Yahoo! Performance Chief Souders Heads for Google

More bad news for Yahoo!, as another executive defects. Steve Souders, Chief Performance Yahoo! has left for Google. According to a post at the top of his own site,

I'm at Google as of January 7, 2008.

Souders is the author of the book High Performance Web Sites, which is described thusly on Amazon.com:

The rules in High Performance Web Sites explain how you can optimize the performance of the Ajax, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, and images that you've already built into your site -- adjustments that are critical for any rich web application. Other sources of information pay a lot of attention to tuning web servers, databases, and hardware, but the bulk of display time is taken up on the browser side and by the communication between server and browser. High Performance Web Sites covers every aspect of that process.

He is also the creator of YSlow, the performance analysis extension to Firebug. Souders has been at Yahoo! since 2000.

Yahoo execs have been leaving with pretty great frequency in 2007, though Google has not been immune to the same malady. Still, as the Performance Chief, he's going to be sorely missed, and it would be an understatement to say that Yahoo! probably isn't happy that Google is going to be getting the benefit of his expertise.