At Yahoo’s annual shareholder meeting, Chief Executive Carl Bartz said the company had “nothing to say” about any potential deal with Microsoft and asked investors to be patient as she works to overhaul the company.
“If we ever have a deal with Microsoft, it will be announced publicly and until we do, we have nothing to say,” said Bartz said at the meeting in Santa Clara, Calif.
Carol Bartz
Both Yahoo and Microsoft have talked about a possible deal of some sort since last year when Yahoo rejected a $45 billion acquisition bid from Microsoft.
Bartz said comparisons between Yahoo and Google should stop because the two companies have different business models. “Please, this direct comparison model to Google is not fair and is frankly not relevant,” she said.
She also said that Yahoo did not have a “vision problem” but that it did have an “execution problem,” which it was working on fixing.
Bartz repeated her plan to update Yahoo’s main properties, including its homepage and mail service. She said Yahoo was working on allowing users to customize more services to focus on things they are interested in. Yahoo is also evaluating other existing products to “shut down, repair or outsource.”
When asked about Yahoo doing more to promote human rights in China and fight censorship, Bartz said the company has worked hard on those issues.
“I’m going to go real simple,” she said. “Yahoo was not incorporated to fix China.”
