Face value: One tough Yahoo!

Life has tested Carol Bartz far more than even running Yahoo! will WHO is Carol Bartz? This week Yahoo!, a huge but floundering internet company, appointed her as its new boss. Ms Bartz is one of only a few women at the top in Silicon Valley, now that the female bosses of Hewlett-Packard and eBay have departed. She is also a weathered Valley veteran. She ran Autodesk, a software company based just north of San Francisco, for many years. She sits on the boards of technology giants such as Cisco and Intel; she used to work at Sun Microsystems and DEC; and she has a nice house and garden in Atherton, the Valley’s swankiest suburb. A very safe choice, it would seem. Too safe, some say. Ms Bartz, at 60, is strikingly old to be running a “Web 2.0” company that, along with Google and Facebook and the rest, needs street cred among college-age kids like Ms Bartz’s own daughter, Layne. The first computer that Ms Bartz touched was a punched-paper-tape IBM 1620 in 1967, the sort that ... (link)