected him.

The last acquisition Tim was involved in was that of Maven Networks, a deal closed down on the 13th of February, that was supposed to bring a new approach to video advertising from the Sunnyvale-based company. Unfortunately, he won't be there to see it fly, as he was added to the list of very important people to have left Yahoo!, since Microsoft made the unsolicited bid public.