Carol Bartz, Yahoo’s new chief executive, says she has instituted a “wall of shame” for products that are not making the grade.
Ms Bartz was displaying her usual frankness, in an interview at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco. She said she was looking at whether to fix or sell those parts of Yahoo with which the company was not happy and had been placed on her wall.
She did not name any division or product but she is clearly not a fan of Yahoo Maps.
“I use Google Maps,” she said.
Blake Jorgensen, the outgoing chief financial officer, added that mapping was a very expensive business to be in and Yahoo did not intend to go into deeper development of the product.
In terms of sales and acquisitions, Ms Bartz said any negotiations with Microsoft over the sale of Yahoo’s search business would be conducted in private and she had no comment.
Search data was extremely important to Yahoo, she added. “We would never de-bone the company.”
However, with its strong cash flow, she said Yahoo was in a good position to pick up “distressed properties.”
Seven weeks into her new job, the CEO said she had been “pleasantly surprised” each week about something she had found out about the company.
She said Yahoo owed consumers a “non-frustrating experience” and did not need to abandon products like it had, leaving them “floating like debris in space.”
Clearly, Ms Bartz plans to bring more focus to Yahoo’s sprawling product offering, either by improving it or getting rid of underperforming units.
Mr Jorgensen said: “We were so beaten up last year with the Microsoft activity, there was a lack of clear decision making.”
“Carol has made decisions and that boosts morale.”
