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."

Comments

Re:the reason she failed is that . .

[rekoil]

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.