MySpace Musical Chairs

Kara Swisher dissects the ins-and-outs at MySpace, which reads like one of the bloodier of Shakespeare’s plays, where all the players lie dead in a heap at the curtain fall. MySpace meanwhile is falling like a meteorite and causing serious hemorrhaging for News Corp.

I have stated from the beginning that they paid way too much for MySpace, and that it doesn’t fit into Murdoch’s news media organization. Murdoch and Barry Diller are two guys that have squandered a lot of money on the quest to build a digital empire, while other rickety empires (Yahoo, AOL) have been falling to pieces in the wings.

The specifics of this mess? Owen Van Natta, brought in only last April as CEO, has been fired by Jon Miller:

- Kara Swisher, After Even More Turmoil, Can the “Hot Mess” at MySpace Be Saved?

Unfortunately for all those involved, that mess got even messier yesterday, after the ousting of CEO Owen Van Natta by News Corp. Chief Digital Officer Jon Miller.

While News Corp. tried to paint the departure as more mutual in its official statement, it was most definitely not, as infighting among top execs finally came to a head today.

Escalating tensions over strategy going forward had grown untenable between Miller and Van Natta, as well as among and between Van Natta and his top two execs, COO Mike Jones and Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn.

Sources said relations had gotten so bad that Hirschhorn had told Van Natta recently that he was planning on resigning by June.

It was a threat that moved well beyond well-known gripes the former media exec had aired to many outside the company over the last year about how much worse shape MySpace was in than he thought and also weariness from his weekly commute between this home in New York to the company’s Los Angeles HQ.

And, after a recent blog post that claimed Hirschhorn was the one leaving, relations became even more frosty, sources said.

The relationship between Miller and Van Natta had also become badly frayed, several sources noted, mostly over the pace of change and the level of control Van Natta had over MySpace.

“There were serious disagreements and something had to give,” said one person close to the situation.

After firing Van Natta in an afternoon meeting yesterday, in what several people described as a “termination without cause,” Miller appointed Jones and Hirschhorn co-presidents of MySpace.

It was a dramatic shift from only nine months ago.

With the backing of News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, Miller hired Van Natta last April, after jettisoning Co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe.

But, despite his CEO title, the former Facebook and Amazon (AMZN) exec didn’t get to select the two top executives beneath him.

Both Jones and Hirschhorn were hired by Miller directly–also with Murdoch’s involvement and approval.

The idea at the time of assembling this troika was that three heads were better than one, especially in dealing with the technological, administrative and business hairball that MySpace had become over the years.

As it turned out, three heads came with three brains and three different ideas of what MySpace needed to do to fix itself.

Co-presidents? Are Jones and Hirschhorn in a foot race to see who should be in charge? Obviously Miller is really in charge, which may explain why Van Natta wasn’t allowed to hire his own team.

Mike Jones is an old friend, and has great skills as a software entrepreneur and consummate deal-maker. His leadership at his start-up Userplane led to the company’s acquisition by AOL. He left that messy organization almost as quickly as he could, and after briefly founding Tsavo, he was tapped for the COO job at MySpace. It seemed odd to me that he would take that role, but perhaps he envisioned some future that has yet to unfold.

I think Miller doesn’t have a plan to turn the freefall of MySpace around, and I don’t know if hiring and firing at the executive suite really matters to the marketplace. I don’t know Hirschhorn at all, so I have no insight into his skills and plans.

But my hunch is that Miller is on a deathwatch, too, and Murdoch has him targetted.

I wonder who might buy this hot potato — and for what price — if Murdoch tried to unload it today?

Google’s new foray into social networking, Buzz, suggests that Bradley Horowitz and Co. have sizable plans at Google, so maybe there is a strange fit there, as Google becomes the third competitor to Twitter and Facebook.

Update on Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 6:26AM by Stowe Boyd  

Looks like Om Malik agrees that Murdoch has fallen out of love with MySpace.