Yahoo Fires CEO by Phone
Company's shares jump 6 percent after Bartz's ouster.
| Posted Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2011, at 10:59 AM ET
Another Yahoo CEO has taken a fall for the Web giant’s inability to fend off younger rivals such as Google and Facebook.
Carol Bartz, 62, was fired Tuesday with more than a year left on her contract. She announced the move in a note to employees Tuesday afternoon, AllThingsD reported: “I am very sad to tell you that I’ve just been fired over the phone by Yahoo’s Chairman of the Board,” she wrote.
The move is another acknowledgement that the company has been playing a losing game of catch-up to Google. Bartz, the tough-talking former chief of the software firm Autodesk, was brought in two-and-a-half years ago to try to reverse Yahoo’s slide. But the Wall Street Journal reports that time spent on the site by U.S. Web surfers has plummeted 33 percent since Bartz took over, according to comScore, and its stock price has been stagnant. Its shares leapt 6 percent on the news of her exit.
The company’s CFO, Tim Morse, will step in as interim CEO while the board hunts for a replacement.
While the move was abrupt, it was not a complete shock to those who follow the company. CNET points out that rumors of Bartz’s demise had been flying for months, despite a public statement of support from company chairman Roy Bostock in June. In a statement Tuesday, Bostock referred to the “very challenging macro-economic backdrop” Bartz has faced but didn’t get specific about the reasons for her ouster.
AdAge noted that Google recently passed Yahoo as the leader in display advertising, and Facebook could overtake both of them by year’s end. Meanwhile, Yahoo under Bartz had struggled to implement a search deal with Microsoft and butted heads with its key Chinese partner, Alibaba.
A former homecoming queen from small-town Wisconsin, Bartz was the first female CEO of a major software company, the Guardian noted in a profile earlier this year for its “Top 100 Women” list. The U.K. paper linked to a YouTube video in which she told TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington to “fuck off.” Esquire was likewise charmed by her foul-mouthed manner.
Taking a step back from Bartz, a CBS News columnist blames Yahoo’s board for the company’s woes, arguing that it has hired the wrong people for top jobs and blew a chance at salvation when it turned down Microsoft’s $44.6 billion buyout bid in 2008. The Journal cites an anonymous source saying that the company would now be open to selling itself to the right bidder.
