New CEO Carol Bartz said she didn’t join Yahoo two weeks ago to sell the company.
Yahoo is the best information site on the Web, says Carol Bartz
But she wasn’t as firm about the company’s search business, which has had trouble competing with Google search.
Bartz offered these and several other early insight on Yahoo during a fourth-quarter conference call where the company announced a 1 percent revenue decline and a $303 million net loss.
Yahoo is the “best information site on the Internet,” she said, and that is where its focus should focus be. It’s top properties, incuding its home page, Yahoo Finance and Yahoo News, are keys to keeping people coming for content, she added.
But so are planned new products, which she declined to discuss. “Things will be rolling out as I start to understand them,” she said.
But Bartz insisted that unloading the company was not in the cards. “Did I come to Yahoo to sell the company?” she asked. “The answer is no.”
Minutes later she elaborated: “This is a fantastic Internet property. It really doesn’t deserve everybody trying to pick and pull it apart.”
But she was less steadfast about Yahoo Search. Search is a valuable part of Yahoo’s business because of what it says about user intentions, she said. And with quality improvements in the past year, its share has stabilized since the third quarter, she added.
The company needs to continue to improve search whether it goes up for sale or not, she said, but “I didn’t arrive here with preconceived notions about anything.”
Bartz said her biggest concern at Yahoo was that “this organization is very complex, therefore it’s hard for people to get speedy answers and make decision.”
It is a problem can be addressed, she added.
