How not to part ways: Carol Bartz and Yahoo

In the late 90s, Yahoo! had the chance to buy eBay but decided they could make a better auction site. That didn't happen. In the early 00s, CEO Terry Semel, in the one thing he did right, claimed that Social Networking was going to be the Next Big Thing. The Board of Directors shot this idea down.

In 1999 they bought Broadcast.com for $5.7 BILLION (with a B). Everyone here who uses Yahoo! Radio raise their hand! Yeah, me, neither. Shortly thereafter they bought GeoCities for $3.6 Billion. While actually a smart move at the time (it was by far the biggest free web host), Yahoo! then did everything in their power to screw it up. It was a very popular site for artists and writers. Then Yahoo! said "by the way, the copyright to anything you put on there belongs to us." Then they were shocked - shocked! - when this upset people for some reason. And this was just one of the ways they screwed it up. Anyway, Geocities shut down a couple of years ago.

Google got where it is because they encourage innovation. For every failure (Google Wave, anyone?) there's a huge success (Google+). Middle managers at Yahoo! squelch any sort of innovation ("That's not what you're supposed to be working on!"), and now basically wait for Google to do something then copy it only not as well. Now it's more or less on deathwatch. Sad, really, for what was once the biggest, hippest place on the Web.

 

Google has a great operating environment where it allows employees to work on things they want. Google Labs was born and alot of these cool concept ideas make it to mainstream. Yahoo can't compete because the best and brightest go to google now. Yahoo is a like the community college of web giants. The day yahoo dies won't even be a sad one because nobody will even care what yahoo is.

 

While I agree with the gist of your post it's a little early to be calling Google+ a success, much less a huge success.

 

Considering that she failed to give investors any return on investment, failed to provide any sort of long term vision, laid off thousands of workers and made nearly $60 million for three years work, I'd say good riddance.

Yahoo should have taken that offer from Microsoft. The company is now worth 1/3 of what it was back then.

How do you know someone is old? email address @yahoo.com
How do you know someone is really old? email address @aol.com

As far as Google goes, if search stopped working tomorrow, Google would be as unfocused as Yahoo. For all their innovation, they remain a one-trick pony. Google's failures far outnumber their successes. And as SCJ points out, the jury on Google+ is still out.

 

If Google Search went away tomorrow, they'd still have Google Maps, Google Earth, GMail, AdSense, Chrome, Android, YouTube, and that's just off the top of my head.

While Carol Bartz was unquestionably bad, she was actually an improvement from when Jerry Yang was CEO (a look at the stocks will tell you that), and no better or worse than Terry "Yahoo! isn't an INTERNET company! It's a MEDIA Company!" Semel.

Jerry Yang DOES make a great "The Face of Yahoo!", but for running things? That didn't fly.

Edited to say: DISCLAIMER: I used to work at Yahoo! and left around the time Terry Semel came on board.

 

Actually I was going to use Google Maps as an example of a huge success, but then I decided not to because A) Yahoo! Maps came out before Google Maps did, and B) I wanted to compare one Google attempt at Social Networking with another. I think you can safely call it a success, considering it's still pretty much in Beta, and I'd be surprised if it isn't a huge success, but you're right, it's not...yet.

 

In my opinion, those other bits of Google remind me of Yahoo.

Fragmented bits without any real cohesion.

(And, ugh, company names with weird punctuation or other affectations make me grimace. I used to work for a firm whose company name was spelled in all lower case. Then I was recruited by another which spelled the company name in all caps!)

The thing with Yahoo is, I wonder if maybe the portal idea can rise again for mobile use, on smart phones. Seems like Yahoo still has some interesting bits and pieces, but Bartz wasn't the one to pull them together.

I think CEOs come in two flavors:
1. Those who turn around companies
2. Those who can lead them into the future.

Perhaps Bartz was lots of #1 and not enough of #2. Although Yahoo likely would have been assimilated into MS (resistance is futile) if Yang had accepted the offer, seeing where things have gone since then make me think that was a pivotal moment in Yahoo's history; an opportunity missed.