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04 Jan 2012 20:05

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Biz: Yahoo tabs PayPal president Scott Thompson as new CEO

  • Yahoo picks the new boss: Scott Thompson, the president of eBay’s PayPal division, has been picked by Yahoo as its new CEO, replacing CFO Tim Morse who filled that role in an interim capacity. This marks the fourth CEO Yahoo has turned to in under five years; the company, once a giant in the world of search engines, has understandably suffered with the seemingly unstoppable ascendancy of Google over the past decade. Thompson faces a tall task — he’s being looked to, as chairman Roy Bostock said, “reignite innovation and drive growth” — this for a company that’s had a ton of trouble with both. source

22 Oct 2011 17:55

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Tech: Google may swoop in to save Yahoo — for antitrust reasons

  • what Google is reportedly in talks to help with an acquisition of Yahoo, which is kind of looking like a rudderless ship these days after Carol Bartz’s departure. They have tens of billions of dollars in the bank; they can do this pretty easily.
  • why If Google were to help — it’s not a sure thing — it would effectively allow them to prop up a competitor in the market, which would help them fend off antitrust claims. Think Microsoft swooping in to help Apple back in 1997. source

07 Sep 2011 10:51

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Biz, Tech: With CEO Carol Bartz fired, is Yahoo preparing to sell itself?

  • fired Last night, Carol Bartz got pushed out at Yahoo, a move that, while swift, wasn’t totally unsurprising — she didn’t exactly win a lot of fans for her handling of the company over the past two years. The stock price went up immediately after the announcement.
  • sold? Now, a Wall Street Journal article uses this phrase: “One of these [independent directors] said Yahoo is open to selling itself to the right bidder.” Yahoo famously dodged a sale to Microsoft in 2008, and since then, their value has declined significantly. Oops. source

13 Oct 2010 21:49

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Biz, Tech: Rumor mill: AOL interested in buying fellow giant also-ran Yahoo

  • Good freaking god, could you imagine? Yahoo and AOL together would be like Scott Baio and Tony Danza doing a sitcom together. It’d be diminishing returns all around. It’d be a sitcom on ABC Family instead of ABC, trying its best to win a smaller audience than either star once had, and the jokes will almost certainly feel old and worn by the time they make ’em. On the other hand, we really like AOL’s current editorial-leaning direction, but Yahoo has not done anything of note since around 2000. AOL would strip Yahoo of most of the extra crap and turn it into a big advertising company. How would this work? And why is AOL acquiring so much stuff right now? And would Tim Armstrong boot out Carol Bartz? We wanna know what Alec Baldwin thinks of all this. source

29 Apr 2010 09:38

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Tech: Them’s fighting words: Yahoo’s CEO rips Google really hard

  • Google is going to have a problem because Google is only known for search. It is only half our business; it’s 99.9% of their business. They’ve got to find other things to do.
  • Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz • Talking smack to the king of the hill today. Google does tons of other stuff, though! They have e-mail (just like Yahoo), a news site (just like Yahoo), a maps app (just like Yahoo), a photo site (just like Yahoo), a social networking site (just like Yahoo) and, unlike Yahoo, a hand in the mobile sphere. And, unlike Yahoo, they don’t have the rep of getting bogged down by all of the extracurricular activities, or (more importantly) of being a place where “startups go to die,” as TechCrunch recently put it. So, while Google is in need of other revenue streams, Yahoo may not be the right company to give them crap. source