Yahoo!'s chief financial officer is leaving the company in a management shake-up instituted by Carol Bartz, the new chief executive. Blake Jorgensen, who had been Yahoo!'s CFO since June 2007, will relinquish his duties as soon as a replacement is found, the company said.

Six weeks into her new role, Ms Bartz is stamping her authority on the troubled company with a more streamlined management structure, doing away with the company's “notorious silos”.

Yahoo!'s technology and product groups will be combined into one entity led by Ari Balogh, the chief technology officer, according to an e-mail to employees. Other changes were not immediately disclosed but there were reports of a widespread overhaul of senior executives.

In a blog post, Ms Bartz promised the new pecking order would speed decision-making in the company and make it easier to fulfil her vision.

“I've been in student mode, slowly getting smarter about what makes this place tick. And most recently, I've been gathering information on what it's going to take to get Yahoo! to a great place as an organisation,” Ms Bartz wrote.

She added: “Today I'm rolling out a new management structure that I believe will make Yahoo! a lot faster on its feet. For us working at Yahoo!, it means everything gets simpler. We'll be able to make speedier decisions, the notorious silos are gone, and we have a renewed focus on the customer.”

She announced that she was creating a new customer advocacy group to get the views of customers better heard at the company.

Ms Bartz was hired by Yahoo! to replace Jerry Yang, its co-founder, who had rebuffed a $47.5 billion acquisition bid from Microsoft last year, and saw a deal to form a search advertising partnership with Google fall apart amid competition concerns.

Mr Jorgensen told a technology conference on Wednesday that Yahoo! was “not opposed” to selling its search business. Microsoft has repeatedly said it is still interested in such a deal.

But he said that the search business is deeply intertwined with Yahoo!'s other online products and properties and, so any deal - a partnership or a sale - would be done for the right reasons and the right economics.

“It's extremely difficult to draw a line down the middle of the organisation and split it into two pieces,” Mr Jorgensen said. He did not mention specifically Microsoft.

Ms Bartz has said that she did not join the company in January to sell it, nor did she have a preconceived notion of doing a search deal, but that “everything is on the table”.

Last month, the company forecast sales in the current quarter would decline between 5per cent and 16per cent year-on-year to between $1.525 billion and $1.725 billion.

Mr Jorgensen appeared at the conference with Hilary Schneider, Yahoo!'s US executive vice president. Asked about changes within the company under Ms Bartz, Ms Schneider said that there is “a new sheriff in town”, whose top priority is improving the customer experience.

“She doesn't suffer fools,” she said. “So stupid questions don't go very far.”

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