14 DAY TRIAL // It's certainly been a tumultuous year at Yahoo as the company is going through some pretty big changes that it hopes it will return it to its former status. Under the leadership of its new CEO, Carol Bartz, who is closing in on one year at the company, it started a massive cost-cutting campaign, one that meant job cuts and closed-down services. It also signed a search partnership deal with Microsoft, which will span over the next five to ten years. Yet it still has a lot of work ahead of it, which is why Bartz is only giving herself a B-minus for 2009.
"It was a little tougher internally than I think I had anticipated," Bartz told Bloomberg in an interview at the company's headquarters. "I did move fast, but this is a big job." When she took over Yahoo from cofounder Jerry Yang it was hoped that the straight-talking executive would put Yahoo back on track and start bringing in much healthier revenue numbers.
It's clear that she made her presence felt at the company and the signs of her overhaul are starting to show, but an increasing number of people are beginning to question whether actual results are coming. One of her first moves was to focus the company on several main directions centering on the homepage and content.
She certainly kept her promise and quite a few "non-essential" Yahoo services were shut down in 2009 including the famed Geocities. Bartz said the closures were necessary and weren't a sign that the company was giving up. "Last year people talked about, ‘Oh, Yahoo is trying to get smaller,'" she said. "We were never trying to get smaller. We were just trying to get more focused." Yahoo's staff also dropped by five percent in the previous year, another cost-cutting measure.
The biggest move though was the search deal with Microsoft in which Yahoo dropped in-house search efforts and its search engine would be powered by Bing. It's a long-term deal that will help Yahoo shed some more costs and hopefully bring in more revenue. When the deal was announced though, many were disappointed and believed that Yahoo could have gotten a better deal.