The article's premise of Yahoo's value being "behavioral data of its users" seems pretty silly. It's all about the ads (search and display).
Maybe it was a roundabout reference to ad targeting?
Why Carol Bartz was fired
21–30 of 31 posts
Re: Why Carol Bartz was fired
#22Interestingly, 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, th…
That only matters if you plan to still be CEO at that point.
Re: Why Carol Bartz was fired
#23Do we seriously need a blog post on "why" she was fired? I think this is blindingly obvious... Yahoo is now a shell of the company it used to be.
Re: Why Carol Bartz was fired
#24Carol 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 yo…
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Re: Why Carol Bartz was fired
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. You know what business will (almost) never go broke? A mortician. How much innovation's necessary there?
Innovation is actually banned by law for mortuaries in many jurisdictions. So you have to use chemical X from select manufacturers Y, and place dead body in box T with procedure Q.
Good point. Not like it'd be accepted anyway.
Re: Why Carol Bartz was fired
#26Interestingly, 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, th…
That only matters if you plan to still be CEO at that point.
Or still own equity in the company.
Re: Why Carol Bartz was fired
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. You know what business will (almost) never go broke? A mortician. How much innovation's necessary there?
Innovation is actually banned by law for mortuaries in many jurisdictions. So you have to use chemical X from select manufacturers Y, and place dead body in box T with procedure Q.
Not true.
You'd be surprised at how much innovation is in the industry, particularly with respect to social media. I know: my company provides web based software to funeral homes and mortuaries. We let them design headstones online. We even put QR codes on the headstones to make it easy to find the deceased individual's online obituary within the cemetery.
Re: Why Carol Bartz was fired
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. You know what business will (almost) never go broke? A mortician. How much innovation's necessary there?
Innovation is actually banned by law for mortuaries in many jurisdictions. So you have to use chemical X from select manufacturers Y, and place dead body in box T with procedure Q.
I attended a talk Bob Sutton (Stanford professor) gave on innovation. One of the first things he talked about was all of the times you do not want to innovate. If you're building a bridge, you probably want to build one with a design and techniques that have been proven to work. There are many other kinds of tasks where repeatability and reliability are more important than innovation.
Handling dead bodies probably falls into that category.
Re: Why Carol Bartz was fired
#29As the article points out, Yahoo's problems began long before her tenure and Bartz's primary experience was running a company which was a market leader and was committed to making hard choices in a timely manner [Autodesk]. Nothing could be further from Yahoo's status at the time she took over - Yahoo has not been the leader in their segment for at least the better part of a decade. They are essentially the AOL of th…
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Re: Why Carol Bartz was fired
#30As the article points out, Yahoo's problems began long before her tenure and Bartz's primary experience was running a company which was a market leader and was committed to making hard choices in a timely manner [Autodesk]. Nothing could be further from Yahoo's status at the time she took over - Yahoo has not been the leader in their segment for at least the better part of a decade. They are essentially the AOL of th…
easy to say that in hindsight - IBM hired Lou Gerstner when it was at the brink of sinking and his previous experience did not have much overlap on what IBM did - he still managed to turn things around