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By Stephen Shankland, 22 April 2009 15:00

NEWS

Yahoo!'s new chief executive Carol Bartz has spoken out about the recently announced five per cent job cuts at the internet pioneer. Instead of an across-the-board cut, Yahoo!'s layoff of about 675 people is intended to enable new hiring and investments in the company's bigger internet properties.

"We have good engineers but have to hire more and get them focused on the right stuff. It's probably the most important thing Yahoo!'s going to do to really become a big strong growing international company," Bartz said during a conference call to discuss the company's lacklustre first-quarter results.

Specifically, she said the company will hire engineers to bring Yahoo!'s major properties onto a unified global platform rather than its current variety of different systems for different countries. Today's scattered technology infrastructure has prevented Yahoo! from adapting quickly and adding new features, especially outside the US, she said.

The choice shows Bartz isn't taking a quick-fix approach to Yahoo!'s problems. First comes engineering, then comes a better experience for Yahoo! users, and only then comes the financial return. "All that investment will pay off, I believe, with more innovation, faster and better user engagement, and the stuff we need to be a hot site. If we're a hot site, the advertisers will follow," she said.

And Bartz cautioned that the revamp isn't going to be complete soon.

"To fully globalise all our platform is probably a couple-year programme," Bartz said. "You can't underestimate the past focus the company had on the US market... The international properties almost had to fend for themselves."

As an example, Bartz pointed to a revamped Yahoo! Music site that opens up to content from YouTube, iTunes, Amazon and other sites and lets Yahoo! members share their music-related activity with their friends. That revamp wasn't possible internationally, she said.

Some of Bartz' frustration with Yahoo!'s sluggish pace shone through at the end of the hour-long call.

Yahoo!'s engineering focus "was sort of scattered to the winds. There were engineers in almost every country, and way too many product people. We had one product management person for every three engineers", she said. "We had a lot of people running around but nobody f**king doing anything!"

Even as Google expands into telephone services, web browsers, mobile phone operating systems, general-purpose cloud computing infrastructure, and any number of other projects, Bartz is keeping Yahoo! focused on its core assets: a number of high-traffic web properties.

Online search remains key to Yahoo!'s future, Bartz said, though she declined to say whether it's necessary for the company to be a primary player or whether it would work if it's using another company's search results. Microsoft and Yahoo! held many discussions in 2008 about such a partnership, with Microsoft taking over the business one option, and such talks appear to be on again according to the Wall Street Journal.

"I'm well-versed enough in the search business at Yahoo! to say it's absolutely critical to Yahoo!. It's critical to our customers and partners that they have a combined search and display experience on the internet. I haven't changed my position on that. Relative to anything else with Microsoft, I'm not going to comment," she said.