New Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz: Totally Clueless, Heading for Failure

2009-05-28T01:31:00.000-07:00

Carol Bartz, new CEO of Yahoo!, recently answered a slew of questions during a conference call, summarized here.

What is Yahoo? That’s easy says Bartz. We’re the place that everyone comes to every day.
Everyone except every single person I know.

"And they spend alot of time on us. They can start on Facebook, but it doesn’t give them what they really want — news, entertainment, etc."
That may be true for the folks that just cancelled their AOL service last year. But for saavy Internet users (a group that's expanding exponentially) Yahoo! is a non-factor. I don't know a single person who ever visits Yahoo! If they want news they read the New York Times. If they want entertainment they visit YouTube or Hulu. For search they use Google. For socializing, Facebook. For topical information, Wikipedia. Only if you have a severe brain injury that limits you to remembering just one single Internet address would Yahoo! actually be useful.

"Yahoo offers an integrated experience."
Corporate nonspeak here. Read "integrated experience" as "doing lots of things poorly".

This whole business that there’s no longer innovation at Yahoo is craziness, says Bartz.
I've used both Google's PPC search advertising service, AdWords, and Yahoo's PPC service since 2003 (back then Yahoo's current service was independent and called Overture). I can honestly say that Google's system gets better every year and Yahoo's only gets worse. And I'm not talking about search volume (where Google is obviously on top). I'm talking about the interface and functionality of the system itself. Yahoo's is slow and clumsy, which is a fatal flaw for someone trying to manage 500 keywords. Google, on the other hand, continually refines AdWords to make it easier, faster, and more efficient.

Only one of Yahoo!'s offerings is a market leader, and that is Yahoo! finance. In every other area where they compete, Yahoo's offerings are a joke when compared with Google.

Yahoo must drive great integrated experiences for people.
What does that even mean? Google is on top for three reasons: (1) they place huge emphasis on getting the best people, and by "best" I mean not just the most "qualified" but the smartest, most curious, and most creative. (2) They encourage bottom-up innovation from their employees [just look at Google Labs]. (3) When they commit to a project, they take a true engineer's perspective and produce a service or product that's hands-down better than all others. Search? Best. Search advertising? Best. Analytics? A free offering that's better than similar products costing $1000s per year. GMail? Best. Maps? Best. The list goes on and on and on. In other words, the folks at Google focus on creating really cool stuff, not on corporate babble like "driving great integrated experiences for people".

"But they don’t have the positioning and reach that we have."
She's right... Google has far superior positioning and 10x the reach.

"We’re very interested in social," says Bartz. And video as well. "The whole video area is so exciting."
Who isn't interested in "social" or the "video area"? Again, what does that mean? Yahoo! will drop a few hundred million dollars on chasing these segments by developing knock-off services and making ill-advised acquisitions... In the meantime the folks at Google will be busy creating more new stuff that's really, really cool.

We are a place people come to be informed. Google is a place people go to to search.
Maybe 10 years ago, before Google's algorithm, when search results were a joke. Now, when people want to be informed, they go to Google. Does she really think that search is only for finding places to look at porn or buy new speakers? When people search, they are searching for... information.

She simply does not get it. Prediction: failure.

death.by.savagery

New Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz: Totally Clueless, Heading for Failure