Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
She ran the company just to manage the day to day business than to provide thought leadership and future vision.
Nope. Bartz Gals == Old Boy Network.
Women don't bring anything new to upper management. They act just like men. Kind of like the ending in "Animal Farm."
Here is a secret taught in most business schools.
Most great companies know who they are and do not void in other areas. What is Yahoo? Yahoo was Yang's cool internet links.
10 years ago they were the internet yellowpages with awesome links to cool sites and a huge resource for information. Back then before slashdot I used Yahoo for tech news and reading and discovering computer related things. They had stuff for auto enthusiasts and for many different subjects. You didn't need to search unless it was something very specific. It was a great resource for the undeveloped internet to get around in. A cooler version of AOL for tech grownups. Yahoo search was not too bad either if you needed to find other things. They were THEE portal.
Today the portal SUCKS. It was crippled around 2003/2004 ish. They tried to imitate Google first with focusing users on the search page instead of the portal links and communities. Then No NO we are advertisers put HUGE AD on page. Make Yahoo default homepage!! etc
Yahoo also had a great IM program (back then) and chat rooms and forums before porn spammers bugged you every 3 minutes with private messages and before spyware/malware was installed in the bloated Yahoo IMs of today.
To this day they could make a comeback as no one has replaced them yet as a cool portal for communities, groups, and cool links. Google is mostly minimalistic to find something new and that is it. But like HP and and a skeleton of companies that died before them they tried to focus on the dollars and change who they are until they are a no one. Yahoo could have turned into the facebook with Yahoo 360 and into something that still is a void in the market. Mainly a cool portal for everything you need or want that is managed.
But that is going to be very hard. Ask.com is still around believe it or not but the term Yahoo might as well mean MSN or RealPlayer. They left their roots and focused on cost accounting. They could have bought out Google if they were smart back in 2005 before the IPO. That would have saved them but still. Bad UI designers and wrong focus on ads crippling the portal was their mistake .... and a bad search engine too
http://saveie6.com/