Yesterday Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz was fired by Yahoo Chairman, Roy Bostock. In a very un-CEO manner, Bartz fired off an email to all Yahoo employees
To all,
I am very sad to tell you that I’ve just been fired over the phone by Yahoo’s Chairman of the Board. It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward.
Carol
I think my children have more class than to act like that, however it shows the frustration levels at the once might giant of the internet, Yahoo. Seriously, is that how you expect someone being paid $19 million a year to act? Apparently it was a troubled tenure during her two and a half years as CEO. From publicly accusing employees of not “f**king doing anything” to cancelling a prestigious keynote address at the giant Consumer Electronics Show show in 2010, to publicly telling TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington to “f**k off” during a question and answer period at a conference. Most importantly Yahoo seemed to continually lay off employees creating a downward spiral that may be next to impossible to recover from.
Where did Yahoo go wrong and who (if anyone) can fix Yahoo….or is it unfixable? There is talk of AOL buying the giant. There is certainly some interest synergy between the two companies should that happen. Yahoo has missed plenty of opportunities over the last several years. It lost the search engine war to Google and then ceded the remainder of the once core business to Microsoft’s Bing last year. It gave up on or shed many other parts of the once might Yahoo empire like Yahoo Dating, Delicious and Yahoo Buzz. Granted, they’ve hit a few home runs like Flickr, the online photo site.
What makes Facebook or Twitter so popular today while Yahoo is doing so poorly? Yahoo is still the 3rd most visited website, behind Google and Facebook. From the cheap seats back here, Yahoo is doing nothing to keep me coming back, other than by habit of checking my Yahoo Mail. What brings people back is content they can’t find elsewhere. People spend time of websites they find engaging. Yahoo once had that. However, they tried to monetize everything and ended up with little to show for it. An example I would like to use is the now shuttered Yahoo Personals. For years Yahoo had a subscription dating site which they found to be too expensive and cumbersome to run when they could collect a check from Match.com to promote that site. Yet, the largest dating site on the internet is a FREE site called PlentyofFish.com with just over a dozen employees and an estimated revenue of $10 million a year (mostly through advertising).
Yahoo has largely been late to a lot of changes in online today. They’ve not (to my knowledge) tried their own brand or flavor of social networking (Google recently found huge success with their new Google Plus) and their mobile apps were months if not years behind outside app developer versions. Yahoo needs to listen a little more to the market and a little less to Wall Street right now and they should find success for both if they do. There is opportunity out there…if they just try.
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