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Well I’ve never been a fan of Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and she continues to stupify me with her ridiculous statements which she holds to so dearly.

As covered over at Search Engine Land Bartz was interviewed in the New York Times. She is stunningly moronic in some of her claims:

“Yahoo, according to Ms. Bartz, simply feeds search results for people who have grown curious while reading one of its news stories or watching a video. It doesn’t generally pop into peoples’ minds as the first place to go look for answers during the course of their day-to-day activities.”

How is that possibly the case? On so many levels I would argue the validity of this claim:

1. Yahoo was initially a search directory then a search engine then added portals.
2. If Yahoo doesn’t pop into mind as answering questions for users, then uh, what about Yahoo Answers? What’s the point of that then?
3. Bartz is singlehandedly dismantling Yahoo as a company with unique software technology and turning it into a portal and content company. Granted for many years they have had a content focus but Yahoo Search Marketing and Yahoo Search were always major components of their company.

“The biggest thing for Yahoo is increasing the number of pages people consume and slapping as many display ads as possible across those pages. “My fortunes are tied to my pages,” Ms. Bartz said.”

This is nonsenscial. I have an ad network. We are interested in content pages to serve advertising. Yahoo is a software technology company…er…it WAS a software technology company. How sad for Yahoo to have a such a short sighted myopic CEO.

“According to Ms. Bartz, the majority of Yahoo’s sites will go the way of Sports. In particular, Yahoo will throw investments behind its entertainment, finance and news operations. Ms. Bartz noted that there are plenty of unemployed journalists out there to pick up.”

Well Carol. Hey Carol. Umm Carol.…those journalists are unemployed because the notion of traditional journalism and simply serving up that content and selling ads is not the same as it used to be. They are unemployed because many companies in this space are unprofitable.

Excuse me while I go bang my head against a brick wall.

“In addition, Ms. Bartz will remember that Terry Semel, a longtime Warner Brothers executive, was brought in before to turn Yahoo into more of a media company. Mr. Semel’s tenure was perhaps characterized more for losing to Google than anything else.”

Clearly Carol doesn’t believe the notion that if we are not aware of our history we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. I think we can revise this though at this point, Yahoo isn’t in the “losing” position any longer. It has lost. Full Stop.

“Ms. Bartz has decided to correct past mistakes by getting all of the employees on the same page and presenting a more consistent look across Yahoo’s sites. In addition, she’s trying to boost morale and get the energy of the company up again –- a task hurt by the hit Yahoo’s shares took after the Microsoft deal was announced.

“I felt bad for the employees because they think it’s a report card,” Ms. Bartz said.”

Honestly, this woman is a CEO? Of any company? Your share price is a report card of sorts, it’s the market responding to the strategic decisions being made. Clearly this is perceived as being a bad decision. Which it is. It’s a horrible decision.

In fact it’s a series of horrible decisions, capped off by myopic thinking and topped off with a healthy dose of delusion.

Way to go Carol!

Update — Just ran into a fantastic quote from the New York Times Bits Blog:

I’ve got to wonder how much running a sales force that peddles expensive software to engineers and designers has to do with running a free Web site that attracts users through branding and products and makes money through advertising.

Post from: Dan Nedelko

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• Free voice mail transcription, which converts recordings into typed text. Users have the option to have these messages sent to themselves as emails or texts — enabling them to search through, sort, save, copy or even forward material from voice mails.
• Free conference calling.
• Cheap international calls, with rates competitive to online telephony leader Skype: $0.02 a minute to France or China, $0.03 to Chile or the Czech Republic, for example.
• Text message organization — texts are sent to whichever mobile phones you specify, including multiple ones at once. They are also collected into your Google Voice inbox, like email, and can be filed and kept — a first in mobile phone history, the NY Times observes. As is the case with Gchat on Gmail, back-and-forth texts will be kept as “conversations.”

Now that means that pretty much your entire digital communication stream can (and will) be captured by Google. It’s going to be in an index somewhere. I would be 100% certain that your Google Desktop Search will index these entries and Google will keep a cache.

I think I’ll stick with Skype. Is anyone else going to try this out? There is an inherent coolness factor but I’m not sure how much more information Google *cough* Big Brother needs about me. Check out http://voice.google.com

Post from: Dan Nedelko

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