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Carol Bartz Is Out As Yahoo's CEO
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."
How is he going to feed his children?
Whenever I look at a yahoo page, it's invariably full of crap, almost like someone intentionally tried to make it as annoying as they possibly could.
Simple, clean, lightweight, and maybe I'd use it for something. But at the moment, yahoo is completely useless. I'm astonished anyone goes there for any reason any more.
Maybe they should be concerned less about hiring "managers" and more with hiring people with actual ideas.
Oh poor you. I'm sure your "severance package" will more than make up for the injustice you suffered today.
She ran the company just to manage the day to day business than to provide thought leadership and future vision.
What the fuck kind of "future vision" do you want? Are you talking about changing how the game is played? Are you talking about turning the industry upside-down? Are you talking about taking the rain out of the cloud, and the social out of the Web 2.0? What about the dilemma of the purveyor of fine information technologies? What about the standardization of search and the commoditization of advertising? Are you taking this all into account with your demand for "thought leadership" and "future vision"? Don't forget about the serialization of socialized media. Flickr, anyone? Twitter? YouTube?
Surprisingly enough you need to be more than an HTML based Gopher, with a 2nd rate search engine.
Mildly on topic:
Thanks for making it so every time I load Yahoo Mail my browser locks up for 5 seconds! I really appreciate that.
Maybe they can hire Steve Jobs. I hear he was the CEO of a pretty large company who left recently.
Oh damnit now I can't remember the name of that company! If only they were in the news more I'd remember them.
Yahoo still doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up. Is it a news aggregator? A search engine? An email service? An online gaming site? A social network? A web hosting company? A bookmark sharing site? A photo sharing site?
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
I bet that $44.6 billion dollars Microsoft wanted to give them is looking pretty good in retrospect...
#DeleteChrome
anyone remember back in the day? when this new mosaic thing was the hot product ? and some thing called 'netscape' your buddy down the hall had on his weirdo 'linux box'?
did anyone think back then, that we would have to listen to this corporate bullshit? stock price and quarterly earnings? this is what we built the internet for? so we could listen to investment bankers yell at people about ad revenue?
There's a reason only about a dozen Fortune 500 companies have female CEOs, and almost none of them are in tech.
One hour and 15 minutes to get to the truth.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Old Boy Network: 1
Bartz Gals: 0.
No chance for rematch under Yahooligans rules.
Ergo, Old Boy Network wins.
Tough Tittie.
--//00
Ooh! Ooh! Women tend not to be sociopaths, they are just insane in other ways. That must be what you mean. Or it could be that it takes more than a few generations of techincal equality to achieve actual equality.
Point of Clarification: Ms. Bartz did not seem like the right person to fix an entity as fundamentally broken as Yahoo!
Misogyny? Old school sexism? Ongoing, entrenched cultural values that discourage females from even considering certain roles, let alone creating an environment that might foster or cultivate them in such pursuits?
Could it be that the criteria for choosing CEOs that selects for individuals that are indistinguishable from sociopaths have inherent biases? Which is working out _so_ well, by the way. Why, just look at the economy.
Hush now, little troll. Grown-ups are talking.
I still gotta migrate my 40$/yr web hosting back to something that charges $9.99. I think it is very weak for a company to go,"Yo, we're gonna charge 4x what everyone else is charging all of a sudden." It is just a hassle to change webhosting.
Here is another question: Is there an online advertiser that does stuff like Google Ads, but instead, lets you white list the ads before they come on your site? I don't like a lot of scammer sites, and I don't want my readers stumbling into them.
God spoke to me
... but it's in very poor taste, and heinously unprofessional. Even worse, the fact that they weren't willing to do it in person can make it look like they were trying to hide something, and may even provide sufficient basis to warrant an investigation. They may not have done anything wrong, in which case it will blow over, of course, but it'll still be a bit of a pain in the rear for them for the time being if an investigation does end up happening
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Because tech guys equate female leadership with their mom yelling down the cellar stairs at them. And they resent it.
Have gnu, will travel.
What can $2 billion dollars accomplish? As was demonstrated by an idiot savant, $2 billion will buy you an NBA championship ring. Management of the $2 billion Yahoo spent acquiring Broadcast.com was handled by Marc Cuban, who used the money to buy one of the shittiest teams in the NBA, then slowly stock it with talent until the Mavericks won a title. Meanwhile, Yahoo figured out that Broadcast.com was little more than a clever pitch that played well in the boardroom, but failed to ever turn any kind of profit. Now it doesn't much exist as even a URL.
And who was the mental giant that hoodwinked yahoo? The same guy who:
Don't measure Yahoo by the wisdom of its own ideas. Measure it by the ideas of those who have successfully tricked Yahoo in the past. To clarify, Yahoo bought Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion, of which Cuban ran off with about $2 billion. As far as Yahoo is concerned, it literally vaporized $5.7 billion in wealth through this transaction.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
More like females in power emulate men to beef up their authority, and subsequently become huge bitches with only half the skill.
Not! Carol! Bartz!
I have a weird love for yahoo still. Maybe it's a love of text based results?
I don't know, but I am not quite ready for yahoo to disappear like an over leveraged bank.
I like yahoo search http://www.yahoo.com
and yahoo finance http://finance.yahoo.com/marketupdate/overview
What I don't like about yahoo is the #comments
Thousands of government comment bots raid the comments with psyop propaganda, steering the issue to the establishment teat.
Perhaps the reality of the matter is they have as much chance as myspace now that Murdoc is gone. While I never really hated geocities, which predated myspace, I have noticed that nothing really lasts very long at yahoo. I am glad I never got sucked into their hype, seemed they were offering DSL for awhile, but alas all things seem to merge back into the rotten snooping spying constitution hating AT&T,
Ma Bell Truly is a Cheap Motherfucker
I don't know where they go from here, but I hope they got all that crap out of their system and pull a fucking mulligan.
I'm convinced this is the core demographic for Yahoo: older women who believe Yahoo = Internet. Both my sisters have Yahoo set as their home page.
Sounds sexist but my money doesn't care about political correctness. Never seen a female CEO do anything good for a tech company.
Probably a senior exec at Google or Microsoft.
Yahoo has been without direction since 1997 or so. They could have been Google, but thanks to their confused choice of direction, they were not. They have never recovered. That Bartz managed to keep the stock from sliding further suggests she did the best anyone can do with Yahoo, "a company in search of a plan."
Yay! Who is Carol Bartz and what is yahoo?
Americans seem to have forgotten that they had a war to get rid of a king because monarchic government is arbitrary, over-centralised and attracts sycophants. So they have corporations, many bigger than medieval kingdoms, which are run dysfunctionally by a monarchical system of government.
The pattern isn't that Fiorina, Apotheker, Bartz and so on are incompetent. It is that the system amplifies the errors and prejudices of single individuals. The special training for the job is basically to believe that, despite all evidence to the contrary, you are superhuman. A normal person with average humility would perceive that the job is impossible. Once someone is sufficiently deluded to believe that they are capable of being a CEO, who knows what demons lie in their personality?
Jobs and Ellison on their own prove nothing; it is possible that both would have failed in a different environment (Jobs could have been the worst CEO of HP or Microsoft ever, but we have no way of knowing.)
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
And I ran out of mod points. Yes. I once worked with a guy, a brilliant EE, who had worked at Tektronix, Philips and universities doing research. None of the major projects he had been involved with had ever resulted in a finished product, but the ideas and concepts he developed were all over the place. This is why bean counters are the last people to let near an engineering department.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
that I doubt anyone can save it. This isn't a Carly Fiona situation where the new manager took a good company and turned it into shit for her own personal benefit. It's already shit. Bartz simply discovered that she was incapable of miracles. That's all. What can you do with a company that can't even keep a comics page updated? If you or I couldn't even do that, how long would we last at our jobs?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
This "evolved to focus on a trade" bit. Do tell us more. In particular, I'd love to see your lecture to an audience of women fighter pilots.
The reason women haven't filled professional jobs is because knuckle draggers like you have made darn sure that they didn't get the chance, since that way the competition was reduced.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
A CEO, or indeed any executive for that matter, fired for something as absurd as not doing their job very well? What is this world coming to? Well, I certainly hope she at the very least has the comfort of a multi-million-dollar severance package.
I feel nostalgic for Yahoo, I must admit. I remember them around 1995 or so when I was on the web using Mosaic and with a monochrome monitor. Yahoo search was the best thing in the world back then, and their home page had lots of cool stuff, like hot sites that were genuinely interesting.
And then it changed. They crammed more and more junk on the front page. Horoscopes. Puff photo-coverage for minor celebs. The search bar, (my principle reason for visiting) got shoved out the way somewhere to make room for links to paying customers, and suddenly it was no longer a joy to use. That was also about the time they started polluting the search results with paid-for links. Admittedly, they were doing this along with every other search engine on the planet, but by this stage the only reason I still went there was because they were marginally better than the alternatives.
And then Google showed up. Nothing on the first page but a logo, a search box and two buttons. And search results where the first half dozen hits didn't instantly take me to someone selling marginally related goods. What a breath of fresh air that was...
I loved Yahoo mail as well. I had an account for years - still do in fact. But then they started pressuring me to buy more space, and refusing to let me even report spam without paying extra. And they kept moving the mail button on the homepage, in what seemed like an ongoing attempt to obfuscate the services that I found useful.
I stopped using Yahoo mail long before Google got in on the act. The account's still active, so I guess they didn't mean all those threatening sounding alerts demanding more money from me.
And the pattern repeated, time and again. I was a big fan of yahoo groups. And then they started inserting adverts into the message threads. Not just a discrete banner on the message window, but a full page message with some sniffy text from Yahoo saying how because it was a free service you had to read the following advert. And then the next message would be the advert. After which, now that you'd thoroughly lost your train of thought, they'd return you the thread proper.
They do seem to have got better recently. I don't go there much, but when I do it looks cleaner and less deliberately annoying than it used to be. And if those impressions are accurate, then there are probably a lot of people who'd find Yahoo useful.
But I think they've got their work cut out for them. I think they burned too many bridges, back in the day.
I just hope the moral of the tale isn't lost on Google.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
It would be a great coda to a not-so-wonderful career if she winds up at HP. In fact, she'd be perfect there.
Having momentum does not imply being the best at each of those categories.
Yahoo has a few applications that are superior to Google (Finance for example). Their email and calendaring is on par with Google (unless you are using Android devices, in which case Google is superior). Maps are also on par in the browser, although Yahoo has nothing to compete with Google Earth. Yahoo has Flickr and hosts fantasy sports leagues, which Google doesn't compete with.
Google's momentum may ultimately make it king over everyone else in each area, but it hasn't happened yet on any objective basis.
Sorry to be the Messenger, but that's the reality for somebody not a fanboy of any of these companies.
Bartz did well at Autodesk. While she was in charge there, Autodesk essentially took over the entire computer animation software industry. They got into solid modeling CAD, where they'd been behind, and are now the leader in that area. She managed to avoid getting Autodesk into anything dumb during the Internet boom, and picked up some good technology in the following bust.
Autodesk is about the size of Facebook, but doesn't get much press attention.
Took too long. Good riddance.