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Edited on Wed Sep-07-11 05:14 PM by cascadiance
Could tell you some stories too, though I won't. Got caught in one of their many downsizings a couple of years ago. Needless to say I think both I and they haven't really recovered from those days... I also used to work with Bartz and ran into her on quite a few occasions at a previous job where she worked too.
I think her biggest mistake was her "deal" with Microsoft. I think it reflected that she really didn't understand the business that Yahoo was in. Even though they were the ones that were making the play for Yahoo at the time purely for financial and power reasons, to me a merger like that didn't make a lot of sense unless they just wanted to cannibalize Yahoo and destroy any competition they would have with Bing.
I had heard that the big reason that Microsoft entered in to the idea of buying out Yahoo was that they had heard rumors of Yahoo talking to Amazon earlier about a potential merger, and wanted to prevent that from happening by looking to buy Yahoo themselves. You stop and think about it, an Amazon merger made a lot of sense, and perhaps now they should look at it again, though it might be less of value than it used to be before Microsoft entered the picture.
An Amazon merger made a lot of practical sense because:
1) Amazon perhaps had the biggest database of consumer buying habits of any online entity at the time.
2) Yahoo was and still is one of the leaders of having a data store of online user's surfing history/habits.
3) Advertisers would KILL and pay top dollar to be able to buy ads on a database that would combine those two sets of information.
4) Amazon technologically, being more of a UNIX and open source company was a lot more technologically compatible with a similar company in Yahoo than Microsoft was, which had totally different technology as the basis of all of its parts. It would be a lot easier to merge the different parts of Amazon with Yahoo than Microsoft with Yahoo.
5) Amazon wasn't trying to create a search engine or mail service business like Microsoft was, and therefore there was less overlap and a lot more that Amazon and Yahoo would gain in terms of using each other's business.
Now, mind you, I'm not ethically advocating all of the above. I still have a problem with issues like online privacy for net surfers and consumers, and I would like to think that such a merger wouldn't create an uncontrolled monster that might mess such things up. But from a business standpoint, it made a lot more sense
And what did Bartz do? Not only did she not merge with Microsoft, but she in effect gave away the technology that Yahoo used to build itself from its start, which was its search engine technology. Now, that part of Yahoo's business might not have been keeping up the way it should have with Google, etc., but to just throw it away to use another even more unproven technology based on non-open source building blocks like Bing in my book was both bad business and bad PR... It sent a message to all of Yahoo's senior technical employees that no one was safe and there wasn't any real "valuable" core technology that the company valued and wanted to make sure kept the company valuable. In effect, she was making it so that only Yahoo's "bigness" was its value, as if that was going to by itself attract ad dolllars and be what is needed in this economy. I think not only was it not really very competitive, ultimately, if we get a decent Democratic administration in place and start breaking up many of these "too big to fail" companies that Yahoo has long been sliding in to, it is companies like Yahoo that will suffer the most. Companies like Google, if you wer to break them up in to smaller pieces, would still have entities that are valuable by themselves like Google Earth, Youtube, etc. Yahoo's entities, with the possible exception of mail now, aren't really all that valuable when they are broken up now.
If Yahoo still owned their own search engine technology, I'd suggest they might get talks going again with Amazon. But I'm sure that Amazon now doesn't want to touch that mess with a ten foot pole if it means that Microsoft will also have a foothold in its business too as a part of a future deal.
It's kind of sad. At one time when Yahoo first started up as the first big search engine, it was more like Google is today (with a very simple search page as its home page, etc.). I think it isn't going to be around too much longer now.
Had Bartz went back to talking to Amazon as Yahoo's CEO, instead of doing the search engine deal she did with Microsoft, I think Yahoo might have a totally different story today.
It's also worth mentioning that Yahoo's former CEO, Terry Semel, who left before Bartz was brought on, had some controversies himself as far as Yahoo's operations in China were concerned. It was on his watch that the government of China was able to take Yahoo's net surfing data and find and arrest certain dissidents, which upset many in congress at the time to the point I believe some legislation was introduced that would make executives like him personally and criminally responsible if a company that is U.S. based gives away information like that to foreign governments like China. Can't remember the details now, but I remember at the time you could really tell that it affected him, and I think he felt personally threatened by it, as he made a point of talking at length in Yahoo's internal all hands meeting then about their problems in China even before it was widely talked about in the news (but after this legislation had been initiated. I wouldn't be surprised if that event wasn't a big factor in his leaving the company earlier.
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