5 ms·

Why Carol Bartz was fired

63 points by donmcc 15y ago

revorad 15y ago
Yahoo does own Flickr and Delicious, two very active modern "user behaviour" sites. So it's not that they didn't have any such data, they apparently just chose to ignore it.
- 0x12 15y ago
  You must have missed this announcement: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/04/bookmark-this-youtubes-chad-hurley-and-steve-chen-buy-delicious-from-yahoo.html http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/04/bookmark-... Yahoo no longer owns delicious.
  - revorad 15y ago
    I did miss it, thanks! But that wasn't so long ago, so my point still stands.
gvb 15y ago
Interestingly, this matches up with pg's analysis from 2010, based on his experiences in 1998. http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html "I didn't realize the answer till later, after I went to work at Yahoo. It was neither of my guesses. The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that advertisers were already overpaying for it. If they merely extracted the actual value, they'd have made less." The problem with customers that are overpaying is that they eventually come to realize it and stop (over) paying.
- pyre 15y ago
  That only matters if you plan to still be CEO at that point.
  - jimbokun 15y ago
    Or still own equity in the company.
0x12 15y ago
Contrary to what the article states Carol Bartz engaged in plenty of surgery, unfortunately most of it was of the amputation variety.
- enculette 15y ago
  you mean, plastic surgery right ? http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/07/0731_women_in_tech/image/carolbartz.jpg http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/07/0731_women_in_tech/i...
phuff 15y ago
It's so interesting to me how you can get these large companies that stay around even though they don't innovate. I mean, I don't explicitly use yahoo services for nearly anything. I occasionally look at flickr photos these days (other people's not mine). I occasionally go to a yahoo group I joined 4-5 years ago. Once a year I do a march madness bracket there. But that's it. There's nothing compelling there for me. (I use yahoo messenger along with 3 or 4 other backends via adium, but it's not my preferred backend... I use it because I know people who prefer it.) What's amazing is that while clearly Yahoo isn't innovating, and clearly they're having trouble, there's still (apparently) enough people that go there on a regular basis that they are generating _some_ kind of revenue. That to me is amazing: when a company gets big enough it can become a sort of "perpetual motion" machine that keeps chugging in revenue even when it's not "successful" by any normal sense of the word.
- maratd 15y ago
  You do not have to innovate to be successful. The overwhelming majority of profitable businesses out there have never innovated and never will. All you have to do is provide value. In fact, the majority of innovative businesses fail and fail miserably. You still have to translate innovation to value. That's really hard.
  - eropple 15y ago
    Exactly. You know what business will (almost) never go broke? A mortician. How much innovation's necessary there?
    - true_religion 15y ago
      Innovation is actually banned by law for mortuaries in many jurisdictions. So you have to use chemical X from select manufacturers Y, and place dead body in box T with procedure Q.
      - eropple 15y ago
        Good point. Not like it'd be accepted anyway.
programminggeek 15y ago
Carol Bartz was fired because the MSFT deal for ads has not performed well at all and anyone who had used both platforms before the unification of Yahoo Ads and MS AdCenter would know that AdCenter has always been considerably worse in almost every respect. AdCenter has always had the problem of MSFT makes it hard to spend your budget to buy any real quantity of traffic. Yahoo was much better at making it easy for you to setup ads, run them, and get traffic. AdCenter sucks at all of that. It is literally years behind of what Yahoo had which was still years behind AdWords. Even worse, AdWords, even with it's quality score policies designed to drive up the price of ads, makes it so much easier to setup ads and get traffic that there is no way AdCenter can compete. The secret sauce in online ads is simple - "make it easy for me to spend money to buy traffic". Google nails that every time. Yahoo was pretty good. Microsoft sucks at it. So, long story short, AdWords is so far ahead of AdCenter that there is no way for Microsoft to catch up. Carol Bartz and Yahoo hitched their horse to the Microsoft AdCenter wagon and that cost Carol Bartz her job. If it don't make dollars, it don't make sense. Microsoft AdCenter doesn't make much of either for Yahoo.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
chugger 15y ago
Yahoo needs a young visionary product guy who understands the web, mobile, etc. The last thing Yahoo needs right now is an "experienced" executive from another company.
brudgers 15y ago
As the article points out, Yahoo's problems began long before her tenure and Bartz's primary experience was running a company which was a market leader and was committed to making hard choices in a timely manner [Autodesk]. Nothing could be further from Yahoo's status at the time she took over - Yahoo has not been the leader in their segment for at least the better part of a decade. They are essentially the AOL of the internet - a service targeted at the less sophisticated intern users or those willing to go with their ISP's default in the case of ATT. There's no fixing it because there is no love for the brand. People have Yahoo email addresses for the same reason they have Hotmail - they got their free email account before Gmail was available and it is too much trouble to change it. Bartz's hiring was a classic case of drafting a CEO based on who is available rather than fit - there was virtually no overlap between Autodesk's business model and operations and Yahoo's. Hopefully, she will find a much better circumstance in her next role.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- bgurupra 15y ago
  easy to say that in hindsight - IBM hired Lou Gerstner when it was at the brink of sinking and his previous experience did not have much overlap on what IBM did - he still managed to turn things around
enculette 15y ago
Carol Bartz was not fired because she is fat, rude and vulgar (although she is) - no, she just pissed off the wrong dude: Jack Ma.
Steko 15y ago
Yahoo Japan has always provided a nice comparison to Yahoo itself. While Yang and co. stood by while Google became everyone's homepage in the US, Yahoo Japan remained the #1 portal in Japan by moving aggressively and continually making the site more useful to their members -- auctions, banking, broadband, personals, etc. All that while at the same time strengthening the brand with the naming rights, universal billboards and of course the sign up girls.
teyc 15y ago
Yahoo was always a technology company trying to be a media company, when being a media company is no longer respectable. At a time when there is so much opportunity, why isn't Yahoo even wading into mobile or social? A CEO's job isn't only to focus on core competencies if the core business is losing lustre. A CEO's job is to look for new markets, and build up the competencies.
enculette 15y ago
I do not worry for yahoo because: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh4jvDsNtEE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh4jvDsNtEE
robfig 15y ago
The article's premise of Yahoo's value being "behavioral data of its users" seems pretty silly. It's all about the ads (search and display). Maybe it was a roundabout reference to ad targeting?
lachlanj 15y ago
Do we seriously need a blog post on "why" she was fired? I think this is blindingly obvious... Yahoo is now a shell of the company it used to be.

63 points by donmcc 15y ago

Yahoo does own Flickr and Delicious, two very active modern "user behaviour" sites. So it's not that they didn't have any such data, they apparently just chose to ignore it.

0x12 15y ago
You must have missed this announcement: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/04/bookmark-this-youtubes-chad-hurley-and-steve-chen-buy-delicious-from-yahoo.html http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/04/bookmark-... Yahoo no longer owns delicious.
- revorad 15y ago
  I did miss it, thanks! But that wasn't so long ago, so my point still stands.

gvb 15y ago

Interestingly, this matches up with pg's analysis from 2010, based on his experiences in 1998. http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html "I didn't realize the answer till later, after I went to work at Yahoo. It was neither of my guesses. The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that advertisers were already overpaying for it. If they merely extracted the actual value, they'd have made less." The problem with customers that are overpaying is that they eventually come to realize it and stop (over) paying.

pyre 15y ago
That only matters if you plan to still be CEO at that point.
- jimbokun 15y ago
  Or still own equity in the company.

0x12 15y ago

Contrary to what the article states Carol Bartz engaged in plenty of surgery, unfortunately most of it was of the amputation variety.

enculette 15y ago
you mean, plastic surgery right ? http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/07/0731_women_in_tech/image/carolbartz.jpg http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/07/0731_women_in_tech/i...

phuff 15y ago

It's so interesting to me how you can get these large companies that stay around even though they don't innovate. I mean, I don't explicitly use yahoo services for nearly anything. I occasionally look at flickr photos these days (other people's not mine). I occasionally go to a yahoo group I joined 4-5 years ago. Once a year I do a march madness bracket there. But that's it. There's nothing compelling there for me. (I use yahoo messenger along with 3 or 4 other backends via adium, but it's not my preferred backend... I use it because I know people who prefer it.) What's amazing is that while clearly Yahoo isn't innovating, and clearly they're having trouble, there's still (apparently) enough people that go there on a regular basis that they are generating _some_ kind of revenue. That to me is amazing: when a company gets big enough it can become a sort of "perpetual motion" machine that keeps chugging in revenue even when it's not "successful" by any normal sense of the word.

maratd 15y ago
You do not have to innovate to be successful. The overwhelming majority of profitable businesses out there have never innovated and never will. All you have to do is provide value. In fact, the majority of innovative businesses fail and fail miserably. You still have to translate innovation to value. That's really hard.
- eropple 15y ago
  Exactly. You know what business will (almost) never go broke? A mortician. How much innovation's necessary there?
  - true_religion 15y ago
    Innovation is actually banned by law for mortuaries in many jurisdictions. So you have to use chemical X from select manufacturers Y, and place dead body in box T with procedure Q.
    - eropple 15y ago
      Good point. Not like it'd be accepted anyway.

programminggeek 15y ago

Carol Bartz was fired because the MSFT deal for ads has not performed well at all and anyone who had used both platforms before the unification of Yahoo Ads and MS AdCenter would know that AdCenter has always been considerably worse in almost every respect. AdCenter has always had the problem of MSFT makes it hard to spend your budget to buy any real quantity of traffic. Yahoo was much better at making it easy for you to setup ads, run them, and get traffic. AdCenter sucks at all of that. It is literally years behind of what Yahoo had which was still years behind AdWords. Even worse, AdWords, even with it's quality score policies designed to drive up the price of ads, makes it so much easier to setup ads and get traffic that there is no way AdCenter can compete. The secret sauce in online ads is simple - "make it easy for me to spend money to buy traffic". Google nails that every time. Yahoo was pretty good. Microsoft sucks at it. So, long story short, AdWords is so far ahead of AdCenter that there is no way for Microsoft to catch up. Carol Bartz and Yahoo hitched their horse to the Microsoft AdCenter wagon and that cost Carol Bartz her job. If it don't make dollars, it don't make sense. Microsoft AdCenter doesn't make much of either for Yahoo.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

chugger 15y ago

Yahoo needs a young visionary product guy who understands the web, mobile, etc. The last thing Yahoo needs right now is an "experienced" executive from another company.

brudgers 15y ago

As the article points out, Yahoo's problems began long before her tenure and Bartz's primary experience was running a company which was a market leader and was committed to making hard choices in a timely manner [Autodesk]. Nothing could be further from Yahoo's status at the time she took over - Yahoo has not been the leader in their segment for at least the better part of a decade. They are essentially the AOL of the internet - a service targeted at the less sophisticated intern users or those willing to go with their ISP's default in the case of ATT. There's no fixing it because there is no love for the brand. People have Yahoo email addresses for the same reason they have Hotmail - they got their free email account before Gmail was available and it is too much trouble to change it. Bartz's hiring was a classic case of drafting a CEO based on who is available rather than fit - there was virtually no overlap between Autodesk's business model and operations and Yahoo's. Hopefully, she will find a much better circumstance in her next role.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
bgurupra 15y ago
easy to say that in hindsight - IBM hired Lou Gerstner when it was at the brink of sinking and his previous experience did not have much overlap on what IBM did - he still managed to turn things around

enculette 15y ago

Carol Bartz was not fired because she is fat, rude and vulgar (although she is) - no, she just pissed off the wrong dude: Jack Ma.

Steko 15y ago

Yahoo Japan has always provided a nice comparison to Yahoo itself. While Yang and co. stood by while Google became everyone's homepage in the US, Yahoo Japan remained the #1 portal in Japan by moving aggressively and continually making the site more useful to their members -- auctions, banking, broadband, personals, etc. All that while at the same time strengthening the brand with the naming rights, universal billboards and of course the sign up girls.

teyc 15y ago

Yahoo was always a technology company trying to be a media company, when being a media company is no longer respectable. At a time when there is so much opportunity, why isn't Yahoo even wading into mobile or social? A CEO's job isn't only to focus on core competencies if the core business is losing lustre. A CEO's job is to look for new markets, and build up the competencies.

enculette 15y ago

I do not worry for yahoo because: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh4jvDsNtEE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh4jvDsNtEE

robfig 15y ago

The article's premise of Yahoo's value being "behavioral data of its users" seems pretty silly. It's all about the ads (search and display). Maybe it was a roundabout reference to ad targeting?

lachlanj 15y ago

Do we seriously need a blog post on "why" she was fired? I think this is blindingly obvious... Yahoo is now a shell of the company it used to be.