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
Showing posts with label Sunnyvale. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sunnyvale. Show all posts
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Microsoft to hire Yahoo staff for the online search business
Microsoft Corp will hire at least 400 workers from Yahoo Inc if government regulators approve the companies' proposed Internet search partnership, and Yahoo will receive $150 million to cover any unexpected costs during the switch to new technology.
The details emerged in a regulatory filing that elaborated on an agreement announced last week. Sunnyvale-based Yahoo said then that an unspecified number of its 13,000 employees would be offered jobs at Microsoft after the Redmond, Washington-based software maker assumes control of the search results and search advertising on Yahoo's Web site.
The transition is supposed to begin early next year, assuming the alliance is approved by antitrust regulators in the United States and Europe.
Microsoft will pay $50 million annually during the first three years of the 10-year contract to supplement the revenue that Yahoo will receive from the ads appearing alongside its search results. The $150 million in guaranteed payments weren't mentioned last week.
The filing said Yahoo can use the $150 million to pay for unforeseen transition costs. Yahoo's stock has fallen by about 15 per cent since it unveiled the Microsoft deal, largely because announced terms didn't include a large upfront payment.
The disclosure probably won't ease the disappointment much, given analysts had anticipated Microsoft paying $1 billion to $2 billion for access to Yahoo's search engine.
Most of the revenue from the Microsoft deal will flow from ad commissions. Yahoo will receive 88 percent of the search ad revenue during the first five years of the contract. After that, Yahoo's commission will range from 83 percent to 93 percent, depending on whether it still handles some of the ad sales in the partnership.
The main reason Yahoo decided to turn over its search engine to Microsoft was to save money. If Yahoo wants to save even more on technology, it
has the option of adopting Microsoft's online mapping service replace of its own, according to the filing.
Yahoo Chief Executive Carol Bartz has already made it known she isn't impressed with Yahoo's online maps. As it is, transferring 400 workers to Microsoft would prune Yahoo's current payroll by about 3 per cent.
Yahoo will lay off some workers if the Microsoft deal goes through, Bartz said last week. Tuesday's filing didn't provide any layoff projections. Although it also has been jettisoning workers because of the recession, Microsoft finished its latest fiscal year end in June with 93,000 employees -- an increase of about 2,000 people from the previous year.
Microsoft is counting on the Yahoo partnership to help it reverse years of losses in its online operations and siphon some traffic -- and ad sales -- from Internet search leader Google Inc.
Yahoo's search engine is the second largest, making it the quickest way for Microsoft to gain ground on Google. Even so, Microsoft and Yahoo combined have less than 30 percent of the US search market compared to 65 percent for Google, according to comScore Inc.
To keep Yahoo happy, Microsoft will have to produce ad revenue per search that is within a certain percentage of Google's industry-leading rate. If Microsoft doesn't hit the target, Yahoo can abandon the partnership before the contract expires.
The filing didn't specify how close Microsoft has to come to Google's revenue per search. Microsoft estimates that Google gets 7 cents in ad revenue for every search, while Yahoo gets 4.3 cents and Microsoft gets 3.9 cents, according to a PowerPoint slide Microsoft mistakenly posted online.
Agencies
The details emerged in a regulatory filing that elaborated on an agreement announced last week. Sunnyvale-based Yahoo said then that an unspecified number of its 13,000 employees would be offered jobs at Microsoft after the Redmond, Washington-based software maker assumes control of the search results and search advertising on Yahoo's Web site.
The transition is supposed to begin early next year, assuming the alliance is approved by antitrust regulators in the United States and Europe.
Microsoft will pay $50 million annually during the first three years of the 10-year contract to supplement the revenue that Yahoo will receive from the ads appearing alongside its search results. The $150 million in guaranteed payments weren't mentioned last week.
The filing said Yahoo can use the $150 million to pay for unforeseen transition costs. Yahoo's stock has fallen by about 15 per cent since it unveiled the Microsoft deal, largely because announced terms didn't include a large upfront payment.
The disclosure probably won't ease the disappointment much, given analysts had anticipated Microsoft paying $1 billion to $2 billion for access to Yahoo's search engine.
Most of the revenue from the Microsoft deal will flow from ad commissions. Yahoo will receive 88 percent of the search ad revenue during the first five years of the contract. After that, Yahoo's commission will range from 83 percent to 93 percent, depending on whether it still handles some of the ad sales in the partnership.
The main reason Yahoo decided to turn over its search engine to Microsoft was to save money. If Yahoo wants to save even more on technology, it
has the option of adopting Microsoft's online mapping service replace of its own, according to the filing.
Yahoo Chief Executive Carol Bartz has already made it known she isn't impressed with Yahoo's online maps. As it is, transferring 400 workers to Microsoft would prune Yahoo's current payroll by about 3 per cent.
Yahoo will lay off some workers if the Microsoft deal goes through, Bartz said last week. Tuesday's filing didn't provide any layoff projections. Although it also has been jettisoning workers because of the recession, Microsoft finished its latest fiscal year end in June with 93,000 employees -- an increase of about 2,000 people from the previous year.
Microsoft is counting on the Yahoo partnership to help it reverse years of losses in its online operations and siphon some traffic -- and ad sales -- from Internet search leader Google Inc.
Yahoo's search engine is the second largest, making it the quickest way for Microsoft to gain ground on Google. Even so, Microsoft and Yahoo combined have less than 30 percent of the US search market compared to 65 percent for Google, according to comScore Inc.
To keep Yahoo happy, Microsoft will have to produce ad revenue per search that is within a certain percentage of Google's industry-leading rate. If Microsoft doesn't hit the target, Yahoo can abandon the partnership before the contract expires.
The filing didn't specify how close Microsoft has to come to Google's revenue per search. Microsoft estimates that Google gets 7 cents in ad revenue for every search, while Yahoo gets 4.3 cents and Microsoft gets 3.9 cents, according to a PowerPoint slide Microsoft mistakenly posted online.
Agencies
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Will Yahoo layoff hundreds of employees?
Yahoo Inc is gearing up for its third round of mass layoffs in 14 months, signaling the long-slumping Internet company is still struggling to snap out of its financial malaise under a new leadership team.
The cuts will likely affect several hundred employees, a person familiar with the plan said, confirming a report first published on The New York Times' Web site.
The person asked to remain anonymous because Yahoo isn't publicly discussing anything that might affect its stock price until the April 21 release of the Sunnyvale, California-based company's first-quarter earnings report.
Most analysts expect those results to be lackluster, extending a pattern of disappointing profits that began in 2006.
Yahoo hired technology veteran Carol Bartz as its chief executive in January to steer a turnaround. The blunt-talking Bartz has spent much of her tenure trying to understand Yahoo's strengths and weaknesses while promising to throw out the dead wood. She already has reorganized Yahoo's management team.
Bartz's predecessor, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, also tried to shake things up by laying off about 1,000 workers in February 2008 only to expand the payroll again in the next few months. Just before Bartz's hiring, Yahoo eliminated more than 1,500 jobs to enter 2009 with 13,600 workers.
When they made the last cuts, Yahoo executives warned more layoffs could be coming if the recession worsened — an unwelcome turn that occurred during the first three months of the year.
The deepening downturn has caused more advertisers to trim their spending, a trend that has hurt all companies like Yahoo that depend on advertising for most of their revenue. The retrenchment has been a bigger problem for more traditional media, particularly newspapers, but it's also forcing Internet companies to tighten their belts.
Even Internet search leader Google Inc, which generates three times more revenue than Yahoo, decided to lay off about 340 workers and curb other expenses during the first quarter to bolster its profits during the tough times.
Agencies
The cuts will likely affect several hundred employees, a person familiar with the plan said, confirming a report first published on The New York Times' Web site.
The person asked to remain anonymous because Yahoo isn't publicly discussing anything that might affect its stock price until the April 21 release of the Sunnyvale, California-based company's first-quarter earnings report.
Most analysts expect those results to be lackluster, extending a pattern of disappointing profits that began in 2006.
Yahoo hired technology veteran Carol Bartz as its chief executive in January to steer a turnaround. The blunt-talking Bartz has spent much of her tenure trying to understand Yahoo's strengths and weaknesses while promising to throw out the dead wood. She already has reorganized Yahoo's management team.
Bartz's predecessor, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, also tried to shake things up by laying off about 1,000 workers in February 2008 only to expand the payroll again in the next few months. Just before Bartz's hiring, Yahoo eliminated more than 1,500 jobs to enter 2009 with 13,600 workers.
When they made the last cuts, Yahoo executives warned more layoffs could be coming if the recession worsened — an unwelcome turn that occurred during the first three months of the year.
The deepening downturn has caused more advertisers to trim their spending, a trend that has hurt all companies like Yahoo that depend on advertising for most of their revenue. The retrenchment has been a bigger problem for more traditional media, particularly newspapers, but it's also forcing Internet companies to tighten their belts.
Even Internet search leader Google Inc, which generates three times more revenue than Yahoo, decided to lay off about 340 workers and curb other expenses during the first quarter to bolster its profits during the tough times.
Agencies
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