Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz was fired yesterday afternoon by Yahoo’s board. Apparently not wanting to deal with her in person, they did it by telephone. They did not think to have her company email privileges disabled first. It is a credit to Ms Bartz that her retaliation was relatively- relatively– low key. She immediately sent an email to the mailing list for all Yahoo staff worldwide, as follows after the jump:
To all,
I am very sad to tell you that I’ve just been fired over the phone by Yahoo’s Chairman of the Board. It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward.
Carol
Sent from my iPad
It’s the “sent from my iPad” which turns it from tragedy to comedy, isn’t it?
I think we can all sympathize with a person whose boss doesn’t even have the guts to call them in and do Donald Trump’s catchphrase in person, but let’s face it, Ms Bartz undoubtedly has a large golden parachute (and an iPad!) and doesn’t really need our sympathy.
Ms Bartz hasn’t exactly set the world on fire at Yahoo in her almost 3 years at the helm. Yahoo was approaching irrelevance then, and still is. It’s been years since they had their own search engine; Yahoo searches are actually done through Microsoft’s Bing. They still don’t seem to have any presence in the smartphone market. All they’ve got is the remains of their brilliant name recognition from the ’90s among the Olds and their one smart investment, China’s Alibaba group, and Bartz had nothing to do with either of these assets. Indeed, she has been criticized for a disintegrating relationship between Yahoo and Alibaba’s management. As such, it makes sense for Yahoo to look for someone with new ideas, but in firing the CEO of a $16 billion dollar corporation by telephone and leaving her the means to gazump the official announcement, Yahoo’s board showed off the well-known weaknesses in its management and forward-planning capabilities.
