Yahoo's Do-Nothings Set to Bleed Purple
It's the reorg to end all reorgs! Under widely loathed former management, Yahoo became famous for its dumb corporate reshufflings. New CEO Carol Bartz, a lovably profane taskmistress, is aiming to undo their mess.
Under former president Sue Decker — whom Bartz swiftly swept out of the company — a swift-moving Silicon Valley startup turned into a glacial global bureaucracy, stacked with a faceless army of disposable vice presidents. Bartz, the new CEO whose blunt speech is laced with four-letter words, is set to flush out the leftovers of Yahoo's lackadaisical leadership. And good riddance!
The cloddishness of the old management team was what made Yahoo's stumbles such a good tale. Back when we were in the business of chronicling every coming and going through Sunnyvale's revolving door, my then-writer Paul Boutin ridiculed my reporting as a running tally of "Yahoo vice presidents you've never heard of, but now they're fired."
Funny because it was true! For example: AllThingsD's Kara Swisher hears that wireless exec Marco Boerries could be on his way out, and has been spending a lot of time on "family issues." We'll translate that from Swisher's overly polite prose: He's going through a messy divorce, and has been talking to people at both Google and Facebook, though neither company seems interested in offering the brash mobile entrepreneur a job. Boerries ran mobile as a fiefdom, separate from the rest of the company, and as a result, Yahoo has proven irrelevant in a mobile market that Apple and Google have run away with.
If you hadn't heard of Boerries before you learned his job was at risk, don't worry — Yahoo has dozens more like him. And they will soon be on the job market — with "getting fired by Carol Bartz" as their most notable accomplishment.