Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

allthingsd.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 151 posts

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#3

Post by 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.

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#4

Post by 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.

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#5

Post by 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.

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#6

Post by voidfiles »

ethank wrote: post #4

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.

Clearly Joe Stump is ready to step in if need be. His article is down right now, probably to many people trying to see if they offered him the job, but here is the google cache.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TgPIGZf...

If I was still working at Yahoo I would be stoked to have this guy as my boss.

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#9

Post by 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.

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#10

Post by blantonl »

daimyoyo wrote: post #2

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.

You hit the nail on the head. Google seems to have figured this out by bringing back a product guy (Larry) to lead the company. And Google is still investing tremendous amounts of time and talent into innovation.

It is scary to see how these early winners in the online business have faltered. AOL, Yahoo, etc. Instead of fostering a culture of innovation, they've instead looked to cut innovation and attempt to use what remaining cash they have left to buy their way into businesses that they seem to always mismanage with "operations management". Take AOL and TechCrunch.

Post reply on HN