I haven’t had much to say on Yahoo for a while, and I won’t be prolix in discussing the ouster of Carol Bartz as the company’s CEO yesterday. She apparently was relieved of her executive duties on a telephone call from the company’s chairman, Roy Bostock, and she promptly shared that fact with Yahoo staff in a brief, presumably valedictory email message.
As I noted nearly two years ago, Bartz seemed lost at Yahoo. She provided lots of sound and fury, not to mention abundant theatrics, but her reign was more sideshow than focused leadership. Yahoo didn’t need a sideshow. There’s not much money in that.
To be fair, though, Bartz was miscast in her role. Before she came to Yahoo, she made her name and reputation as the chief executive at Autodesk, a company that specializes in the development of 3D-design, engineering, and entertainment software.
As you might imagine, Autodesk’s software was (and still is) sold to and used by design professionals and engineers, not consumers. On the other hand, Yahoo is a content, media, and communications company that serves a broad-based consumer market. They’re very different companies, and it’s not clear why the Yahoo board thought Bartz’ previous experience made her the ideal candidate to reverse the dimming fortunes of one of the Internet’s brightest lights during the wild 90s.
Anyway, the whole Yahoo saga of the last decade has been an unremittingly sad story. Yahoo retains some valuable assets, but nobody there seems to know how to get the most from them.
Twilight in the Valley of the Nerds 