Wall St lukewarm as Yahoo hails new chief

By Chris Nuttall and Richard Waters in San Francisco

Published: January 13 2009 22:33 | Last updated: January 14 2009 00:35

Yahoo appointed software veteran Carol Bartz as its new chief executive on Tuesday, an appointment viewed by Wall Street as safe but unspectacular.

Ms Bartz, 60, takes up the position immediately. She was previously executive chairwoman of Autodesk, a design software company that she led as chief executive for 14 years, and is a board member of Intel and Cisco Systems.

Reports of her appointment sent Yahoo shares 1 per cent lower by the close in New York at $12.10.

The software company also announced that Sue Decker, its president and the chief internal candidate for the job, would resign after a transitional period to pursue other challenges.

Roy Bostock, Yahoo chairman, said Ms Bartz would lead Yahoo into its next era of growth.

“She is the exact combination of seasoned technology executive and savvy leader that the board was looking for ,” he said. “She is admired in the Valley as well as on Wall Street for her deep management expertise, strong customer orientation, excellent people skills, and firm understanding of the challenges facing our industry.”

Wall Street analysts were more circumspect. “We think she would be a solid choice as Yahoo’s new chief executive, but we are concerned about her apparent lack of professional experience with internet companies and online advertising,” said Scott Kessler, analyst at S&P’s equity research.

Mark Mahaney, Citigroup internet analyst, said she had been a highly effective chief at Autodesk, helping it to grow into a $4bn (£2.7bn) company. He said she would bring organisational skills and “substantial technology industry experience”, but added that she lacked media industry experience.

That was something that the previous outsider to be appointed chief executive – Terry Semel – possessed in abundance, but Yahoo is seen to have fallen behind operationally during his tenure as it lost market share in the search arena to Google.

Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s co-founder, replaced Mr Sempel as chief executive in 2007. Ms Bartz will take over with the company facing low single-digit growth in internet advertising in 2009 and its rival Microsoft still interested in picking up its search business after it walked away from a full takeover bid last year.