Honestly Yahoo’s CEO Carol Bartz needs to just keep her mouth shut, just take a look at some of these quotes from her recent interview with USAToday.
Q: Who’s your biggest single competitor?
A: Facebook — not today, but they could be. If they keep going, they will have the vault of information on everybody in the world, and that’s valuable.
Or to translate, let me not answer your actual question and give you a foreshadowing answer that means nothing.
On Yahoo’s advertising push:
Too much of the advertising (on the Internet) is static and feels old-fashioned. So we like to work with the advertisers to say, “Let’s kind of get in there and mix it up. Let’s get people jolted awake again.”
One of my favorites: Purina Puppy Chow has a little puppy walking across the top of the screen. I sit there like an idiot because it’s cute, and I happen to like puppies. It drags the bowl.
She is right there is not enough moving, blinking, loud Flash ads on the web – clearly we need more puppies.
When interviewer David Lieberman says that Yahoo makes him do to much work by him having to click a button that says “don’t show me this again” Bartz responds:
Oh, excuse me, please. You are getting a lot of value. This is not like a free lunch here. We just opened a data center in Buffalo, and in its first phase it has 50,000 servers. That is not cheap. So the very fact that you get all this great information is part of the deal.
Are you fucking serious?
Also this patently untrue statement:
If you want to run an ad on the iPad, it has to be approved by Apple
Or you can just have an ad in a webpage – but you know they don’t allow Flash so cute puppies are out.
Then I stopped reading this after I saw this gem:
Q: In January you gave yourself a B-minus for the first year. How about this year?
A: I’m off the grading thing. I’m just going to declare that we are pass-fail, and I pass.
How does she still have a job? Oh she passed, never mind.