Yahoo has announced Carol Bartz, 60, to succeed Jerry Yang as the CEO of Yahoo. Bartz is a respected tech veteran who served in Autodesk as the CEO from 1992-2006. Autodesk is a software company which grew from $300 million to $1.5 billion during her 14 years of service. Autodesk’s stock price during that tenure grew ten-folds. She also comes with past experience as an executive at other major tech companies such as Digital Equipment Corp, Sun Microsystems, and currently serves on the board of Cisco Systems and Intel Corp.

She comes in with the tremendous task of lifting Yahoo’s moral, renewing potential talks with Microsoft, potentially overseeing more layoffs to save costs, and lifting Yahoo’s stock which has fallen ever since Microsoft $4.7 billion acquisition bid broke down about 18 months ago

Chairman Roy Bostock said “[Bartz] is the exact combination of seasoned technology executive and savvy leader that the Board was looking for, and we are thrilled to have attracted such a world-class talent to Yahoo.”

Yahoo has also announced that President Sue Decker, who was also considered for the CEO position, would be leaving the company after serving for almost nine years in various management roles. Bartz was the only one to be offered the CEO position. She was perceived as part of the “Jerry Yang Regime”.

“There is no denying that Yahoo has faced enormous challenges over the last year, but I believe there is now an extraordinary opportunity to create value for our shareholders and new possibilities for our customers, partners and employees. We will seize that opportunity,” said Bartz in a statement.

The word on the street thus far is that Bartz was a solid pick considering her history in the technology industry and serving on the boards of highly respected companies such as Cisco and Intel. Some industry observes however are concerned that she lacks media industry experience.

Do you think this was a good pick?

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - SEM

Tags: Industry News, jerry yang, Microsoft, MSN, News, Search Engine Marketing, SEM, yahoo

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 5:11 pm and is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.