Yahoo! Fires CEO Carol Bartz

I guess you could say it was bound to happen and for the better. Carol Bartz, the CEO of Yahoo! announced after market close that she has been fired.

Bartz, known for her tough demeanor and management style, was let go after being onboard for a little over two years. The former CEO of computer aided software developer AutoDesk, sent an email out to Yahoo employees from her Apple iPad:

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

Sent from my iPad

Nice Apple advertising Carol.

Her replacement is current CFO Tim Morse and he will serve only as an interim replacement.

During Bartz's tenure, she came in as the axe to rid of non-performing products and services as well as remove the layers of middle management deep in the company to cut costs. However, it wasn't good enough for the board nor its shareholders. When Bartz took over on January 2009 to replace founder Jerry Yang, Yahoo!'s stock was trading around $12/share. Today, it closed at $12.91 essentially going nowhere while many hi tech companies' in Silicon Valley stocks have soared since the 2007 Financial Crisis. Yahoo's competitors, Google and Baidu have seen a significant increase in shareholder value.

After the announcement, Yahoo! shot up after hours to trade at $13.72. I guess that's one way to add shareholder value.

But really, just what is Yahoo! these days? To me, Yahoo! still remains one of the world's top most visited sites and a leader in aggregated content. However, without a social networking property and having given in to providing its own search (they use Microsoft Bing), Yahoo!'s crown jewel continues to be and will always be the company with a cool website name that has free email.

But its fair to say that Carol Bartz wasn't the right person for the job. It just never seemed like it was the right fit. Sure, Carol would be great to run a mid size Fortune 1000 company. But Yahoo!? No, but I was pulling for her when she first came in. Yahoo! in retrospect should have found an Internet marketing veteran to lead their company. Steve Case, the former CEO of AOL comes to mind. Richard Rosenblatt of Demand Media. Heck, maybe even John Battelle of Federated Media. For what Yahoo! needs is someone who is an industry insider and who understands this beastly thing called the Internet.

Yahoo! needs to stop being a stodgy old company and go back to its roots as an innovative company capable of taking risks to drive new ideas before the rest of the Internet turns it into something obsolete.

About Kerry Kobashi

Kerry is the founder of KerryOnWorld. He lives in Silicon Valley and has worked as an engineer and project manager. He owns Kobashi Computing a consulting company.