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Carol Bartz Is Out As Yahoo's CEO

Posted by Soulskill on from the didn't-leverage-cloud-synergies-enough dept.

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."

10 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. perhaps it's because their pages suck by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:perhaps it's because their pages suck by kiwimate · · Score: 4, 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.

    2. Re:perhaps it's because their pages suck by TooMuchToDo · · Score: 4, 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).

  2. typical... by MickyTheIdiot · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Maybe they should be concerned less about hiring "managers" and more with hiring people with actual ideas.

    1. Re:typical... by md65536 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Most of the managers I know tend to think that all the good ideas come from managers.

  3. the reason she failed is that . . by ani23 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    She ran the company just to manage the day to day business than to provide thought leadership and future vision.

    1. Re:the reason she failed is that . . by rekoil · · 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.

    2. Re:the reason she failed is that . . by Hadlock · · Score: 4, 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.

      --
      moox. for a new generation.
  4. Yahoo! - Time to Grow Up by drgroove · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

    1. Re:Yahoo! - Time to Grow Up by Billly+Gates · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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/