Why Carol Bartz was fired
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Why Carol Bartz was fired
1–10 of 31 posts
Re: Why Carol Bartz was fired
#2Yahoo does own Flickr and Delicious, two very active modern "user behaviour" sites. So it's not that they didn't have any such data, they apparently just chose to ignore it.
Re: Why Carol Bartz was fired
#3Interestingly, this matches up with pg's analysis from 2010, based on his experiences in 1998. http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html
"I didn't realize the answer till later, after I went to work at Yahoo. It was neither of my guesses. The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that advertisers were already overpaying for it. If they merely extracted the actual value, they'd have made less."
The problem with customers that are overpaying is that they eventually come to realize it and stop (over) paying.
Re: Why Carol Bartz was fired
#4Yahoo does own Flickr and Delicious, two very active modern "user behaviour" sites. So it's not that they didn't have any such data, they apparently just chose to ignore it.
You must have missed this announcement:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/04/bookmark-...
Yahoo no longer owns delicious.
Re: Why Carol Bartz was fired
#5Yahoo does own Flickr and Delicious, two very active modern "user behaviour" sites. So it's not that they didn't have any such data, they apparently just chose to ignore it.
You must have missed this announcement: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/04/bookmark-... Yahoo no longer owns delicious.
I did miss it, thanks! But that wasn't so long ago, so my point still stands.
Re: Why Carol Bartz was fired
#6Contrary to what the article states Carol Bartz engaged in plenty of surgery, unfortunately most of it was of the amputation variety.
Re: Why Carol Bartz was fired
#7It's so interesting to me how you can get these large companies that stay around even though they don't innovate. I mean, I don't explicitly use yahoo services for nearly anything. I occasionally look at flickr photos these days (other people's not mine). I occasionally go to a yahoo group I joined 4-5 years ago. Once a year I do a march madness bracket there. But that's it. There's nothing compelling there for me. (I use yahoo messenger along with 3 or 4 other backends via adium, but it's not my preferred backend... I use it because I know people who prefer it.)
What's amazing is that while clearly Yahoo isn't innovating, and clearly they're having trouble, there's still (apparently) enough people that go there on a regular basis that they are generating _some_ kind of revenue. That to me is amazing: when a company gets big enough it can become a sort of "perpetual motion" machine that keeps chugging in revenue even when it's not "successful" by any normal sense of the word.
Re: Why Carol Bartz was fired
#8Carol Bartz was fired because the MSFT deal for ads has not performed well at all and anyone who had used both platforms before the unification of Yahoo Ads and MS AdCenter would know that AdCenter has always been considerably worse in almost every respect.
AdCenter has always had the problem of MSFT makes it hard to spend your budget to buy any real quantity of traffic. Yahoo was much better at making it easy for you to setup ads, run them, and get traffic. AdCenter sucks at all of that. It is literally years behind of what Yahoo had which was still years behind AdWords.
Even worse, AdWords, even with it's quality score policies designed to drive up the price of ads, makes it so much easier to setup ads and get traffic that there is no way AdCenter can compete.
The secret sauce in online ads is simple - "make it easy for me to spend money to buy traffic". Google nails that every time. Yahoo was pretty good. Microsoft sucks at it.
So, long story short, AdWords is so far ahead of AdCenter that there is no way for Microsoft to catch up. Carol Bartz and Yahoo hitched their horse to the Microsoft AdCenter wagon and that cost Carol Bartz her job.
If it don't make dollars, it don't make sense. Microsoft AdCenter doesn't make much of either for Yahoo.
Re: Why Carol Bartz was fired
#9It's so interesting to me how you can get these large companies that stay around even though they don't innovate. I mean, I don't explicitly use yahoo services for nearly anything. I occasionally look at flickr photos these days (other people's not mine). I occasionally go to a yahoo group I joined 4-5 years ago. Once a year I do a march madness bracket there. But that's it. There's nothing compelling there for me. (…
You do not have to innovate to be successful. The overwhelming majority of profitable businesses out there have never innovated and never will. All you have to do is provide value.
In fact, the majority of innovative businesses fail and fail miserably. You still have to translate innovation to value. That's really hard.
Re: Why Carol Bartz was fired
#10Yahoo needs a young visionary product guy who understands the web, mobile, etc.
The last thing Yahoo needs right now is an "experienced" executive from another company.