Yahoo! has continued to do exactly what got it in this mess in the first place. It has played it boring and hired a CEO, in Carol Bartz, who is a safe pair of hands for a publicly quoted company, but has little or no Web 2.0 or advertising experience – apparently these are important to Yahoo!. Please someone get me a rocket scientist. No seriously, as apparently while it isn't rocket science you DO actually need a rocket scientist to make these decisions (I'm guessing he can just walk around the building shouting "MAXIMUM THRUST" like a lot).I'm clearly not the only one thinking this as investor reaction caused the stock to drop as low as $11.78 before climbing back to $12.1. Needless to remind everyone last year it was trading at around $22 before a year of losing ground.Prior to Yahoo! Bartz spent 14 years at Autodesk (and was on the boards of Intel and Cisco) and clearly has lots of executive and technology experience running a publicly quoted company. What do you mean you are not familiar with the computer-aided design software firm? To be fair she did increase revenues from $300m to $1.5bn and the company's share price increased nearly ten-fold. Good luck with that at Yahoo!.Her appointment looks like a total compromise as headhunter firm Heidrick & Struggles, which led the CEO search, has said that Yahoo! would also be looking for a strong No. 2 with more internet and product experience. Why not put someone like that in charge of the company in the first place? Just a thought.There were a number of candidates out there who could have taken the Yahoo! job, but in the end the once grand search firm seems to have had trouble attracting people to the job – because it is really a tough sell. One of those people in minor contention, but who really wanted the job was Yahoo! president Sue Decker who has resigned. She was very closely associated with Jerry Yang and look how that worked out. It was probably a smart choice not to give her the job.Reports have suggested that the Yahoo! board got a lot more knock backs from outside execs than expected for the CEO job because of the challenges and sinking moral. Runners and riders are thought to have included former Yahoo! chief operating officer Dan Rosenweig, who currently runs media private equity firm Quadrangle; Meg Whitman, long-time Ebay CEO; Tim Armstrong, Google's North American head of sales; News Corp's COO Peter Chernin; and current Juniper Networks executive Kevin Johnson. Former AOL chief Jonathan Miller was also linked.All that seems clear is that Yahoo! will not remain in its current form for much longer. Totally convinced of that. It has lost all initiative and is falling further behind as we type.I know this because no one talks about it or uses it. The only time it is talked about is that time that Microsoft tried to buy it? Oh and there was that Google deal. Those were the days. That could have been a transformational deal, but now that Window has been firmly shut and it is not a door opening. It looks more like a whole. Hole.Bartz will no doubt safely steer Yahoo! as a highly competent executive, but it is a firm that desperately needed to be more than safely steered.
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I'm gonig to add my Twitter conversation/ responses on this here as well.
Yahoo has played safe with Carol Bratz for CEO, she's the safe option and little advertising or web 2.0 experience. Stock drops. SNAFU.
[@sushobhan ] @GordonM Carol Bratz is perhaps the most dangerous option they could've chosen, given her supposed ignorance of all that Yahoo needs.
[@sushobhan ] @GordonM Will Carol Bratz do a Mark Hurd?
@sushobhan I think Hurd had more to play with - HP had a strong PC market position. If she can do numbers like he's done. woman is a genius.
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Gordon Macmillan
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