According to the internal memo obtained by Geekwire, Mehdi and his tenure are described as follows:

Yusuf has been involved with leading Microsoft Online Services businesses longer than anyone else on the OSD LT, and has been a pivotal leader at critical milestones of our division’s journey from the early days of MSN, to the original MSN and Live Search products, to the launch of Bing and the consummation of key strategic deals for OSD and MS, including Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter and Nokia.  Most importantly, he has built a world class marketing, business development, strategy, and product management organization that has made incredible contributions to the success of OSD and Microsoft.  

Mehdi’s direct reports will now report directly to Qi Lu, (the former Yahoo executive) who is president of the Online Services Division. While Bing has continued to gain market share, OSD has continued to loose money and faces increasing pressure to “stop the bleeding.” The following chart shows the quarter over quarter loses since 2007.

Source: Microsoft/CNN Money

This deal will give Ask.com access to Blinkx’s 12 million hours of audio and video content. Each time a user searches for Blinkx’s content, Ask.com has agreed to pay a fee, according to the release. Reportedly, a Blinkx area on the Ask.com site will be how users access the audio and video content.

“Ask.com’s momentum is impressive and we’re very proud to be powering their new video search offering,” said Suranga Chandratillake, founder and CEO, blinkx. “This relationship further demonstrates our technology leadership in the video search space and is an exciting development for our 130 or so media partners whose content can now be accessed through Ask.com.”

The full release is available over here.