Editor’s note: This article was first published in September 2011, the week Yahoo dismissed Carol Bartz. Her age (63), the “more than 80%” Google search share and the state of Yahoo describe that moment; Yahoo was later sold to Verizon in 2017.
Carol Bartz, chief executive of Yahoo (aged 63), has been fired. Word has it that Yahoo fired her over the phone (such are the wonders of new technology). The reasons for her dismissal haven’t been explained yet: the company has only told her that her services are no longer needed. Everything suggests, though, that it’s because she failed to close the gap with the search giant, Google.
Carol Bartz was the company’s great hope when she was hired in 2009. Before joining Yahoo, Bartz was a legend in running companies of this kind: she did a good job at Intel and Cisco, and she doubled Autodesk‘s revenue.
That’s why she was chosen to replace Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang. Her task at the company wasn’t easy. Yahoo has struggled to turn a profit since its early days, to the point that there have been rumours of a sale more than once, as well as interest from Microsoft in buying it.
Carol Bartz was supposed to make Yahoo once again the company it had been in its early days, with healthy finances and a growing share of the market. Bartz cut costs, reduced the workforce and lowered the pay of some middle managers, measures that sat awkwardly with Glass Lewis naming her “the executive with the most disproportionate pay”.
The fact is that Bartz didn’t manage to build a solid advertising revenue model. That would have required increasing the number of people using the search engine, so that Yahoo’s own version of AdSense could pay off. The problem for Yahoo is that Google is still the preferred search engine for more than 80% of internet users. So if the plan is to hire someone else to close the gap with Google, I don’t think Yahoo needs a chief executive so much as a magician.
P.S. One point off for Yahoo for joining the fashion of firing people by phone.
Featured image: Yahoo! Blog from Sunnyvale, California, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
