During the Yahoo stockholders meeting which included yodelers, Regis Phelbin and a statement from CEO Carol Bartz “If I see another Britney Spears thing, I’m gonna throw up.”, Michael Jackson was driving a record number of visitors to the site.
Maybe the “fluff-o-metter” Bartz said she had in store for the redesign may be put on hold, following the 16.4 million uniques it got on Thursday for the Michael Jackson news.
The stockholders report can be heard here.
Bartz had some interesting comments to make during the meeting.
- It is unfair to Google to compare the two companies – yeah why tie Google to a shrinking company.
- She was there to get Yahoo’s mojo back – guess cursing like a sailor and saying Britney Spears stories make her puke is some powerful mojo.
- Products like Yahoo 360 and GeoCities that they are shutting down are mere “space debris” – nice way to describe products her employees spent major effort to build and develop despite their lack of success.
- Yahoo’s business in China and self censorship elicited her comment “Yahoo was not incorporated to fix China” and “You can’t hold us as the bad boys forever.”- but giving information on reporters that are then but in prison should be glossed over with time. Maybe she forgot about how people’s corporate protests in the US eventually helped get apartheid abolished..
The last two annual shareholders meetings saw the stepdown of both CEOs at the time, Terry Semel in 2007 and Jerry Wang last year. Despite no major protests at this meeting, we will have to wait to see if Ms Bartz makes it to next year’s shareholders meeting.
