Another day, another high-profile defection from Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO). This time, it's longtime Yahoo! web performance executive Steve Souders, who announced he was joining Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) come January 8. Souders has been at Yahoo! since 2000, which is a lifetime in the technology business.

Souder's responsibilities at Yahoo! included managing the team for development of the "My Yahoo!" personal web start page that is used by millions every day. Souder was also into developing products and platforms to ensure the performance of Yahoo!'s web products (as in, speed) while ensuring the smoothest and most consistent customer experience.

One thing that most likely caught Google's eye was Souder's work on making Yahoo!'s sites faster. Google is so proud of how quickly it delivers global search results to each customer that it prints the number of milliseconds each search takes for each of the billions of monthly searches performed on its network.

Will Yahoo! have some serious work to do in 2008? Yes, it will -- this year will be a make-or-break year for the company. It has quite a feat ahead to come back from piddly financial performance results (compared to the competition, anyway) and really deliver in some areas. For Yahoo!, revenue growth could come from internet search, but taking share away from Google may be impossible. Still, the growth from its paid services was not that hot in 2007 either, so where does that leave it? We'll find out in 2008.

[Update, 1-4-08: According to Yahoo!, Souders did not work for or oversee the My Yahoo! development team]