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Yahoo’s board of directors will attempt to take focus off their firing of CEO Carol Bartz by releasing a slew of new products over the coming months, a move meant to turn the company around while removing themselves from a PR nightmare that has elevated board and shareholder in-fighting to a whole new level.
According to Rich Riley, senior vice-president of Yahoo Europe, the Middle Eat and Africa the company is predicting “a very exciting few months for us on the product side.”
Riley says that the company’s “growth needs to be faster and we’ll embrace that change”
Riley also praised the work that Bartz had accomplished at the company, noting:
“We have a lot of respect for Carol and think she did a lot of great stuff for Yahoo but the board made it clear there must be change.”
How he manages to respect a CEO who managed to stifle innovation and lead the company down a path of ever declining stock prices is beyond me.
Blake Irving, the group’s chief product officer says Yahoo’s goal is now wrapped up in personalizing the site, increasingly targeting mobile devices and offering more far reaching social networking integration to create a larger sense of community and what we assume will be ultimately higher interaction times on various Yahoo based properties.
Irving says of the company’s new direction:
“There’s no time for us to go back and reconstitute what the strategy is. The board loves it, and wants to accelerate.”
So there you have it, Bartz is out and the company is pushing harder than ever to compete. Perhaps the fear of shareholders forcing out top executives after the Bartz firing will lead to a more “hurry up and innovate” approach at Yahoo, something they have never really managed to accomplish under her leadership, then again only time can tell.
