Bartz couldn't deliver Yahoo turnaround

07.09.2011
As she approached her third anniversary as Yahoo's CEO, Carol Bartz couldn't overcome a recent string of missteps that apparently eroded the board's confidence in her and eclipsed her achievements as leader of the embattled Internet pioneer.

Bartz took over from co-founder Jerry Yang in January 2009 with guns blazing, straight talk that sometimes included profanity, and a history of executive success at Digital, Sun and Autodesk, where she served as CEO from 1992 to 2006.

Bartz got carte blanche and the benefit of the doubt from the board in her first two years at the helm, when she oversaw a significant corporate realignment intended to make the company more agile, a big technology upgrade to improve its advertising and publishing systems, and a streamlining of the company's products and services.

However, this year the directors seemed to become more skeptical about her abilities to deliver the much-awaited turnaround for Yahoo, which not only has continued on a financial funk, but also stumbled in various ways.

Bartz started off on the wrong foot in January this year when during the company's fourth-quarter earnings call, she disclosed that the search engine partnership with Microsoft wasn't yielding the expected revenue.

That wide-ranging, 10-year search partnership, which Bartz brokered with Steve Ballmer in mid-2009, continues to disappoint revenue-wise, and critics question whether it will yield the promised financial benefits for Yahoo and the improved competitive position for it and Microsoft against Google.