

Why Carol Bartz was fired - donmcc
http://www.asymco.com/2011/09/07/why-carol-bartz-was-fired/

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gvb
Interestingly, this matches up with pg's analysis from 2010, based on his
experiences in 1998. <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
That only matters if you plan to still be CEO at that point.

~~~
jimbokun
Or still own equity in the company.

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Steko
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.

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phuff
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.

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maratd
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
Exactly. You know what business will (almost) never go broke?

A mortician.

How much innovation's necessary there?

~~~
true_religion
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.

~~~
garbowza
Not true.

You'd be surprised at how much innovation is in the industry, particularly
with respect to social media. I know: my company provides web based software
to funeral homes and mortuaries. We let them design headstones online. We even
put QR codes on the headstones to make it easy to find the deceased
individual's online obituary within the cemetery.

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brudgers
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.

~~~
bgurupra
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

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programminggeek
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.

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0x12
Contrary to what the article states Carol Bartz engaged in plenty of surgery,
unfortunately most of it was of the amputation variety.

~~~
enculette
you mean, plastic surgery right ?

[http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/07/0731_women_in_tech/i...](http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/07/0731_women_in_tech/image/carolbartz.jpg)

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

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teyc
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.

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robfig
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?

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chugger
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.

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lachlanj
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.

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revorad
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
You must have missed this announcement:

[http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/04/bookmark-...](http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/04/bookmark-
this-youtubes-chad-hurley-and-steve-chen-buy-delicious-from-yahoo.html)

Yahoo no longer owns delicious.

~~~
revorad
I did miss it, thanks! But that wasn't so long ago, so my point still stands.

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enculette
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.

