Quickie Yahoo Trial Denied
The two Detroit pension funds suing Yahoo in Delaware to invalidate its severance plan “poison pill” have been denied the expedited trial that they asked for ahead of the August 1 stockholders meeting. The plan is supposed to incentivize Google staff to leave if an acquisition were to come off.

Yahoo Execs Abandon Ship
The latest departures from Yahoo, according to TechCrunch, which is now sporting a scorecard of ex-Yahoos, are Stewart Butterfield and his wife Caterina Fake, the co-founders of Flickr, the photo-sharing site Yahoo bought in 2005; executive VP, engineering for search and advertising technology (think Panama) Qi Lu; senior VP of communications and communities (mail, messenger, groups, Flickr, Zimbra) and author of the famous November 2006 Peanut Butter Manifesto Brad Garlinghouse, who observed of Yahoo that “We want to do everything and be everything to everyone…The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular”; and senior VP of search Vish Makhijani.

Last week Yahoo lost the head of its Network Division Jeff Weiner, the head of research and data mining Usama Fayyad and Yahoo Open Strategy evangelist Jeremy Zawodny.

Makhijani is reportedly going to become CEO of Yandex, the “Russian Google.”

Google Docs & PDF
Google Docs is now partially supporting PDF files. Users can upload, preview and share them but not edit or search them although they can copy and paste text.

HP Changes M&A Guy
HP has named Marius Haas senior VP and general manager of its Procurve networking business, reporting to chief strategy and technology officer Shane Robertson. Haas had been senior VP if strategy and corporate development, with a hand in all HP’s acquisitions since 2004. He is replaced by Brian Humphries, responsible for M&A. Humphries had been VP of finance for HP Services.

Icahn Blogs
Carl Icahn (or his hired clone) has started blogging, spreading the gospel of shareholder activism. See http://www.icahnreport.com/.

Yahoo To Reorg: WSJ
At press time the Wall Street Journal reported that Yahoo is going to reorganize and centralize product units like mail, search and homepage in a global organization. The company is still in search of a strategy – beyond the Google deal – to increase earning and prove it’s worth more than the $47.5 billion it turned down from Microsoft, the paper said. It suggests that the reorganization is behind some of the recent executive departures at Yahoo.

HP & VMware Cozy Up
HP has cuddled up closer to VMware and introduced integrated management software for heterogeneous environments, basically a bunch of business technology optimization (BTO) software that’s supposed to automate management across both physical and virtual environments – plus bundling VMware Infrastructure 3 with the HP Insight Control Environment. HP is also churning out VMware-certified consultants.

AMD Names Chief Sales Officer
AMD has named senior vice-president Gustavo Arenas chief sales officer, a job that’s sort of been open since Henri Richard, head of both sales and marketing, quit last September to go to Freescale. Arenas reports to the Office of the CEO. Like AMD CEO Hector Ruiz, Arenas joined AMD in 2003 from Motorola and was previously responsible for AMD’s sales, business and marketing for North America, Latin America and the Caribbean.

MSI To Pre-Load SUSE on Netbook
Micro-Star International (MSI) is going to pre-load SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 on its cheap new netbooks starting with a $399 Atom-based model called the Wind Notebook. The Taiwanese company plans to sell Wind worldwide starting this summer. It will also include OpenOffice. Novell and MSI have been in bed together since 2006, but this is their first pre-load agreement. The value of the pact was not disclosed. Wind with XP is $480.

Novell Cuts Top Sales Post
The executive VP of worldwide sales at Novell, Tom Francese, is leaving the company at the end of July and won’t be replaced. His position is being eliminated, having reorganized the sales force and broadened the company’s indirect channels. Regional sales managers remain in place, with Tim Wolfe as president of the Americas, Volker Smid as president of EMEA, and Maarten Koster as president of Asia/Pacific. All will report to CEO Ron Hovsepian.

Although it was the second time in less than a month Novell found it timely to reaffirm its fiscal ’08 guidance of $940 million-970 million in revenue and a non-GAAP operating margin somewhere between 7% and 9%.