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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."
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.
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.
The primary skill for a CEO of a company like Yahoo is the ability to create an environment where skilled and creative developers want to come and work.
You need to create an environment where someone with a good idea can work on it and turn it into a success (or at least try). Where you can work on interesting things, instead of spending all day every day figuring out how to advertise to people. Instead of focusing on cutting costs, focus on creating good products, and making them a success. Good developers like to work on things that are interesting and successful.
All the new CEO has to do is attract good talent and get out of their way. Remove their barriers that are distracting them from day to day.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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
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?
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!
I love Mobile Smartphones, they are starting to bring back sanity in websites. Why can't all websites function like the good ones do on my Droid? Clean, unbloated, fast loading ...
It is sad when I hit a website on my gig Inet connection (at work) and .... buffering buffering ....
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
... 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.
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."
You need to create an environment where someone with a good idea can work on it and turn it into a success (or at least try). Where you can work on interesting things, instead of spending all day every day figuring out how to advertise to people. ... All the new CEO has to do is attract good talent and get out of their way. Remove their barriers that are distracting them from day to day.
No offense, but Google is just now belatedly realizing that this is not what you should do. They are shutting down "products" left and right because for years they have greenlit seemingly every neat idea that an engineer had, and basically none of them except AdWords and Android have positively impacted the bottom line. We would all like to work at companies like you describe, but it turns out that creating that type of environment doesn't help unless you do have managers who are exactly "barriers" to the bad ideas and letting the good ones through. And those are very hard to find...
"95% of all Slashdot
There is a bit in truth in both of those statements. Google may be shutting down a lot of its "experiments", but they had all served their purpose and their benefits have been incorporated into existing products. Innovation doesn't mean green lighting every "neat idea"...they should all serve a purpose, but if you don't allow your employees to spend some time to innovate and try new things, your never going to improve your products. Some of the worst places ive worked at is where they punished you for thinking outside the box or doing something different, even if they had real potential to provide a lot of benefits.
Completely irrelevant. I mean, they're just the most popular image sharing and image related social provider on the web today (flickr).
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!
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.