For Yahoo, Firing Of Bartz May Be Beginning Of End

Well, what now for Yahoo?

The company confirmed Tuesday that Carol Bartz has been ousted as CEO, with CFO Tim Morse taking over on an interim basis. First reported by AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher, the news follows a post Swisher wrote earlier in the day that suggested a variety of potential investors were circling the company, effectively looking to pick away the meat from what remains on the Internet company’s bones. Among those named as possible bidders: News Corp., AT&T, Verizon and various private equity firms.

Yahoo said it has formed an “Executive Leadership Council” to support Morse until a permanent CEO is chosen. The council also will support a “comprehensive strategic review” by the company’s board. Chairman Roy Bostock said in a statement that the board is “committed to exploring and evaluating possibilities and opportunities that will put Yahoo on a trajectory for growth and innovation and deliver value to shareholders.”

In a post earlier today, my colleague Jeff Bercovici lists a variety of potential replacements for Bartz, including recently installed Yahoo Americas chief Ross Levinsohn, among others. But the focus on the Street won’t be on succession. Investors instead will be zeroed in on the break-up value of the company.

Indeed, after a series of essentially failed CEOs – Terry Semel, Jerry Yang and Bartz – I suspect there will be increasing concern on the Street that Yahoo is simply not governable in its current state. While Yahoo gets huge traffic to some of its key properties, like Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports and Yahoo News, the company is clearly struggling to find an identity at a time when consumers are spending more and more time on social networking sites and mobile devices.

There lately has been increasing pressure from the Street for the company to monetize its investments in Yahoo Japan and Alibaba Group – pressure that the company may no longer be able to resist. However, the Street’s confidence in the value of Yahoo’s Alibaba holdings has been tarnished by the recent public squabbling between Bartz and Alibaba foudner Jack Ma over the ownership of the Alipay online payments business.                   More

The 5 Most Evil Things Tech Companies Helped Happen

If oppressive regimes want to stay oppressive, they need to fear—and wield—technology like a sword covered in napalm. And in most cases, they can’t do that without using outside help. Here are the five worst corporate collaborators in technology.

IBM & The Holocaust

 

You really cannot get much worse than helping the Nazis perpetrate the Holocaust. You just can’t. And yet, the company that used to make our laptops and now entertains us on Jeopardy helped create the most rationalized, methodically-perfected means of genocide in human history. As author Edwin Black explains in his exhaustive “IBM and the Holocaust,” the computer firm’s services were perfectly suited for the machinations of the Third Reich. The Nazis wanted to perfect human murdering. To turn it into a science. Genocide was to be flawless, smooth, and predictable. Sort of like a computer:

“The only way to eliminate any mistakes,” [Nazi scientist Dr. Karl] Keller insisted, “is the registration of the entire population. How is this to be done?” Keller demanded “the establishment of mandatory personal genetic-biographical forms…Nothing would hinder us,” he assured, “from using these forms to enter any important information which can be used by race scientists.”

For this, Germany needed computers. IBM made great computers—and they were sold to Hitler, straight from the New York office. IBM’s custom made punchcard computers were specially designed for the Third Reich, and Nazi computer scientists were personally trained by IBM engineers. The statistical might of these machines were able to facilitate the chilling ease with which the Holocaust was executed.

Nokia Siemens & Torture in Bahrain

 

Authoritarian regimes don’t usually need much evidence before torturing citizens within an inch of their lives. But in Bahrain, government torture squads use intercepted phone, text, and internet transcripts as sufficient reason to devilishly torment its people into submission (or worse). And how do they do it? With equipment sold to them by Nokia Siemens. As in, the same companies that sell phones and electrical equipment. The systems provided by Nokia Siemens are hardwired into Bahrain’s communications infrastructure—inescapable eyes and ears. This listening and whispering menace is also the reason Bahrain hasn’t joined in with other Middle Eastern nations in overthrowing—or at least rallying against—their harsh governments. It’s hard to organize change when you’ve got an omniscient torture goon standing over your shoulder.              More