Ya-who? New Yahoo boss fails to impress Wall Street

 

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By Reuters

Posted on 14 Jan 2009 at 07:48

Yahoo has named Autodesk Chairman Carol Bartz as its new CEO, with Wall Street doubting whether she has the experience needed to turn around the internet company.

While Bartz is a Silicon Valley veteran with a reputation for being a tough but fair manager, shareholders of Yahoo had hoped for a chief executive with more deal-making credentials who could revive talks with Microsoft.

Other names that had been mentioned in the press as possible contenders include News Corp chief operating officer Peter Chernin and Arun Sarin, ex-CEO of Vodafone. Another former frontrunner, Yahoo's president Sue Decker, will now resign after a transitional period.

"I think the market may be a little bit disappointed that Yahoo's not going with someone who isn't a little bit more savvy when it comes to technology and media," says Todd Greenwald, an analyst at Signal Hill.

Shares of Yahoo fell 3.6% after news of Bartz's hire was reported, but the stock recovered to end the day down just 1% at $12.10, as analysts said the end of the two-month CEO search could help bring some stability to the company.

Jerry Yang, who co-founded Yahoo, agreed in November to step down as CEO, capping a tumultuous year in which he angered many shareholders by rejecting a $47.5 billion takeover bid from Microsoft only to see an alternative web search advertising partnership with Google fall apart under US antitrust scrutiny.

Yahoo has struggled to maintain its hold on the internet search advertising market against Google, and suffered a dizzying stock slide after rejecting Microsoft's bid.

Bartz background

Bartz, 60, was chairman, president and CEO of software company Autodesk for 14 years until she stepped down in April 2006. Under her tenure, Autodesk's revenues rose to more than $1.5 billion from less than $300 million, and its share price increased nearly ten-fold, Yahoo claims.

Autodesk says Bartz will remain executive chairman even after taking the Yahoo job. She has also held executive positions at Sun Microsystems and is on the boards of Cisco and Intel.

Bartz, on her first conference call as Yahoo's CEO, sharply rejected the idea that running an online media company would be a tough task given that her executive experience has mostly been in the software and technology fields.

"I didn't know CAD [computer-aided design] when I joined Autodesk, I didn't know hardware when I joined Sun," she said in response to an analyst's question. "I am a technology person, I am a market-driven person, I love customers. So I suspect I have a little brainpower to learn what it takes to understand media."

Bartz said she would "dive deep" into Yahoo in the next few weeks to learn more about its operations, and will look to Yang, the board and employees to "jump-start my education."

Gartner analyst Allen Weiner says Bartz is known as a leader who could build consensus among different factions. "That's certainly something that Yahoo needs right now. They need that adult leader to bring that order to the company," he claims. "She's not what you would call a dot-com or web insider, but maybe that's not what Yahoo needs right now.

Bill Coleman, CEO of software maker Cassatt, who has known Bartz since 1985, says she is "an extrovert who gets energy out of being involved, being where the action is."

"She has the unique ability to be able to look you in the eye and tell you exactly what you are doing wrong - how you messed up - and you leave feeling that she has done you a favour," says Coleman, who worked for Bartz at Sun Microsystems in the 1980s and recruited her to the board of BEA Systems when he was BEA's chief executive.