Yahoo’s new boss has a fairly simple default setting when it comes to competitors and critics — let’s “kick some butt”, as she once put it — so it was no surprise that the message on a recent visit to Singapore was pretty forceful.
In an interview with The Straits Times (a local newspaper publisher in Singapore), chief executive Carol Bartz says that she wants to keep things simple – keep doing what Yahoo is good at, expand globally and interact better with users and advertisers, no matter where the battle lines might be. Mission statements don’t come much starker than that but Bartz knows Yahoo has a mountain to climb after some dire years of failed deals with Microsoft and Google and a plunging stock price.
Clearing up misconceptions about Yahoo is top of the agenda, she says, adding that she was happily surprised to find out that many people around the world still hold Yahoo, which has over 500 million users, in high regard.
The problem for the company has been criticism from media and analysts for not getting key deals done. Bartz, in her famous straight-talking manner, said in her first analysts’ conference a few days after taking over in January this year that she wanted to ensure Yahoo got breathing room so it could “kick some butt’.
Bartz, who initially rejected several overtures for the position, has responded by aggressively cutting costs in her first 11 months, breaking down organisational barriers and reaching out to Yahoo’s 13,500 employees. The search engine giant operates in 40 countries in 25 different languages but Bartz says that the company simply hadn’t thought globally enough.
“I got here and thought why was only 25 per cent of our revenue global? It should be half. So we have much more of a global push and a real renewed focus on making sure our customers have great experiences on our sites and our advertisers have great relationships with us.”
Activist investor Carl Icahn, who joined the board last year in protest at the failed deal with Microsoft, resigned as a director recently, saying in a letter that he wished Bartz could be cloned “because so many of the companies in the country could use a Carol Bartz as CEO”.
On the other hand, critics have labelled her aggressive tactics as an unnecessary ego trip yet to yield results. And the elephant in the room still remains — how will Yahoo compete with Google?
Google rules the Internet with over 700 million visitors a month and supremacy in online advertising and search.
While Bartz has admitted that Google is a “fierce competitor”, she is defiant, insisting that competing with it is not the be all and end all of Yahoo’s existence. “I’m not taking on Google, we are in a totally different business,” she says. “Only half our business is search. Our customers come to us to get informed.”
Search is only 3 per cent of Internet use, she says. The rest is spent “being informed and engaging socially”.
And she believes there is more than enough room in the Internet universe for Google and Yahoo: “Brands aren’t defined by key words, they also do emotional branding and traffic branding. So just like there’s not just one magazine in the world, or one newspaper, or one TV network, there’re all kinds of places where advertisers spend their money.”
But like any other business, market share is important, and ultimately Yahoo wants to be “the centre of people’s lives online”. So the good news for users is that it means understanding more of what they want.
“They are looking for more opinions, they want to know gradings, they always want to know gossip and entertainment, as well as hard news, and financial information,” she says.
“If you have that one-stop feeling, you wake up one morning, your home on the Internet is Yahoo. And that’s what we continue to focus on.”
Article extracted from The Straits Times, November 25, 2009.
Read the full article at The Malaysian Insider