Webware

Yahoo continues to pull out all the stops in hopes of convincing investors and advertisers that even though it's a massive media and technology company today, it has a plan for the future.

"Today is the beginning of a journey back to respect," said Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz in a meeting with financial analysts at Yahoo's headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. "Yahoo was the big shining star in the mid-1990s and mid-2000s, and then somehow we weren't so shiny anymore."

The all-day meeting, which is being Webcast, is designed to reconnect Yahoo with the financial community, something Bartz hinted earlier this year was long overdue in comments she made in New York. Ever since former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang turned down a $33 per share offer from Microsoft in 2008, Yahoo's stock has languished at about half that value, and with the economy taking a turn for the worse, even a tepid recovery has been seen as welcome news.

Bartz brought a team of Yahoo leaders up on stage to show off ... Read more

Carol Bartz will bring Yahoo back to the CES keynote stage this January, the Consumer Electronics Association announced Tuesday.

Yahoo has given CES keynotes in the past but skipped last year, presenting instead a press conference on its Yahoo Connected TV project. Bartz will speak on Thursday January 7, 2010 in Las Vegas, when she might have a different set of businesses to present to the crowd.

CES has been morphing into a hybrid show for years, traditionally a consumer electronics showcase but increasingly bringing in the likes of Yahoo, Ford, and entertainment companies. Yahoo stuck to the consumer electronics script in its last couple of keynotes, including one gaffe-prone affair in 2006 where Tom Cruise rescued then-CEO Terry Semel.

But the leader of Yahoo's Connected TV group announced plans to leave this week, prompting speculation that Bartz is thinking about adding that group to the list of properties she'd like to shed. Instead, Yahoo may be planning to use its CES slot as a promotional vehicle for its media properties, which are ... Read more

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz is already tired of cynicism about the company, but understands that the business world still looks at Yahoo with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Yahoo introduced a new $100 million global ad campaign Tuesday in New York at the IAB's MIXX conference, centered on the marketing-friendly ideas of personalization and empowerment. Expect to see a blitz of Yahoo ads starting Monday emphasizing that "It's You" when it comes to finding what you want on the Internet, and especially at Yahoo.

Most of Chief Marketing Officer Elisa Steele's presentation, before those in town for Advertising Week and streamed live online, was constructed to emphasize that Yahoo cares about its users, with the reasonable presumption that advertisers will care about a company that can attract hundreds of millions of those users. Yahoo is already an Internet monster: the second largest property on the Web behind Google with 581 million visitors a month and 70 percent of the U.S. Internet population stopping by on a regular basis.

But Yahoo's ... Read more

Yahoo's long nightmare is over, having finally offloaded its search business to Microsoft after years of rumors, negotiations and reversals. Now all it has to do is figure out what comes next.

A new era at Yahoo began the minute CEO Carol Bartz signed the paperwork turning over the right to conduct searches on Yahoo's huge network of Web sites to Microsoft in exchange for 88 percent of the revenue generated by Microsoft's Bing. Now Yahoo is first and foremost a media company, in the business of attracting as many people to its properties as possible in hopes of selling lucrative ad deals on those pages.

This strategy has not always worked on the Internet. Search advertising has been far and away the most effective way for advertisers to reach their audiences, and they have responded by pouring money into the coffers of the company that has best combined relevant search results and efficient advertising: Google.

But Bartz seems to have decided that Yahoo doesn't have the ability or the will ... Read more

Yahoo's first annual shareholder meeting with Carol Bartz as CEO was largely uneventful, as she promised to turn Yahoo around by focusing on content and organization.

The actual business of the meeting was brief: all 12 nominees up for reelection to the board of directors were approved, three company-sponsored proposals were approved, and a shareholder "say on pay" proposal was rejected. Bartz spent most of the meeting talking about the work she has been doing to get Yahoo back on track, emphasizing that Yahoo has a strategy; it just needs to "execute"--business-speak for "not screw up all the time."

"We try to make sure we have 'wow' experiences for anybody who comes to a Yahoo site," Bartz said. She reminded shareholders several times that Yahoo is as much a content company as a search company, calling Yahoo "the largest online media company." This, of course, deflects comparisons to Google, who's stock has dramatically outperformed Yahoo's over the last several years.

Shareholders asked few pointed questions during their turn at the microphone. ... Read more

Earlier this week, as she prepared for her first shareholder meeting as CEO of Yahoo, Carol Bartz told a story about her favorite question she ever received at a shareholder meeting while at Autodesk: "Why, young lady, are you qualified to keep your job?"

Yahoo's Carol Bartz will face shareholders Thursday for the first time since she became CEO in January.

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET News)

Bartz is unlikely to face such a question Thursday, just six months after assuming the top role at Yahoo following one of the most tumultuous years in the company's history. Bartz has shaken up Yahoo in her short time on the job; bringing in her own people with a cost-cutting mandate, putting the fear of God into the engineering team, and charming the business press with interview performances that call to mind what might have been the result if Lucille Ball and George Carlin had raised a techie daughter.

But shareholders will arrive at the Santa Clara Marriott with a key fact in mind: despite the ... Read more