Carol Bartz, who replaced Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang as the company's CEO in January 2009, has been let go by the company, according to a report by AllThingsD.
Bartz said she was "fired over the phone by Yahoo's Chairman of the Board" in an email sent to employees today. Chief Financial Officer Tim Morse will act as interim CEO until a longer term replacement can be found.
During her 30-month tenure, Bartz presided over a tumultous period in the company's history, as it effectively backed out of the search business by outsourcing its search results to Microsoft and shifted its attention elsewhere, primarily toward expanding its Web content offerings and entering hot spaces like personalized mobile news.
The company was already struggling by the time Bartz took the reigns and promised a new approach. The former AutoDesk CEO was hired to help turn things around, but evidently those ambitions proved too high.
As competitors like Google grew their ranks, Yahoo has had to make a series of layoffs while shuttering some of its Web properties, including Buzz, Geocities, its publisher network and its Maps API, among others. After word of its plan to shut down its social bookmarking service Deliciousleaked, Yahoo ultimately decided to sell it to YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, sparing fearful users the prospect of having to somehow backup a few years' worth of data.
Despite numerous changes to products and personel, Yahoo has struggled to return to its pre-2009 financial performance. Its stock price remains around $12.50, as AllThingsD points out, which is not far from where it stood the day Bartz took over.
Prior to joining Yahoo, Bartz was chair, president and CEO of Autodesk for 14 years. Before that she was VP of Worldwide Field Operations and an executive officer at Sun Microsystems.
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