Why Yahoo! want to chip in for unique ID cards project?

I was raised as a pretty poor farm girl in Wisconsin and always thought of upgrading myself. So I over-achieved! I was lucky...” A characteristically short bio from Carol Ann Bartz, the feisty chief executive of the $7.2 billion internet company Yahoo! and editor of ET’s Emerging Business and IT page today. But there's more to the lady than her reputedly colourful language and distinct management style that has roused the veteran internet company from its supposed stupor.

She battled cancer to take her previous company Autodesk from a mere vertical applications company into a diversified yet focussed $1.4 billion software giant. When she stepped into the top job at Yahoo! this January she had knee surgery. "So, I've decided that I won't start another new job — that knee replacement hurt much more than cancer!” she laughs, but the gritty spirit shows.

Considering she took her time to agree to Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang's repeated pleas to come out of retirement, it was obviously more than glasses of her favourite cheap white wine that made her say yes. The tedium of her golf handicap improving only from 40 to 28 and days filled with gardening, photography and reading were only partly responsible. It was obviously the Autodesk-like challenge of clearing up and focusing while steering the Sunnyvale, California-based company out of a financial slump.

And the first big decision she took reflected it: a decade-long alliance with Microsoft in the search space. “Yahoo currently has a market share of about 20%; Microsoft has about 8% in search. Combined, we will have over 28%,” says Bartz. “But the two will exist as separate brands, maintain their identities. Yet, users will have more data to go after when they search — it’ll make a Yahoo! search deeper and better, and we expect regulatory approvals on the alliance by Q1, 2010.”

An India fan who has been to this country five times before, on her first visit as Yahoo! CEO she is predictably clear about her plans here too. And it has nothing to do with her interest in Mughal history and elephants... She wants in on the government’s Unique Identity Project, and more. She met the PM about it and her friend Nandan Nilekani, stressing Yahoo’s strength. “It involves a huge database and we at Yahoo! have expertise in handling huge amounts of data,” she reveals.

Education and training, what internet can do and how mobile phones can transform the internet experience, are obviously also target areas - and since India is Yahoo's biggest R&D centre after Sunnyvale, more than a supporting role is on the cards. "Entire products are already developed here, not parts of products. Our cloud computing initiative, video search ability and the total search monetization project are being done by Yahoo! in India," she emphasises, seeing Yahoo developing even more tools out of the India centre.

But the main trend this "over-achieving" tech pioneer (she got her computer science degree in 1971) sees is the web getting more collaborative and yet personalised. "It's not just about gathering information but also sharing, and about getting each others opinion," she says as she decides on 'collaborative internet' as the theme for her EBIT page today.

Economic Times