Carol Bartz Is Out As Yahoo's CEO 200
itwbennett sends word that Carol Bartz is no longer the CEO of Yahoo. Company CFO Tim Morse will take up the job's responsibilities temporarily. In an email to Yahoo staff, Bartz said she had been fired over the phone by the chairman of the board. The AllThingsD blog sums up the situation thus:
"[When Bartz replaced Jerry Yang], she presented a take-no-prisoners image and was touted as someone with a reputation as a professional manager who could clean up the place. Not so, as it has turned out. While Bartz has streamlined certain areas and made some strong management hires, her performance has been decidedly bumpy and mostly downhill. The share price has settled in at about $12.50 (just about where it was when Bartz took over), Yahoo’s recent financial results have been weak, its key advertising business is struggling, its attrition rate among engineers and others is startlingly high and its product innovation cycle seems stopped up."
Re:perhaps it's because their pages suck (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know...I have been using it as my home page for longer than I can remember. Sign in to my.yahoo.com and set it up the way I like it, done. Clean and simple.
Yahoo also has my oldest mail account, at something like 14 years. That account is all over the web and if I get one spam e-mail in six months that doesn't get caught it's something I notice because it's so unusual.
Oh yes, and Maps. Google Maps? Forget it, they still don't know my street exists and it's been here for five years. I like MapQuest, but sometimes it just flakes out and won't give me directions. Yahoo Maps is the most consistently reliable for me.
Re:the reason she failed is that . . (Score:5, Interesting)
More to the point, it seemed that the biggest initiatives within Yahoo while I was there (from 2009 until early this year) were *all* centered around profit, not users - mainly, cost-cutting and ad tech. As if the goal wasn't to grow users, just grow revenue and profit per existing user. What opened my eyes was when the cost-cutting initiatives that made sense - primarily the data center consolidations, which definitely needed to get done ASAFP - started getting pushed back due to the need for quarter-to-quarter profit management. Bartz should have grown a pair, pushed forward the consolidation even if it meant missing the street for the quarter, allowing Yahoo to reap the rewards much sooner.
I'll also never forget the quarterly all-hands meeting where the major product announcement for the quarter was...*full-page ads on the login page*.
Sorry I didn't stick around to see Bartz go, but I couldn't risk her *not* going.
Re:perhaps it's because their pages suck (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm the exact opposite. Profile: 28, male, married, very tech literate (own a hosting/tech consultancy firm). Gmail account for everything (personal, business, local community college account even for the fine welding/fabrication classes they offer that I take), Calendar as well for personal and business, Finance for my portfolio. Hell, as I type this, I'm in Google Chrome, which syncs all my bookmarks across my Windows and Mac machines, as well as my Nexus One and my Xoom tablet. File storage? Google Docs. Contacts? Google Contacts, also synced across everything. Google Maps and Navigation for more uses than I care to type out at the moment. I emailed someone at Google my new subdivision street (with supporting info), and the data was corrected in under a month.
My point? Yahoo was your thing, Google is mine. Yahoo may have had the lead, but they gave it up (for various reasons, mostly business/management related).
Its all about momentum, and I think Yahoo doesn't have enough vision, management competency, nor technical talent to compete against the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Apple anymore.
Sorry to be the Messenger (or Google Talk, if you prefer).
Re:the reason she failed is that . . (Score:5, Interesting)
Out of curiosity, my pet theory was that Bartz was installed by Microsoft after the 2008 buyout failed, under the premise that Yahoo would invest heavily in Microsoft's ad network and bing search engine back end. Is there any truth in this? Or did she simply take the path of least resistance and lay down every time Microsoft waived money in her direction?
Particularly after the backdoor buyout of Nokia and installing a Microsoft executive as CEO there, Bartz at the time sure looked like a backdoor buyout of Yahoo.
Yahoo! - Time to Grow Up (Score:5, Interesting)
Yahoo reminds me of that old SNL skit - it's a floor wax, and a desert topping. Only Microsoft comes to mind as a parallel when reviewing the absolute scattershot approach to online monetization that Yahoo has taken, but M$ has a host of other products / services (ok, just Office & Windows) that keep it's bottom line solid, allowing it to experiment w/ various approaches online until it finds a "hit". Yahoo doesn't have the luxury of online experimentation that M$ does; it needs to find a magic formula and stick with it, which it seemingly refuses to do.
BTW, I bet dollars to donuts that in ~5 years, Yahoo, AOL, and IAC (Ask.com) merge. They could call themselves "That 90's Web Company". LOL
Firing by phone isn't illegal... (Score:4, Interesting)