14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo's first shareholder meeting with new CEO Carol Bartz at the helm went by without too much commotion. The actual order of business went smoothly and Bartz spent most of the time emphasizing on the changes she had been making and the fact that the company did have a strong plan going forward.
A big part of her speech was trying to convince people to stop comparing the company with rivals Google and Microsoft. "We are not just a search company," Bartz said while calling Yahoo "the largest online media company. [...] Google is basically a pure search company... They don't have the same kind of sales structure."
"This direct map comparison with Google is not fair for Yahoo and frankly not relevant," she commented on comparisons between Google's business model and Yahoo's. Of course, she would say that considering a profit of just above $100 million on $1.16 billion in revenue compared with Google's $1.88 billion on a revenue of $4.07 billion.
Any questions about Microsoft and any future deals between the two giants were quickly silenced, with Bartz pinpointing that, "If we ever have a deal with Microsoft, it will be announced publicly, and until then there's nothing to say."
She also stressed the point that Yahoo was more of a "home on the Internet" than a search page, and that was the strategy it was pursuing. There weren't many details of the upcoming homepage redesign, though she did mention the site might introduce a "fluff-o-meter" to allow users to get more customized stories on their homepage, moving away from the celebrity gossip news that took up most of the headlines on the page at that very moment.