8 ms·

Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

291 points by hornokplease 15y ago

daimyoyo 15y ago
Finally. Carol may have been a decent operations manager, but Yahoo needs a product driven leader. You can't cost cut your way to new users.
- blantonl 15y ago
  You hit the nail on the head. Google seems to have figured this out by bringing back a product guy (Larry) to lead the company. And Google is still investing tremendous amounts of time and talent into innovation. It is scary to see how these early winners in the online business have faltered. AOL, Yahoo, etc. Instead of fostering a culture of innovation, they've instead looked to cut innovation and attempt to use what remaining cash they have left to buy their way into businesses that they seem to always mismanage with "operations management". Take AOL and TechCrunch.
- lawnchair_larry 15y ago
  Funny, isn't that a description of Tim Cook and Apple now?
  - stuff4ben 15y ago
    I disagree. AOL and Yahoo don't have someone like Jonathan Ive who is, for all intents and purposes, Apple's "product guy". Jobs was just the guy that focused and drove them all to excellence.
  - CamperBob 15y ago
    No. Cook is arguably as responsible for Apple's recent success as Jobs, if not more so.
nkassis 15y ago
Not holding hope that the next person will do much better. It sad considering how talent they still seem to have. Looking at the Yahoo UI people and the people behind hadoop. I'd like to see them push web applications more. They seem to have the people to build good web apps. They never did anything with Zimbra an awesome product and instead sold it to VMware. Those kinds of things are what they could I my view do well in.
ethank 15y ago
Yahoo needs someone who can clearly articulate what Yahoo does. There is no "product" to draft behind, just a disjointed set of technologies which individually are great (as someone pointed out, YUI and Hadoop, etc), but holistically don't have any focus. Google had the same problem, but they are now shedding this.
- voidfiles 15y ago
  Clearly Joe Stump is ready to step in if need be. His article is down right now, probably to many people trying to see if they offered him the job, but here is the google cache. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TgPIGZfZ9AwJ:stu.mp/2011/06/dear-yahoo-hire-me-as-your-next-ceo.html+http://stu.mp/2011/06/dear-yahoo-hire-me-as-your-next-ceo.html&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TgPIGZf... If I was still working at Yahoo I would be stoked to have this guy as my boss.
  - bentlegen 15y ago
    Except even if you managed to acquire all those companies, all their key leaders would leave Yahoo in a year to do their own thing. I mean, do you really think the New York Times staff wants to work for Yahoo! News? Or that Jack Dorsey wants to work for Yahoo! Mobile? Yahoo can't buy their way out of this mess, IMHO.
    - voidfiles 15y ago
      Yea, but if you buy all the companies. They couldn't leave in one year because they would need to earn out there shares.
  - harryh 15y ago
    Identifying talent is not a substitute for actual vision. Buzz does an excellent job of making that point here: http://log.scifihifi.com/post/6891792369/i-would-like-to-announce-that-im-ready-willing http://log.scifihifi.com/post/6891792369/i-would-like-to-ann...
0x12 15y ago
That was a couple of years late. Yahoo! can still be turned around but it will take something more than a cost-cutting and downsizing mentality to achieve that. Under a leader with vision with buy in from the various department heads combined with the current traffic base of Yahoo as a launchpad would still be a force to be reckoned with. Just recovering from the Bartz years will take a while, lots of talent has been discarded or they've left seeing the writing on the wall. Before Yahoo will manage to undo that damage there is a lot of work that needs doing.
jmjerlecki 15y ago
This was a great diatribe against Carol. If you guys missed it from a couple of months back an angry shareholder confronts Bartz. He's dead on and with this now happening – absolutely right. http://soundcloud.com/erickschonfeld/yahoo-sharehloder-rant http://soundcloud.com/erickschonfeld/yahoo-sharehloder-rant
- jurjenh 15y ago
  Is there a transcript of it anywhere? Never mind, just found it: http://www.alacrastore.com/research/thomson-streetevents-Yahoo_Inc_Shareholders_Meeting-T4011721 http://www.alacrastore.com/research/thomson-streetevents-Yah... It's at the end, I believe he was the last speaker...
- robryan 15y ago
  I guess that is typical in these big shareholder meetings, as in no attempt at a response? Sounds like they are all about saying everything is on track and not at all about the hard questions.
protomyth 15y ago
The sad thing is they have all the parts to make a great competitor to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Some sort of messaging to strap their news, financial, flickr, etc. together into something compelling. They still have amazing front page traffic.
steve8918 15y ago
I used to work at Yahoo during the whole Microsoft debacle. I have to say that this is a disappointing development, namely because it really sounds like the board is giving up on Yahoo, and they will package up Yahoo to the highest bidder. It certainly sounds like the board is getting bored (pun intended) of trying to resuscitate Yahoo and would rather move onto newer and fresher companies with richer rewards. This unfortunately means more rounds of layoffs as they try to increase margins and profitability by hacking and slashing employees. I think in hindsight being sold to Microsoft was probably the best thing for the Yahoo, the employees, and for the shareholders.
- blantonl 15y ago
  A Microsoft acquisition looked attractive, but I would argue that a Google acquisition would be far better for both. Google would foster a culture totally different from Yahoo's, and at the same time thrill the existing Yahoo employees - which means they would stick around. So much opportunity for both. Microsoft is a great company, but their online businesses are losing money like crazy, and I suspect that many Yahooers would not be super excited about joining Microsoft.
  - cpeterso 15y ago
    What would Google gain from acquiring Yahoo? Yahoo has little search technology of its own and many services that overlap with existing Google services. I think Yahoo's properties (and users) might be a better fit with Facebook.
    - blantonl 15y ago
      For one, Yahoo would obtain significant talent. And they would gain an enormous amount of users that use Yahoo's services. I'm curious, why do you think Yahoo's properties would be a better fit with Facebook?
      - ary 15y ago
        Why would Google buy Yahoo so that Yahoo could obtain Google's talent? There is no way Google would water down its engineering pool with Yahoo's engineering staff.
mathattack 15y ago
She was dealt a tough hand. Very few firms have second lives and very few innovation firms can cost cut to greatness. Motorola is a more frequent outcome than Apple.
JacobAldridge 15y ago
I wonder if Yahoo! lacks the vision of a founder to compare with Gates, Jobs & Woz, Branson, Larry & Sergey, even Zuckerberg? It's been described as listless and without vision or a clear direction for several years now. Particularly with more macro economic trends, now is a good time for CEOs and business owners to re-engage themselves and their teams with the original vision or intent of their business, to help confirm a new vision moving forward. I've just never felt that Yahoo! had that baton handed to them by the original founders (I even had to search for their names - Jerry Yang and David Filo). Plenty of companies grow to enormous success without the founder having to drive it, of course, but there's usually some connection that links the CEO to the company's founding principles. Yang is still on the Board I believe - can anyone point me to where his thoughts on the direction might have been shared?
- dpark 15y ago
  Yang already tried the CEO role a couple of times. He was generally regarded as ineffective. He also sat on the board of Alibaba when the Alipay scandal went down. I don't honestly think he's where to look for the future of Yahoo. I'm not sure that he has a real vision for Yahoo. Yahoo's issue is that they have no overall direction. They have some great assets in terms of employees as well as online properties. But what exactly does Yahoo do? They aren't a search engine. They aren't really a news site. They talk a lot about mobile, but don't seem to have a meaningful presence. They talk about local, but I'm not even sure what that means, and in any case they don't actually seem to be doing anything meaningful there. (You can't claim to be "local" and have such broken maps.) They seem mostly to be an advertising company, but they don't really identify as such. They need to figure out what it is that they do, or at least what they want to do, and pursue that aggressively. Otherwise I fear they'll continue on their aimless path.
  - wallflower 15y ago
    > They talk a lot about mobile, but don't seem to have a meaningful presence "Several Flickr internal attempts to build and ship native mobile experiences (going back to 2006) were squashed relentlessly." http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Flickr-miss-the-mobile-photo-opportunity-that-Instagram-and-picplz-are-pursuing/answer/Kellan-Elliott-McCrea?srid=po3 http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Flickr-miss-the-mobile-photo-op...
diego 15y ago
The problem is that Yahoo was born as a product that became obsolete quickly. It has no DNA anymore, it's just a collection of various media services. It's not a computer, or a piece of software, or a social network. It was a directory of web links. A library. It's doubtful that a Steve Jobs could come back to Yahoo and get it back in touch with its roots. IMHO, their best bet is to sell.
- gfodor 15y ago
  I'm not so sure about this. The roots of a company run deeper than a product. The original goal of Yahoo! was similar in spirit to Google: help people make sense of the massive amount of information available on the web. They've of course gone in a wild array of directions since then, and I'm not sure they had as long a view of the web as Google did, but I'd be surprised if the founders don't have a good number of strong views they've held about how things should work online since the beginning. It remains to be seen if they can tap into the creative energy and focus that led Yahoo! to its early success.
  - dredmorbius 15y ago
    Google, at least until the advent of Buzz and Google Plus, seemed to keep the user experience first and foremost (they're rapidly losing this vision). Yahoo turned to face the siren song of advertising and eyeball aggregation, damn the user, by the end of the 1990s. Sure, some of their products may have shone (I was well off and away from their target userbase by that time) but as Diego said, the corporate DNA of organizing the Web, was lost.
- sgns 15y ago
  There's an emotional connection that many geeks have to Yahoo: I know I'd still like to like it. If they made something that made us all go "Aaaaw....", we'd recommend the hell out of it, and soon enough it could replace Google News for some people, for example. And from that the next step would not be too long. Imagine if they had a great news reading and exploring service integrated in a smart way with a reading list/book marking service - like del.icio.us? (ouch...) They have had great technology.
- 15y ago
yangtheman 15y ago
I wonder if Yahoo! needs old Jerry Yang (the one with fire in his belly in his early days) back as Twitter did with Jack Dorsey.
- danilocampos 15y ago
  Yang already had his shot at a Jobs-like return and he botched it miserably. Worst of all, he messed up Yahoo's chance for an acquisition, which at this point seems like the only way it can actually generate some value.
- brown9-2 15y ago
  At what point in Yahoo's history did Jerry Yang have "fire in his belly"? What highlights in Yahoo's history does this cover?
flocial 15y ago
I think the greatest example of what Yahoo! could have been is Yahoo! Japan. They own the auction space and as part of the juggernaut SoftBank group pretty much own a big part of the space (even more if you count the spun off Soft Bank Investments). It's sad that lack of vision and truly ingrained technical innovation prevented the company from truly realizing the advantages of being a first mover in the space but they sure had a nice run for what started as a collection of links.
uvince 15y ago
Speaking from experience there, Yahoo! will do better without that kind of "leadership" up top. Let's break Yahoo! up into its valuable components, sell it and shed the rest. I'll be buying Yahoo! stock in the morning.
peteforde 15y ago
I would never dream of selling a company to Yahoo. I don't build to flip, so seeing what they did with Flickr, Delicious and dozens of other projects (internal ones, too: SimpleGeo is proof that FireEagle should have gotten a major push out of the gate) makes me feel a little bit like Joss Whedon contemplating doing another show with FOX. Does anyone have any compelling counter-arguments, or believe things will ever get better? Is Yahoo in AOL/NAMBLA territory at this point?
derwildemomo 15y ago
"CFO interim CEO".. yeah, those guys usually have a vision.
- hga 15y ago
  Well, at least a CFO has a good chance of keeping the lights on for a few months while the board finds a new CEO.
  - derwildemomo 15y ago
    "Keeping the lights on" doesn't sound too nice, although it's likely exactly what he's going to do..
    - TheCondor 15y ago
      Is Yahoo in danger of going under, it looks like they bring in about $1billion a year, do they need more than that? or are the profitable?
mhd 15y ago
Fired over the phone? Is that common at that level?
- wpietri 15y ago
  Well, Yahoo got rid of their last telegraph just weeks ago; otherwise they would have used that.
  - mhd 15y ago
    Well, church steeples are still an option… (One if bought by Microsoft, two if firing CEO)
- jarek 15y ago
  Supposedly the CEO and the chairman were on opposite U.S. coasts. Must have been pretty urgent though...
  - tdurden 15y ago
    Agreed. There is more to the story we don't know yet.
- duncanj 15y ago
  You're right. They missed the opportunity to do it on reality TV.
neovive 15y ago
I remember using Yahoo! way back in the days of Mosaic. Yahoo! has a long history (in Internet time) and many long-time and loyal users of it's email and other entertainment and lifestyle services. Yahoo! has to break out of the "portal" mindset of trying to be all things to all people. When portals were the all the rage in the late 90's, options were limited in the online services space -- which is clearly not the case anymore. What Yahoo! currently brings to the table is talent, experience, traffic and a loyal user base of it's core services (e.g. Mail, Messenger, Finance, Flickr, Stores, Fantasy Sports, etc.). They need to integrate these services better by focusing on one core demographic and offering a more cohesive experience. The first step is to identify their core demographic and build around their needs. They should raise cash for acquisitions through the sale of existing properties that do not service their primary audience. The Yahoo! brand and user base is strong enough to make a comeback, they just have to look at their company from a slightly different perspective and play their best hand in the current market.
entrepreneurial 15y ago
Maybe Steve Jobs left as CEO of Apple to run Yahoo???
- mactitan 15y ago
  Not to many people would want to punish Jobs in this way but it is the only important question. How would Jobs run Yahoo? Well, he wouldn't have mortgaged the search; he would have demanded that it be the best.
indrax 15y ago
Can someone explain the timing of these switches? Jobs resigns, Arrington resigns, CmdrTaco resigns, Reddit is spun off, and now this. (did I mis one?) Is there something about august/september? Is it just my personal filter?
- cjenkins 15y ago
  I can't say for sure, but possibly fiscal quarter/year ends?
xyahoo 15y ago
An ex-Yahoo here, using a throwaway account. Yahoo's biggest problem is the creamy middle layer of managers. They are usually lifers (as in, been at Yahoo for a decade), or fresh MBAs with a Stanford degree who think that just because they sat through Management-101, they know how products should be designed. This middle layer is like a Turkish harem. They're busy backstabbing each other, politicking and fucking things up. BUT NO ONE HOLDS THEM ACCOUNTABLE! Some dick will screw up a project, and then when the team gets laid off, happily move to another one to fuck that up too. Too often I've seen engineers just get disgusted and leave; or they'll go into a depressive "I don't care" mode. Passive-aggressive behavior is the norm. Blake, when he joined, said that "we say 'no' to nothing, and 'no' to everything". What he meant was: in a meeting, the manager will say 'yes' to everything; but the moment he steps outside, he'll think "I'm not gonna do that!". Innovation is also hampered by these middle morons. Someone tries to do something innovative, and a middle cockroach will crawl out, whining that his 'team' is working on it, and they'll have something ready in (some future quarter). So you're told to back off. Then you wait. In the meantime, that middle manager will use this opportunity to ask for more reqs and expand his little fiefdom. Time will pass, and nothing will get done. And you'll be waiting, agonizing, watching competitors eat Yahoo's lunch as this middle manager fucks around. And then there will be cycles of outsourcing to Bangalore and Beijing. Some middle beancounter decided that 3 engineers in India can be hired for 1 engineer in the US. (Never mind the quality of people; it's just the 3:1 ratio that matters). So now they're busy outsourcing to Bangalore. Even critical support tasks are outsourced to Bangalore. So what used to take a couple of back-and-forth emails and get fixed in an hour, now takes 3-4 days. The list of Yahoo's problems are long; and C-level people are not high on that list. "Vision" is also not a problem for Yahoo, if they'd just let the engineers just do their fucking jobs! Carol's biggest mistake was pissing Jack Ma off and losing Alipay. A person at that level should never, ever, make such a blunder; and she had to go.
- joshu 15y ago
  Well put. There is a big difference between leadership and management. Leadership is about taking risks, while management is about mitigating them. They are thus often in direct tension. Yahoo had a lot of management and not much leadership.
- 15y ago
Jun8 15y ago
Another nail in the coffin for the "A successful CEO's skills can easily transfer to any company" idea! From the top of my head (other than Bratz): Zander at Motorola, Sculley at Apple, etc. You just can't graft them on like that.
- ecuzzillo 15y ago
  It might be true, though, that there is a large equivalence class of companies that can trade CEO's well, and interesting consumer tech companies are just not in that equivalence class. It seems like Coke and Levi Strauss could trade, for example, and be fine, or something.
porterhaney 15y ago
Saw this on twitter and couldn't agree more: Yahoo needs to hire a CEO focused on their core competency - Fantasy football. http://twitter.com/#!/MatthewJBrown/status/111233535263780865 http://twitter.com/#!/MatthewJBrown/status/11123353526378086... In all honesty, Yahoo! does a lot of things right, I hope for the numerous DOers still left at Yahoo! that they hire someone with the vision and effectiveness to make something out of the once great service.
kavehgolabi 15y ago
Im surprised it took so long to fire Carol. As I saw Yahoo selling off all of its cool properties that were distracting to its core, I wondered what exactly their core was. It seems like yahoo was eager to become a bunch of links and licensed content...someone must have relied too much on an excel sheet to figure out how yahoo could become a valuable company. Though Yahoo lost many valuable properties like yahoo dating while others like yahoo maps failed to innovate, I look at what Yahoo did with the news on its front page as indicative of the company philosophy. They put sensational news on the front page begging for people to click the links. Many of the headlines are deceptive as the articles themselves are a let down. Its almost as if the yahoo content team was trying to trick users to get a few more pennies out of banner ads and lose clientele. Many times I have read comments of users making fun of the writers. Im not sure what yahoo's plan is but if I was the bored I would donate 25% of the company equity to Mark Zuckerberg and another 26% to the Page and Brin and send a box of chocolates and a plea for help. :) I wish Yahoo the best but its going to take a lot to change their culture.
kavehgolabi 15y ago
Im surprised it took so long to fire Carol. As I saw Yahoo selling off all of its cool properties that were distracting to its core, I wondered what exactly their core was. It seems like yahoo was eager to become a bunch of links and licensed content...someone must have relied too much on an excel sheet to figure out how yahoo could become a valuable company. Though Yahoo lost many valuable properties like yahoo dating while others like yahoo maps failed to innovate, I look at what Yahoo did with the news on its front page as indicative of the company philosophy. They put sensational news on the front page begging for people to click the links. Many of the headlines are deceptive as the articles themselves are a let down. Its almost as if the yahoo content team waas trying to trick users to get a few more pennies out of banner ads and lose clientele. Many times I have read comments of users making fun of the writers. Im not sure what yahoo's plan is but if I was the bored I would donate 25% of the company equity to Mark Zuckerberg and another 26% to the Page and Brin and send a box of chocolates and a plea for help. :) I wish Yahoo the best but its going to take a lot to change their culture.
ad93611 15y ago
I worked for Sun in the Bayarea and for Yahoo from their Bangalore office. I found lot of similarities between Sun and Yahoo. Similar to Sun, the engineers at Yahoo were really really good. It was really disappointing to see engineers of so much quality not being used to their full potential. If there is one good thing that could come out of this, it would be, if those awesome engineers were freed up to help create real value to our economies. I would hire an ex-yahoo engineer in a heartbeat.
pconf 15y ago
Stock is reportedly up ~6% on the news. Too bad the board couldn't have figured this out months ago. All she did was sell search to Microsoft. More or less the same as here modus operandi at Autodesk. At least that MS sellout gave ProEngineer a nice batch of customers. Her search sale helped nobody but did reduce the competition for Google's search monopoly. IMO any Yahoo CEO who can't fix their flagship webmail within a year should be shown the door. Of course fixing webmail means fixing middle management, and that's a rather more difficult problem.
vishalkgupta 15y ago
Carol never clearly defined her strategy as CEO. It wasn't clear to her employees and it wasn't clear for investors. She may have had some big picture plan that would taken many years to achieve, but it didn't look that way. It was clear that board wasn't willing to wait to find out. Which ever direction they go with a new CEO, here's hoping for an actual plan.
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bane 15y ago
Employee approval of now ex-CEO Bartz http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/06/yahoo-employees-carol-bartz/ http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/06/yahoo-employees-carol-bart...?
panabee 15y ago
First, the board should decide: media company or tech company. If Yahoo! is a media company -- which is more conservative since its peers would be AOL, Viacom, et al., and not Google, Facebook, et al. -- then merge/acquire Netflix ($11.5B market cap) and anoint Reed Hastings CEO. Let him navigate Nethoo through the transition to new media. Combining distribution and content failed for AOL-TW, but with the media industry in flux and with more content surfacing from the grassroots, perhaps now is the time for vertical integration. If technology, then Yahoo! needs a new culture and a bold vision to attract the most talented engineers. No ambitious engineer wants to slave under PMs when they could flourish in engineering-oriented companies like Google and Facebook. Yahoo!'s mission? Help users discover, personalize, and consume content. Be the service -- mobile or web -- people turn to when they have nothing to do, when they want to find a cool article, deal, song, video, picture, restaurant, conversation, or event. Today, Google is where you go when you know what you want. Yahoo! could help people upstream of search -- before people know what they want. Which, conveniently, is most of the time. Lots of companies tackle the problem in different areas: Digg with news, Pandora with music, Yelp with local businesses, Instagram with photos, Groupon with deals. With content proliferating faster than ever before, there is a need for some service to help people discover and consume content. Users don't want to hunt for content. They want the coolest deals, music, shows, restaurants, and news to come to them. Analyzing the web for the most relevant content -- no matter the type -- at a personalized level is non-trivial. Because it's a daunting technical problem, it will attract smart engineers. Despite the naysayers, Yahoo! occupies an enviable position with massive assets: hundreds of millions of users, deep advertiser relationships, and an iconic brand. The question is how to organize these assets into a sustainable and promising company. Yahoo! has the cash flow to acquire some pieces, perhaps go private, and execute against some vision. There is an opportunity to once again innovate with compelling technology and recruit talented engineers. There is an opportunity to help users navigate the explosion of online content in a smarter, more natural way. There is an opportunity for Yahoo! to reassert itself as one of the premier companies in Silicon Valley, one led by pioneering technology.
wisty 15y ago
What Yahoo could be: A social graph that's not a walled garden. Want to add Facebook stuff to your page? Sign the Facebook ToS, lube up, and get ready to get shafted. Want Google+ interaction? Same deal. Facebook (and to a lessor extent, G+) don't want you to run apps that involve them. They want you to create content for users to "like". Yahoo could create a great identity system - multiple identities (so you don't need to use your real name for everything), notifications (replacing email for web apps), payments, micropayments, advertising, the works. Want to make a web app? Check out (the fictional) Yahoo.js, and the (fictional) native client for your server (or just make it all run on JSON as a fallback). It could work like that. They just need to ask a bunch of people making new web apps what the pain points are, solve them, then use that to push people to a Yahoo Notifications page, and from there to Yahoo's other properties.
robert_nsu 15y ago
relevant link: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20102379-93/revisiting-yahoos-blown-$44.6-billion-sale-to-microsoft/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20102379-93/revisiting-yaho...
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enculette 15y ago
Carol Bartz deserved to be fired this very way as she did a lot of harm to many people. justice

291 points by hornokplease 15y ago

Finally. Carol may have been a decent operations manager, but Yahoo needs a product driven leader. You can't cost cut your way to new users.

blantonl 15y ago
You hit the nail on the head. Google seems to have figured this out by bringing back a product guy (Larry) to lead the company. And Google is still investing tremendous amounts of time and talent into innovation. It is scary to see how these early winners in the online business have faltered. AOL, Yahoo, etc. Instead of fostering a culture of innovation, they've instead looked to cut innovation and attempt to use what remaining cash they have left to buy their way into businesses that they seem to always mismanage with "operations management". Take AOL and TechCrunch.
lawnchair_larry 15y ago
Funny, isn't that a description of Tim Cook and Apple now?
- stuff4ben 15y ago
  I disagree. AOL and Yahoo don't have someone like Jonathan Ive who is, for all intents and purposes, Apple's "product guy". Jobs was just the guy that focused and drove them all to excellence.
- CamperBob 15y ago
  No. Cook is arguably as responsible for Apple's recent success as Jobs, if not more so.

nkassis 15y ago

Not holding hope that the next person will do much better. It sad considering how talent they still seem to have. Looking at the Yahoo UI people and the people behind hadoop. I'd like to see them push web applications more. They seem to have the people to build good web apps. They never did anything with Zimbra an awesome product and instead sold it to VMware. Those kinds of things are what they could I my view do well in.

ethank 15y ago

Yahoo needs someone who can clearly articulate what Yahoo does. There is no "product" to draft behind, just a disjointed set of technologies which individually are great (as someone pointed out, YUI and Hadoop, etc), but holistically don't have any focus. Google had the same problem, but they are now shedding this.

voidfiles 15y ago
Clearly Joe Stump is ready to step in if need be. His article is down right now, probably to many people trying to see if they offered him the job, but here is the google cache. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TgPIGZfZ9AwJ:stu.mp/2011/06/dear-yahoo-hire-me-as-your-next-ceo.html+http://stu.mp/2011/06/dear-yahoo-hire-me-as-your-next-ceo.html&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TgPIGZf... If I was still working at Yahoo I would be stoked to have this guy as my boss.
- bentlegen 15y ago
  Except even if you managed to acquire all those companies, all their key leaders would leave Yahoo in a year to do their own thing. I mean, do you really think the New York Times staff wants to work for Yahoo! News? Or that Jack Dorsey wants to work for Yahoo! Mobile? Yahoo can't buy their way out of this mess, IMHO.
  - voidfiles 15y ago
    Yea, but if you buy all the companies. They couldn't leave in one year because they would need to earn out there shares.
- harryh 15y ago
  Identifying talent is not a substitute for actual vision. Buzz does an excellent job of making that point here: http://log.scifihifi.com/post/6891792369/i-would-like-to-announce-that-im-ready-willing http://log.scifihifi.com/post/6891792369/i-would-like-to-ann...

0x12 15y ago

That was a couple of years late. Yahoo! can still be turned around but it will take something more than a cost-cutting and downsizing mentality to achieve that. Under a leader with vision with buy in from the various department heads combined with the current traffic base of Yahoo as a launchpad would still be a force to be reckoned with. Just recovering from the Bartz years will take a while, lots of talent has been discarded or they've left seeing the writing on the wall. Before Yahoo will manage to undo that damage there is a lot of work that needs doing.

jmjerlecki 15y ago

This was a great diatribe against Carol. If you guys missed it from a couple of months back an angry shareholder confronts Bartz. He's dead on and with this now happening – absolutely right. http://soundcloud.com/erickschonfeld/yahoo-sharehloder-rant http://soundcloud.com/erickschonfeld/yahoo-sharehloder-rant

jurjenh 15y ago
Is there a transcript of it anywhere? Never mind, just found it: http://www.alacrastore.com/research/thomson-streetevents-Yahoo_Inc_Shareholders_Meeting-T4011721 http://www.alacrastore.com/research/thomson-streetevents-Yah... It's at the end, I believe he was the last speaker...
robryan 15y ago
I guess that is typical in these big shareholder meetings, as in no attempt at a response? Sounds like they are all about saying everything is on track and not at all about the hard questions.

protomyth 15y ago

The sad thing is they have all the parts to make a great competitor to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Some sort of messaging to strap their news, financial, flickr, etc. together into something compelling. They still have amazing front page traffic.

steve8918 15y ago

I used to work at Yahoo during the whole Microsoft debacle. I have to say that this is a disappointing development, namely because it really sounds like the board is giving up on Yahoo, and they will package up Yahoo to the highest bidder. It certainly sounds like the board is getting bored (pun intended) of trying to resuscitate Yahoo and would rather move onto newer and fresher companies with richer rewards. This unfortunately means more rounds of layoffs as they try to increase margins and profitability by hacking and slashing employees. I think in hindsight being sold to Microsoft was probably the best thing for the Yahoo, the employees, and for the shareholders.

blantonl 15y ago
A Microsoft acquisition looked attractive, but I would argue that a Google acquisition would be far better for both. Google would foster a culture totally different from Yahoo's, and at the same time thrill the existing Yahoo employees - which means they would stick around. So much opportunity for both. Microsoft is a great company, but their online businesses are losing money like crazy, and I suspect that many Yahooers would not be super excited about joining Microsoft.
- cpeterso 15y ago
  What would Google gain from acquiring Yahoo? Yahoo has little search technology of its own and many services that overlap with existing Google services. I think Yahoo's properties (and users) might be a better fit with Facebook.
  - blantonl 15y ago
    For one, Yahoo would obtain significant talent. And they would gain an enormous amount of users that use Yahoo's services. I'm curious, why do you think Yahoo's properties would be a better fit with Facebook?
    - ary 15y ago
      Why would Google buy Yahoo so that Yahoo could obtain Google's talent? There is no way Google would water down its engineering pool with Yahoo's engineering staff.

mathattack 15y ago

She was dealt a tough hand. Very few firms have second lives and very few innovation firms can cost cut to greatness. Motorola is a more frequent outcome than Apple.

JacobAldridge 15y ago

I wonder if Yahoo! lacks the vision of a founder to compare with Gates, Jobs & Woz, Branson, Larry & Sergey, even Zuckerberg? It's been described as listless and without vision or a clear direction for several years now. Particularly with more macro economic trends, now is a good time for CEOs and business owners to re-engage themselves and their teams with the original vision or intent of their business, to help confirm a new vision moving forward. I've just never felt that Yahoo! had that baton handed to them by the original founders (I even had to search for their names - Jerry Yang and David Filo). Plenty of companies grow to enormous success without the founder having to drive it, of course, but there's usually some connection that links the CEO to the company's founding principles. Yang is still on the Board I believe - can anyone point me to where his thoughts on the direction might have been shared?

dpark 15y ago
Yang already tried the CEO role a couple of times. He was generally regarded as ineffective. He also sat on the board of Alibaba when the Alipay scandal went down. I don't honestly think he's where to look for the future of Yahoo. I'm not sure that he has a real vision for Yahoo. Yahoo's issue is that they have no overall direction. They have some great assets in terms of employees as well as online properties. But what exactly does Yahoo do? They aren't a search engine. They aren't really a news site. They talk a lot about mobile, but don't seem to have a meaningful presence. They talk about local, but I'm not even sure what that means, and in any case they don't actually seem to be doing anything meaningful there. (You can't claim to be "local" and have such broken maps.) They seem mostly to be an advertising company, but they don't really identify as such. They need to figure out what it is that they do, or at least what they want to do, and pursue that aggressively. Otherwise I fear they'll continue on their aimless path.
- wallflower 15y ago
  > They talk a lot about mobile, but don't seem to have a meaningful presence "Several Flickr internal attempts to build and ship native mobile experiences (going back to 2006) were squashed relentlessly." http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Flickr-miss-the-mobile-photo-opportunity-that-Instagram-and-picplz-are-pursuing/answer/Kellan-Elliott-McCrea?srid=po3 http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Flickr-miss-the-mobile-photo-op...

diego 15y ago

The problem is that Yahoo was born as a product that became obsolete quickly. It has no DNA anymore, it's just a collection of various media services. It's not a computer, or a piece of software, or a social network. It was a directory of web links. A library. It's doubtful that a Steve Jobs could come back to Yahoo and get it back in touch with its roots. IMHO, their best bet is to sell.

gfodor 15y ago
I'm not so sure about this. The roots of a company run deeper than a product. The original goal of Yahoo! was similar in spirit to Google: help people make sense of the massive amount of information available on the web. They've of course gone in a wild array of directions since then, and I'm not sure they had as long a view of the web as Google did, but I'd be surprised if the founders don't have a good number of strong views they've held about how things should work online since the beginning. It remains to be seen if they can tap into the creative energy and focus that led Yahoo! to its early success.
- dredmorbius 15y ago
  Google, at least until the advent of Buzz and Google Plus, seemed to keep the user experience first and foremost (they're rapidly losing this vision). Yahoo turned to face the siren song of advertising and eyeball aggregation, damn the user, by the end of the 1990s. Sure, some of their products may have shone (I was well off and away from their target userbase by that time) but as Diego said, the corporate DNA of organizing the Web, was lost.
sgns 15y ago
There's an emotional connection that many geeks have to Yahoo: I know I'd still like to like it. If they made something that made us all go "Aaaaw....", we'd recommend the hell out of it, and soon enough it could replace Google News for some people, for example. And from that the next step would not be too long. Imagine if they had a great news reading and exploring service integrated in a smart way with a reading list/book marking service - like del.icio.us? (ouch...) They have had great technology.
15y ago

yangtheman 15y ago

I wonder if Yahoo! needs old Jerry Yang (the one with fire in his belly in his early days) back as Twitter did with Jack Dorsey.

danilocampos 15y ago
Yang already had his shot at a Jobs-like return and he botched it miserably. Worst of all, he messed up Yahoo's chance for an acquisition, which at this point seems like the only way it can actually generate some value.
brown9-2 15y ago
At what point in Yahoo's history did Jerry Yang have "fire in his belly"? What highlights in Yahoo's history does this cover?

flocial 15y ago

I think the greatest example of what Yahoo! could have been is Yahoo! Japan. They own the auction space and as part of the juggernaut SoftBank group pretty much own a big part of the space (even more if you count the spun off Soft Bank Investments). It's sad that lack of vision and truly ingrained technical innovation prevented the company from truly realizing the advantages of being a first mover in the space but they sure had a nice run for what started as a collection of links.

uvince 15y ago

Speaking from experience there, Yahoo! will do better without that kind of "leadership" up top. Let's break Yahoo! up into its valuable components, sell it and shed the rest. I'll be buying Yahoo! stock in the morning.

peteforde 15y ago

I would never dream of selling a company to Yahoo. I don't build to flip, so seeing what they did with Flickr, Delicious and dozens of other projects (internal ones, too: SimpleGeo is proof that FireEagle should have gotten a major push out of the gate) makes me feel a little bit like Joss Whedon contemplating doing another show with FOX. Does anyone have any compelling counter-arguments, or believe things will ever get better? Is Yahoo in AOL/NAMBLA territory at this point?

derwildemomo 15y ago

"CFO interim CEO".. yeah, those guys usually have a vision.

hga 15y ago
Well, at least a CFO has a good chance of keeping the lights on for a few months while the board finds a new CEO.
- derwildemomo 15y ago
  "Keeping the lights on" doesn't sound too nice, although it's likely exactly what he's going to do..
  - TheCondor 15y ago
    Is Yahoo in danger of going under, it looks like they bring in about $1billion a year, do they need more than that? or are the profitable?

mhd 15y ago

Fired over the phone? Is that common at that level?

wpietri 15y ago
Well, Yahoo got rid of their last telegraph just weeks ago; otherwise they would have used that.
- mhd 15y ago
  Well, church steeples are still an option… (One if bought by Microsoft, two if firing CEO)
jarek 15y ago
Supposedly the CEO and the chairman were on opposite U.S. coasts. Must have been pretty urgent though...
- tdurden 15y ago
  Agreed. There is more to the story we don't know yet.
duncanj 15y ago
You're right. They missed the opportunity to do it on reality TV.

neovive 15y ago

I remember using Yahoo! way back in the days of Mosaic. Yahoo! has a long history (in Internet time) and many long-time and loyal users of it's email and other entertainment and lifestyle services. Yahoo! has to break out of the "portal" mindset of trying to be all things to all people. When portals were the all the rage in the late 90's, options were limited in the online services space -- which is clearly not the case anymore. What Yahoo! currently brings to the table is talent, experience, traffic and a loyal user base of it's core services (e.g. Mail, Messenger, Finance, Flickr, Stores, Fantasy Sports, etc.). They need to integrate these services better by focusing on one core demographic and offering a more cohesive experience. The first step is to identify their core demographic and build around their needs. They should raise cash for acquisitions through the sale of existing properties that do not service their primary audience. The Yahoo! brand and user base is strong enough to make a comeback, they just have to look at their company from a slightly different perspective and play their best hand in the current market.

entrepreneurial 15y ago

Maybe Steve Jobs left as CEO of Apple to run Yahoo???

mactitan 15y ago
Not to many people would want to punish Jobs in this way but it is the only important question. How would Jobs run Yahoo? Well, he wouldn't have mortgaged the search; he would have demanded that it be the best.

indrax 15y ago

Can someone explain the timing of these switches? Jobs resigns, Arrington resigns, CmdrTaco resigns, Reddit is spun off, and now this. (did I mis one?) Is there something about august/september? Is it just my personal filter?

cjenkins 15y ago
I can't say for sure, but possibly fiscal quarter/year ends?

xyahoo 15y ago

An ex-Yahoo here, using a throwaway account. Yahoo's biggest problem is the creamy middle layer of managers. They are usually lifers (as in, been at Yahoo for a decade), or fresh MBAs with a Stanford degree who think that just because they sat through Management-101, they know how products should be designed. This middle layer is like a Turkish harem. They're busy backstabbing each other, politicking and fucking things up. BUT NO ONE HOLDS THEM ACCOUNTABLE! Some dick will screw up a project, and then when the team gets laid off, happily move to another one to fuck that up too. Too often I've seen engineers just get disgusted and leave; or they'll go into a depressive "I don't care" mode. Passive-aggressive behavior is the norm. Blake, when he joined, said that "we say 'no' to nothing, and 'no' to everything". What he meant was: in a meeting, the manager will say 'yes' to everything; but the moment he steps outside, he'll think "I'm not gonna do that!". Innovation is also hampered by these middle morons. Someone tries to do something innovative, and a middle cockroach will crawl out, whining that his 'team' is working on it, and they'll have something ready in (some future quarter). So you're told to back off. Then you wait. In the meantime, that middle manager will use this opportunity to ask for more reqs and expand his little fiefdom. Time will pass, and nothing will get done. And you'll be waiting, agonizing, watching competitors eat Yahoo's lunch as this middle manager fucks around. And then there will be cycles of outsourcing to Bangalore and Beijing. Some middle beancounter decided that 3 engineers in India can be hired for 1 engineer in the US. (Never mind the quality of people; it's just the 3:1 ratio that matters). So now they're busy outsourcing to Bangalore. Even critical support tasks are outsourced to Bangalore. So what used to take a couple of back-and-forth emails and get fixed in an hour, now takes 3-4 days. The list of Yahoo's problems are long; and C-level people are not high on that list. "Vision" is also not a problem for Yahoo, if they'd just let the engineers just do their fucking jobs! Carol's biggest mistake was pissing Jack Ma off and losing Alipay. A person at that level should never, ever, make such a blunder; and she had to go.

joshu 15y ago
Well put. There is a big difference between leadership and management. Leadership is about taking risks, while management is about mitigating them. They are thus often in direct tension. Yahoo had a lot of management and not much leadership.
15y ago

Jun8 15y ago

Another nail in the coffin for the "A successful CEO's skills can easily transfer to any company" idea! From the top of my head (other than Bratz): Zander at Motorola, Sculley at Apple, etc. You just can't graft them on like that.

ecuzzillo 15y ago
It might be true, though, that there is a large equivalence class of companies that can trade CEO's well, and interesting consumer tech companies are just not in that equivalence class. It seems like Coke and Levi Strauss could trade, for example, and be fine, or something.

porterhaney 15y ago

Saw this on twitter and couldn't agree more: Yahoo needs to hire a CEO focused on their core competency - Fantasy football. http://twitter.com/#!/MatthewJBrown/status/111233535263780865 http://twitter.com/#!/MatthewJBrown/status/11123353526378086... In all honesty, Yahoo! does a lot of things right, I hope for the numerous DOers still left at Yahoo! that they hire someone with the vision and effectiveness to make something out of the once great service.

kavehgolabi 15y ago

Im surprised it took so long to fire Carol. As I saw Yahoo selling off all of its cool properties that were distracting to its core, I wondered what exactly their core was. It seems like yahoo was eager to become a bunch of links and licensed content...someone must have relied too much on an excel sheet to figure out how yahoo could become a valuable company. Though Yahoo lost many valuable properties like yahoo dating while others like yahoo maps failed to innovate, I look at what Yahoo did with the news on its front page as indicative of the company philosophy. They put sensational news on the front page begging for people to click the links. Many of the headlines are deceptive as the articles themselves are a let down. Its almost as if the yahoo content team was trying to trick users to get a few more pennies out of banner ads and lose clientele. Many times I have read comments of users making fun of the writers. Im not sure what yahoo's plan is but if I was the bored I would donate 25% of the company equity to Mark Zuckerberg and another 26% to the Page and Brin and send a box of chocolates and a plea for help. :) I wish Yahoo the best but its going to take a lot to change their culture.

kavehgolabi 15y ago

Im surprised it took so long to fire Carol. As I saw Yahoo selling off all of its cool properties that were distracting to its core, I wondered what exactly their core was. It seems like yahoo was eager to become a bunch of links and licensed content...someone must have relied too much on an excel sheet to figure out how yahoo could become a valuable company. Though Yahoo lost many valuable properties like yahoo dating while others like yahoo maps failed to innovate, I look at what Yahoo did with the news on its front page as indicative of the company philosophy. They put sensational news on the front page begging for people to click the links. Many of the headlines are deceptive as the articles themselves are a let down. Its almost as if the yahoo content team waas trying to trick users to get a few more pennies out of banner ads and lose clientele. Many times I have read comments of users making fun of the writers. Im not sure what yahoo's plan is but if I was the bored I would donate 25% of the company equity to Mark Zuckerberg and another 26% to the Page and Brin and send a box of chocolates and a plea for help. :) I wish Yahoo the best but its going to take a lot to change their culture.

ad93611 15y ago

I worked for Sun in the Bayarea and for Yahoo from their Bangalore office. I found lot of similarities between Sun and Yahoo. Similar to Sun, the engineers at Yahoo were really really good. It was really disappointing to see engineers of so much quality not being used to their full potential. If there is one good thing that could come out of this, it would be, if those awesome engineers were freed up to help create real value to our economies. I would hire an ex-yahoo engineer in a heartbeat.

pconf 15y ago

Stock is reportedly up ~6% on the news. Too bad the board couldn't have figured this out months ago. All she did was sell search to Microsoft. More or less the same as here modus operandi at Autodesk. At least that MS sellout gave ProEngineer a nice batch of customers. Her search sale helped nobody but did reduce the competition for Google's search monopoly. IMO any Yahoo CEO who can't fix their flagship webmail within a year should be shown the door. Of course fixing webmail means fixing middle management, and that's a rather more difficult problem.

vishalkgupta 15y ago

Carol never clearly defined her strategy as CEO. It wasn't clear to her employees and it wasn't clear for investors. She may have had some big picture plan that would taken many years to achieve, but it didn't look that way. It was clear that board wasn't willing to wait to find out. Which ever direction they go with a new CEO, here's hoping for an actual plan.

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bane 15y ago

Employee approval of now ex-CEO Bartz http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/06/yahoo-employees-carol-bartz/ http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/06/yahoo-employees-carol-bart...?

panabee 15y ago

First, the board should decide: media company or tech company. If Yahoo! is a media company -- which is more conservative since its peers would be AOL, Viacom, et al., and not Google, Facebook, et al. -- then merge/acquire Netflix ($11.5B market cap) and anoint Reed Hastings CEO. Let him navigate Nethoo through the transition to new media. Combining distribution and content failed for AOL-TW, but with the media industry in flux and with more content surfacing from the grassroots, perhaps now is the time for vertical integration. If technology, then Yahoo! needs a new culture and a bold vision to attract the most talented engineers. No ambitious engineer wants to slave under PMs when they could flourish in engineering-oriented companies like Google and Facebook. Yahoo!'s mission? Help users discover, personalize, and consume content. Be the service -- mobile or web -- people turn to when they have nothing to do, when they want to find a cool article, deal, song, video, picture, restaurant, conversation, or event. Today, Google is where you go when you know what you want. Yahoo! could help people upstream of search -- before people know what they want. Which, conveniently, is most of the time. Lots of companies tackle the problem in different areas: Digg with news, Pandora with music, Yelp with local businesses, Instagram with photos, Groupon with deals. With content proliferating faster than ever before, there is a need for some service to help people discover and consume content. Users don't want to hunt for content. They want the coolest deals, music, shows, restaurants, and news to come to them. Analyzing the web for the most relevant content -- no matter the type -- at a personalized level is non-trivial. Because it's a daunting technical problem, it will attract smart engineers. Despite the naysayers, Yahoo! occupies an enviable position with massive assets: hundreds of millions of users, deep advertiser relationships, and an iconic brand. The question is how to organize these assets into a sustainable and promising company. Yahoo! has the cash flow to acquire some pieces, perhaps go private, and execute against some vision. There is an opportunity to once again innovate with compelling technology and recruit talented engineers. There is an opportunity to help users navigate the explosion of online content in a smarter, more natural way. There is an opportunity for Yahoo! to reassert itself as one of the premier companies in Silicon Valley, one led by pioneering technology.

wisty 15y ago

What Yahoo could be: A social graph that's not a walled garden. Want to add Facebook stuff to your page? Sign the Facebook ToS, lube up, and get ready to get shafted. Want Google+ interaction? Same deal. Facebook (and to a lessor extent, G+) don't want you to run apps that involve them. They want you to create content for users to "like". Yahoo could create a great identity system - multiple identities (so you don't need to use your real name for everything), notifications (replacing email for web apps), payments, micropayments, advertising, the works. Want to make a web app? Check out (the fictional) Yahoo.js, and the (fictional) native client for your server (or just make it all run on JSON as a fallback). It could work like that. They just need to ask a bunch of people making new web apps what the pain points are, solve them, then use that to push people to a Yahoo Notifications page, and from there to Yahoo's other properties.

robert_nsu 15y ago

relevant link: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20102379-93/revisiting-yahoos-blown-$44.6-billion-sale-to-microsoft/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20102379-93/revisiting-yaho...

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enculette 15y ago

Carol Bartz deserved to be fired this very way as she did a lot of harm to many people. justice