Bartz

The CEO of the Yahoo! has been shown the door, but unlike many recently-unemployed workers who get the bad news during an exit interview, Carol Bartz learned she was out in a humiliating phone call from the board of directors.

That left Bartz telling employees she’d been fired in an internal memo sent from her iPad.

Investors were happy to see the back of Bartz, sending Yahoo! shares higher on the news.  Bartz faced a growing number of critics in the past few years, almost immediately after arriving as CEO in early 2009.  Much like Yahoo! itself, her critics accused her of being out of touch with Internet culture and the realities of today’s high-tech businesses.

Bartz was no friend of coordinating expanded and improved broadband projects through the government.  She opposed the National Broadband Plan and Net Neutrality policies, dismissing both as government interference.  That put her in direct opposition to Google, which has spent millions in the public policy arena to influence expanded broadband in the United States.

Despite the lackluster results Yahoo! managed under her leadership, Bartz remained well-compensated, earning $60 million over the past two years.

Yahoo! has remained a challenged endeavor as a first generation Internet superstar long-faded after the dot.com crash in 2000.  Various efforts to relaunch Yahoo!’s flagging advertising revenue business, long dominated by Google, have not been very successful.  Yahoo!’s biggest problem has been its lack of innovation, creating new reasons for web visitors to return to a company that used to be a household name.

Now some believe the only hope Yahoo! has left is to sell itself to someone else.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CNBC Broadband Regulation 3-2-10 .flv[/flv]

Free Press’ policy director Ben Scott held his own, despite being hopelessly outnumbered, in a business-friendly CNBC ‘Power Lunch’ debate over broadband public policy held in March 2010.  Scott faced Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz, Larry Clinton from the “Internet Security Alliance,” which receives substantial support — not disclosed by CNBC — from AT&T and Verizon, and CNBC’s clueless Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, who insisted 99 percent of America already subscribes to broadband.  All of the industry talking points were on hand, which isn’t too surprising when they come from industry front groups like the ‘ISA.’ (3/3/2010 — 5 minutes)