This isn’t, to be honest, breaking news in the sense that the Microsoft-Yahoo deal was. But neither is it a “man bites dog” bit of Friday fluff. We just have a quote from Carol Bartz claiming that Yahoo’s “never been a search company.”
Bartz told Ashlee Vance in simple terms, “We have never been a search company. It is, ‘I am on Yahoo. I am going to do a search.'”
Those few statements could give away a fair amount of information. Let’s start with the first sentence. By saying that Yahoo’s never been all about search, Bartz is perhaps trying to downplay the fact that Microsoft will more or less take over Yahoo’s search efforts. It’s like a kid who, after losing a favorite toy, professes not to have liked it, anyway.
Then there’s her splitting of semantic hairs to consider. Although Bartz’s “I am on Yahoo. I am going to do a search” observation is correct, it brings to mind the company’s loss to a search competitor. Does anyone doubt that Bartz would rather have people “Yahoo” things rather than Google (or even Bing) them?
So the “I am on Yahoo” comment might also emphasize the idea of Yahoo being done with search.
It’s something to think about, anyway. And here’s one last note that may reflect Bartz’s credibility with shareholders: Yahoo’s stock is down 0.81 percent right now, while the Dow and Nasdaq are up 1.73 percent and 1.77 percent, respectively.
