Who is Carol Bartz?
Bartz spent 14 years as Autodesk’s CEO before becoming executive chairman in April 2006. Before Autodesk, she worked at Sun Microsystems, 3M, and Digital Equipment Corp., so she’s seen the tech industry from several perspectives. And for some more breadth, she’s on the boards of Intel, Cisco Systems, and Network Appliance. Bartz has ventured outside the straight business realm, too. She’s a board member at the Foundation for the National Medals of Science and Technology, was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 1997, and served on President Bush’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. And she’s been outspoken about being a breast cancer survivor. More telling about her style, though, is an anecdote from her history at Autodesk with its current CEO, Carl Bass, who came to the company through an acquisition. “They were having tough times. She fired him,” Ponvert said. “She had the courage to realize two months later that she desperately needed him.
This week Yahoo!, a huge but floundering internet company, appointed her as its new boss. Ms Bartz is one of only a few women at the top in Silicon Valley, now that the female bosses of Hewlett-Packard and eBay have departed. She is also a weathered Valley veteran. She ran Autodesk, a software company based just north of San Francisco, for many years. She sits on the boards of technology giants such as Cisco and Intel; she used to work at Sun Microsystems and DEC; and she has a nice house and garden in Atherton, the Valley’s swankiest suburb. A very safe choice, it would seem. Too safe, some say. Ms Bartz, at 60, is strikingly old to be running a “Web 2.0” company that, along with Google and Facebook and the rest, needs street cred among college-age kids like Ms Bartz’s own daughter, Layne. The first computer that Ms Bartz touched was a punched-paper-tape IBM 1620 in 1967, the sort that Yahoo!’s programmers today might have read about in the palaeontology module of their computer-scien
What exactly Carol Bartz got? Carol Bartz is a capable manager; she led Autodesk for 14 years. Autodesk is a CAD software company; its products are used by some of the world’s top architects and builders. Carol Bartz could have those management skills and leadership thing but her experience at Autodesk suggest that Carol Bartz is not the perfect person for Yahoo! or simply Yahoo! doesn’t need Carol Bartz. Bartz got no experience or know how when it comes to online advertising business. Yahoo and Autodesk are quite different, the two companies occupies two different world, different business models and cultures. There are a lot of rumors in the Wall Street that investors are not impressed with Bartz recent appointment as Yahoo’s next CEO. Moments after the news broke out that Carol Bartz will be Yahoo’s next CEO the stock started to plunge; Silicon Valley tech people are already scratching their heads. Carol Bartz got a very serious problem here, Yahoo! is in deep trouble, The Company i
