Yahoo! CEO: I Would Have Sold to Microsoft

By Jane McEntegart
published

Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz says she would have sold the company Microsoft.

Since she was appointed CEO, Carol Bartz has made a lot of changes at Yahoo! and the outspoken chief executive has never been afraid of speaking her mind about how the company was run before she arrived.

A couple of weeks back Bartz surprised people by declaring Yahoo! was never a search company. Claiming "her fortune was in her pages" the Yahoo! CEO said she was more than happy with 20 percent of the search market. Yesterday Bartz said in an interview that had she been in charge when Microsoft was trying to buy Yahoo!, she would have said yes.

"Well, sure. You think I'm stupid?" she asked CNBC. "I mean, let me see... $15, $34, yeah, I think so."

Former CEO Jerry Yang rejected Microsoft's offer that amounted to nearly $45 billion, claiming the offer "substantially undervalued" the company.

When asked what's next for Yahoo! Bartz resorted back to her "search isn't what we're after" mantra. "I don't wake up in the morning and say 'Gosh, what am I going to search?' That's not what I do. I wake up and say, 'What's happening?' And that's really what Yahoo is. We really want to be the center of peoples' online lives."

Check out the full story here.

Jane McEntegart
30 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Montezuma
    Yahoo is just mad that they are nowhere near as successful as Google.
    Reply
  • jerther
    she would have sold the company Microsoft.
    I would too :P
    Reply
  • doomtomb
    Yahoo is old news. Microsoft probably made the right move bringing something fresh that has the chance of success like Bing rather than teach an old dog like Yahoo, new tricks.
    Reply
  • jellico
    doomtombYahoo is old news. Microsoft probably made the right move bringing something fresh that has the chance of success like Bing rather than teach an old dog like Yahoo, new tricks.Yeah, I agree. If he is not now, I'll bet Jerry Yang will be kicking himself in the future for not cashing out when he had the chance.
    Reply
  • hellwig
    montezumaYahoo is just mad that they are nowhere near as successful as Google.Agreed, but then again, Google only does search. They have other crap, but none of it is big ticket, and none of it is #1 like their search. Wouldn't you be upset if your neighbor made more than you for doing less?

    Yes, I use their search, and have a Gmail account (not my primary), and like Google Earth, but I wouldn't pay for any of it. I certainly don't think Google should be a $30 billion dollar company (just like I think Microsoft would have been crazy to actually pay $40+ billion for Yahoo).

    You'd think we would have learned from the first internet bubble bursting, the internet is a means of distributing information. It is NOT a big bank where you get to print your own money just because you know HTML. The acquisitions of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.. will prove disastrous in the end, a couple years from now, when no one gives a crap about any of those sites.
    Reply
  • Major7up
    Carol BartzI wake up and say, 'What's happening?'Yeah, I do but then I pull up Tom's, Wired or CNN...never Yahoo.
    Reply
  • CChick
    I think Jerry made the right move by NOT selling Yahoo.

    Yahoo, after it got beaten by Google, seems kind of lost. like they dont know what they should do after.

    They were stupid enough not to use their Brand image at its full potential.

    Now Yahoo is being run by a dumb bitch, never a search company my ass.

    Yahoo just gonna get worst. watch.
    Reply
  • mlopinto2k1
    Yea! They gonna get worst! lol
    Reply
  • redgarl
    So... is she going to sold Microsoft or Yahoo?
    Reply
  • megamanx00
    Carol Bartz just may get that company going. She's right though, as to me yahoo stopped being about search along time ago. Their chat rooms use to be popular back when they allowed user rooms, but since the spam bot problem got out of control and they didn't do anything about it there are just alot of bots spamming each other. Yahoo had groups and page profiles way before myspace, so to me it really missed the boat on social networking and now it's a bit late to try and catch up. It's gonna be hard cleaning up the mess that Yang left that's for sure.
    Reply