Who is Carol Bartz?

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- ...  more

Yahoo's New Sheriff - InternetNews.com www.internetnews.com/webcontent/article.php/3796696 New Prospect for Yahoo CEO: Carol Bartz | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD kara.allthingsd.com/20090107/new-prospect-for-yahoo-ceo-carol-bartz/ Gawker - Carol Bartz, the Woman Everyone but Yahoo Forgot - Carol Bartz gawker.com/5132606/carol-bartz-the-woman-everyone-but-yahoo-forgot BBC NEWS | Technology | Carol Bartz: 'the safe pick' news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7827546.stm Carol Bartz Profile www.crunchbase.com/person/carol-bartz Carol Bartz stepping down as Autodesk CEO, president / COO Carl Bass named as her successor May 1 www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/01/18/BUGG2 Carol Bartz's Challenge at Yahoo: Choose a Path, Build a Team and Do It Fast - Knowledge@Wharton knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2142 Internet giant: Carol Bartz new CEO of Yahoo - Nachrichten English-News - WELT ONLINE www.welt.de/english-news/article3022699/Carol-Bartz- ...  more

UPDATED: Two days after taking the job of CEO of AutoDesk, Carol Bartz was diagnosed with breast cancer. She missed one month for surgery and chemo, returned to work, and proceeded to whip an aimless, undisciplined company into shape. Two days after taking the job of CEO of Yahoo, Bartz reportedly threatened to "dropkick to f*****g Mars" anyone whose gossip about the company ended up on the blogs, according to Valleywag. Of course, someone did and promptly sent it to Valleywag, the National Enquirer of tech. Valleywag thought she was joking, but if she was serious, "she's going to wear her foot out fast." Don't doubt her, Yahoos.  more