
Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO - hornokplease
http://allthingsd.com/20110906/exclusive-carol-bartz-out-at-yahoo-cfo-interim-ceo/
======
xyahoo
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.

~~~
kamaal
I am from Bangalore, And I seriously don't understand this Bangalore and
Beijing hate.

Why do Americans assume all Chinese and Indians are fools? Aren't you people
shooting yourself in the foot by assuming your competition is weak?
Outsourcing works for a lot more factors than mere money. But money is a major
factor.

Here in India, we have usual set of good and bad engineers _like everywhere_.
There a lot of very good talented and hardworking folks here, sure they don't
come cheap. But they come cheaper than what a similar guy in the US would
cost. I have myself seen a lot of quality work getting delivered at almost
1/10th the cost it would have taken in the US.

The US taught us ideals of capitalism, didn't you guys want the world to
follow _your way of life_. Now when we actually do, you guys frown.. withdraw
turn your back on the same principles you have taught us for nearly half a
century now.

You have nothing to fear from the bad engineers here, trust me they are
loosing out very quickly. What you must fear is good hardworking folks coming
at cheap prices. That will be a big problem, because when some one sees
quality coming for cheap they will go for it.

Also, Indian is a huge buyer of military equipment from the US. We spend
billions buying stuff from you. But we never complain that those jobs are
being outsourced to America. In fact we love America for the help they offer
us.

We live in a globalized world, this is how its going to be in the future.

~~~
tyahoo
OP is right. I am worked at yahoo till recently and I am an Indian and I don't
think people in Bangalore or Beijing are bad. During my career in India and in
US I met quite a few good engineers . In early days of Yahoo! India the
quality of Indian engineers are pretty good. Off late they are just hiring
whoever send in a resume. I know people who are interviewing these candidates
even when they say no the manager is hiring because they have fill up the req.
Its really sad state you hire these so called "programmers" who can't
understand basic things and its frustrating deal with and explain every small
details and the work that comes out is completely different from what you
wanted and than some more delay. No one complaining about American or Indian
engineering quality I seen bad engineers on both sides. Its about getting
quality engineer. If you remove pretty good engineers or team here and try to
hire below average engineers from India only because they cost less than its
really fucked up you are not really saving up anything in this only to realize
your product is delayed for an year and it turned to piece of crap. Don't be
so defensive about these comparisons not everybody in India are great
programmers nor they are fools

~~~
goombastic
Partly true, however there is another aspect to it as well. It's just that
Yahoo and other blue-label firms have an exalted notion of who should work
with them. They tend to go for the fashionable set; the english speaking, high
fiving crowd of self labelled developers who cant code themselves out of a
paper bag.

I know of at least one "dynamite" programmer whom Yahoo! India rejected
because the guy didn't have a graduate degree. As usual, he was too busy
coding to go get a degree. Well guess what, it's been pretty interesting
working with him.

------
jmjerlecki
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>

~~~
jurjenh
Is there a transcript of it anywhere? Never mind, just found it:
[http://www.alacrastore.com/research/thomson-streetevents-
Yah...](http://www.alacrastore.com/research/thomson-streetevents-
Yahoo_Inc_Shareholders_Meeting-T4011721)

It's at the end, I believe he was the last speaker...

------
diego
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.

~~~
tjmc
I've always seen Yahoo as a "me too" company - the Carl's Jr of the online
titans. If they've ever been the best at something they've never stayed there
for long. The decline began when they decided search wasn't their core
business and portals were the way to go. Who would want to work there? Even
Microsoft are more innovative these days.

Having said all that, thanks for buying Viaweb off PG guys. At least some
Yahoo cash went to good use...

~~~
fuzionmonkey
At least Carl's Jr is good.

------
JacobAldridge
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?

~~~
danilocampos
Don't forget – Jerry Yang actually _returned_ to Yahoo! for a period. And
completely fucked the dog, screwing up a potential acquisition and being
replaced by Bartz. Say what we will about Valleywag, they covered this period
pretty well:

BSing the troops:

[http://gawker.com/valleywag/tech/yahoo/jerry-yangs-
fireside-...](http://gawker.com/valleywag/tech/yahoo/jerry-yangs-fireside-
chat-translated-314162.php)

Ballmer writing a polite letter killing the acquisition prospects:

<http://gawker.com/386898/>

"Hey guys, uh, Ballmer's very public proclamations notwithstanding, Microsoft
didn't actually want to buy us:"

[http://uk.gawker.com/5020835/yahoo-ceo-tries-to-convince-
sha...](http://uk.gawker.com/5020835/yahoo-ceo-tries-to-convince-shareholders-
microsoft-never-wanted-to-merge)

~~~
gcb
implying microsoft acquisition of a big competitor is a good thing.

~~~
mynameishere
He screwed the company's owners out of many millions of dollars. Microsoft may
well have killed and gutted the fish, but the CEO's responsibility is to the
shareholders.

~~~
patrickaljord
I see what you mean. But let's say he would have sold to Microsoft and then
Microsoft would have killed and gutted the fish, you'd probably be criticizing
him for having no vision by selling Yahoo to MS and letting it die like that.

------
ethank
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.

~~~
minikomi
So how is Yahoo still number 4 in ranking (according to Alexa).. Honest
question - what drives so much traffic? Search?

~~~
dpark
Yahoo produces a ton of content. I believe their Finance and Sports sites are
#1. Autos is huge. Their news site is big. Their front page gets massive
traffic. They have a ton of other sites as well. And this isn't spammy content
farming. They really do have a ton of original as well as quality licensed
content (e.g. AP stories). They do extremely well in the realm of content, and
with audience engagement around that content. Add in Yahoo Mail, Personals,
Answers (ugh), etc. They have a lot of very successful sites.

~~~
mistermustard
Yahoo Sports is an excellent sports journalism outlet and probably the only
serious competitor to the ESPN monopoly. They broke the story on the Miami
recruiting scandal, one of the largest NCAA violations in history, after doing
extensive in-depth research.

------
daimyoyo
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.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
Funny, isn't that a description of Tim Cook and Apple now?

~~~
stuff4ben
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.

------
steve8918
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
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
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
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
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.

------
porterhaney
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/11123353526378086...](http://twitter.com/#!/MatthewJBrown/status/111233535263780865)

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.

------
neovive
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.

------
mathattack
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.

------
indrax
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
I can't say for sure, but possibly fiscal quarter/year ends?

------
ad93611
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.

------
flocial
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.

------
0x12
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.

------
panabee
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.

------
Jun8
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
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.

------
wisty
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.

------
mhd
Fired over the _phone_? Is that common at that level?

~~~
jarek
Supposedly the CEO and the chairman were on opposite U.S. coasts. Must have
been pretty urgent though...

~~~
tdurden
Agreed. There is more to the story we don't know yet.

------
pconf
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.

------
kavehgolabi
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.

------
nkassis
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.

------
vishalkgupta
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.

------
protomyth
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.

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

------
yangtheman
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
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.

------
uvince
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.

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

~~~
hga
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
"Keeping the lights on" doesn't sound too nice, although it's likely exactly
what he's going to do..

~~~
TheCondor
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?

------
peteforde
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?

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

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

justice

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

~~~
mactitan
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.

