Yahoo fires CEO Bartz

Bartz: In line of fire San Francisco, Sept. 7: Carol A. Bartz, Yahoo’s chief executive, was fired on Tuesday, ending a rocky two-year tenure in which she tried to revitalise the online media company. She went out with the same outspoken style she used while running the company. In an email she sent to employees from her iPad, titled “Goodbye,” Bartz wrote: “I am very sad to tell you that I’ve just been fired over the phone by Yahoo’s chairman of the board.” Bartz was informed of the board’s decision while she was travelling to New York from Maine, according to a person familiar with the board’s action. She also wrote, “It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward.” Bartz has been under pressure from her first day in the job to turn the company around, and in recent months the pressure from major investors intensified. The company remains adrift despite management shuffles, layoffs and the shedding of underperforming services. She engineered a deal that turned over its search operations to Microsoft, but that has also failed to live up to expectations. Timothy Morse, the company’s chief financial officer, will serve as the interim chief executive. Yahoo also said it had started a strategic review of the company’s options, including possible divestment of its Asian holdings. It cautioned that no decisions had yet been made. The company also said its directors named five other senior Yahoo executives to an executive leadership council that was intended to help Morse. “Yahoo hasn’t asserted what it wants to be — whether it wants to be a media or technology company — and Carol, rightly or wrongly, is being blamed for a bad search deal and a less than stellar performance,” said Jordan Rohan, an analyst with Stifel Nicolaus. Investors have long tried to pressure Yahoo to sell itself or at least sell major pieces of the company. Yahoo rejected a $33 a share buyout offer from Microsoft in 2008. Yahoo’s shares were essentially flat during Bartz’s two-year tenure, closing at $12.91 in regular trading on Tuesday. In after-hours, following the news of her departure, Yahoo’s shares gained 6.3 per cent to $13.72.