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Maggie Shiels

Yahoo's action heroine

  • Maggie Shiels
  • 13 Jan 09, 22:55 GMT

Carol Bartz is undoubtedly the type of CEO who tells it like it is.

During her conference call regarding her announcement as the new boss of Yahoo she told those listening to give the embattled company some "friggin' breathing room".

Carol BartzA former colleague of hers at Autodesk told the Associated Press that she was known to talk like a sailor and didn't worry too much about how people felt in order to get the job done. She admitted as much when she said she regards herself as a "straight shooter" who is ready to "seize the opportunity".

Proof of her no nonsense approach came when she went on to say that "Yahoo is a company with great assets that frankly could use a little management".

Ouch, Jerry!

Charles Cooper over at CNET described her as "an old-school technology executive who has thrived in crises that would have overwhelmed most of the good old boys she's competed against since the 1970s".

Mr Cooper noted that at the software company Autodesk she "crushed a rebellion of prima donnas" and when the internet revolution happened she rebutted analysts with the quip "You'd be happier if we were selling plastic-wrapped fruit baskets over the internet?"

When she stood down as CEO at Autodesk, revenues had grown from $300m to $1.5bn - a classic yah-boo-sucks to the money men.

Ms Bartz is wasting no time in getting on with business at the Sunnyvale HQ. Straight after her conference call she held a management meeting. Now that would have been an interesting get-together.

She will mark a big change from co-founder Jerry Yang who has been put through the wringer for his management style. Some say it's resulted in the once mighty internet portal lying bloodied and bruised in a dark back alley waiting for an ambulance. Will Ms Bartz bring it back to health?

Kara Swisher at AllThingsD.com is a big fan: "It's like watching a digital version of 'The Gladiator'."

Silicon Valley, it seems, has a new all-action heroine.

Rory Cellan-Jones

E-tailing - has the revolution arrived?

  • Rory Cellan-Jones
  • 13 Jan 09, 16:47 GMT

Two sets of figures out today confirmed what I'd expected - that amidst all the economic gloom, online retailing continued to boom at Christmas.

One set of statistics came from Nielsen Online [pdf], which puts web traffic under the microscope. Its report says that traffic to the top ten UK retail websites was up by 37% in the last quarter of 2008 compared to the previous year. Ready to buy

No surprise that Amazon is at the top of the list with a monthly audience of 15.6 million. But that was a rise of just 18% on the previous year, whereas the figures for some traditional retailers were far more spectacular. Argos saw its audience rise by 32%, Marks and Spencer had a 46% rise and Littlewoods' audience was up 66%.

Earlier the British Retail Consortium had issued its survey for December, and it was packed with gloom and doom. "Worst December in Survey's History," was the headline on the press release, and it's obvious that the high street had a pretty miserable Christmas. But right at the end was this line: "Non-food non-store sales in December were 30.0% higher than a year ago." That means online retailing to you and me, and it's a far better performance than was predicted, even by the online retailing industry.

In the past the BRC, which in the main speaks for the big high street retailers, has been sceptical about the share of total retail sales enjoyed by the online sector. It puts it at under 4%, while the IMRG, which describes itself as "the voice of e-tail", claims it is much higher at around 15%. Whatever the true figure, two things are clear - online spending is growing rapidly, while high street spending is shrinking.

Back in the late 90s the dotcom evangelists told us that online start-ups would crush the dinosaurs of retailing and leave the shopping malls and high streets deserted. That didn't happen - but a decade later the online retail revolution is finally happening. And funnily enough, the dinosaurs are now leading the charge.

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