Summary: Microsoft's Blake Irving becomes the chief technology officer of Yahoo! (latest among several Microsoft proponents who run the 'new' Yahoo!)

WHENEVER people depart from Microsoft they may actually become more of a problem than when they were inside Microsoft. The Microsoft influence grows wings and moves on to other companies, sometimes competitors.

It's a good thing that Canonical abandoned Yahoo! right before the release of Ubuntu 10.04. As we have shown in recent weeks, Yahoo! is fast becoming just a department of Microsoft [1, 2, 3], having been hijacked through proxy agents like Carl Icahn.

The latest news is that Microsoft's Blake Irving, whom we named as a rumoured candidate for a top position at Yahoo!, is now confirmed to be in. He will become Yahoo's chief technology officer.

As it promised, Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) has moved very quickly to replace CTO and EVP of products Ari Balogh, who said earlier this month that he was leaving for “personal reasons.” The company says Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) veteran Blake Irving will be its new chief product officer. Irving had been a long-time executive at Microsoft, who—among other roles—led the back-end of its Windows Live platform, but “retired” three years ago, shortly before a major reorganization of Microsoft’s online operations. He’s worked since as a professor at Pepperdine’s business school.

One reader of ours cites this article and says that "Yahoo will finally stop pretending to be an independent company and take up its new role as the search arm of Microsoft. Not being totally merged so as to escape the monopolies commission..." ⬆