Yahoo Fired Its CEO

yahoo_logo.jpgYahoo is reported to fire its CEO Carol Bartz by phone. If some of you remember, she was hired with great fanfare, and the move was targeted at saving the search giant from obscurity. Nevertheless, she didn’t do a lot, except making a deal with Microsoft.



Yahoo has recently released a statement, saying that Bartz had been “removed” from her position. The post will be taken by Timothy Morse, chief financial officer, for now. Yahoo will then be looking for someone else.

According to media reports, Carol Bartz sent a goodbye letter to employees from her tablet, saying that she was very sad to tell everyone she had been fired over the phone by the company’s chairman of the board. Carol expressed her pleasure to work at the company and wished everyone the best.

Meanwhile, Yahoo has consistently lost ground on advertising within the past years. For example, even Facebook seems to overtake Yahoo in 2011 and collect the biggest slice of Internet display advertising dollars in the United States.

Carol Bartz was hired by Yahoo 2 years ago to replace its co-founder Jerry Yang, who also failed to turn the search engine around. When she joined the company, Yahoo’s shares were trading for around $12. However, when Wall Street heard of her exit, the shares jumped more than 6% in after-hours trade to $13.72. Later Wall Street lost interest in Carol Bartz, because she didn’t do that much. Moreover, she mishandled the Yahoo’s strained relationship with Chinese Alibaba Group, which had handed Alipay to the search engine. Alipay was controlled by Alibaba founder Jack Ma, most likely without the search giant’s knowledge. Meanwhile, Alibaba was claiming that the company was fully aware of the transaction.

Just in the beginning of this past summer, Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock for some reason gave his public support to Carol Bartz at Yahoo’s annual general meeting. This seems strange when compared with the decision to fire her by phone just three months later.

One of the interesting facts of Carol Bartz’s career is that she once went as far as to tell Michael Arrington, the owner of the Techcrunch service to “f*** off” during an interview at some industry event. By a coincidence, Michael Arrington quit his company at the same time that Bartz was fired. In other words, it seems that they were both “f***ed off” at the same time. Yahoo's senior executive, who later worked for AMD, claimed that the company’s building in Satan Clara has bad feng shui. It seems that Carol Bartz will now agree with him.

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