Yahoo has just fired CEO Scott Thompson after the board found out he padded his resume with a few lies. Scott Thompson  was only CEO for Yahoo for 4 months. Yahoo has issued a statement stating Thompson “has left the company”  At the moment Yahoo has named Ross Levinsohn as its interim CEO.
Yahoo has had a hard time holding on to its CEO’s as of late. Â Yahoo has lost some footing in the search engine game when Google entered the game and along with losing their footing they are losing CEO’s. Â Here is a list of Yahoo CEO’s that’s attempted to take Yahoo to the next, but lost their jobs in the process.
Tim Koogle
1995-May 2001: Yahoo’s first CEO Tim Koogle made black turtlenecks a tech exec fashion statement while Steve Jobs was still in exile from Apple. A 1998 Business Week profile called Koogle “the grown-up voice of reason” at Yahoo. Three years later, he stepped down, seemingly unable to do anything about the imposion of Web advertising as the dot com bubble burst. Under Koogle, Yahoo paid billions for companies like Broadcast.com and Geocities. Those were the days when “counting eyeballs” was all the rage and tomorrow’s horizon promised to be that much brighter than today’s. All good until the reckoning came and investors wondered what Yahoo was really all about. Another problem: Koogle had a reputation for being a nice could who had a hard time saying “no” to projects that sprang up willy nilly.
Terry Semel
May 2001-June 2007: Yahoo made a sharp departure from Koogle when it looked to Hollywood where it hired Terry Semel, who had spent 24 years at Warner Bros. A technology company run by a Hollywood suit? At first, it worked. Semel was given credit for cutting corporate initiatives that made little sense and rationalizing business groups. He also diversified Yahoo’s business away from strict dependence on display ads with alternative revenue streams such as premium services and classified listings. Semel saw Yahoo as a media play and pushed as hard as he could to realize that vision. But the company lurched from one financial disappointment to the next. Semel was unable to come up with a way for this very first-generation Web company to stave off younger rivals. In particular, was painfully slow to build a successful search advertising business and got left behind by Google. One side note: Semel tried and failed to entice a fresh-faced Harvard dropout named Mark Zuckerberg to sell Yahoo something called Facebook. Had Zuck said yes, the tech landscape would look a lot different today.
Jerry Yang
June 2007-January 2009. As Yahoo’s co-founder with Jerry Filo, Jerry Yang had a special connection with the company. That’s why he agreed to take over after Yahoo parted ways with Semel. Fairly or not, Yang’s legacy will forever be connected with the decision to reject Microsoft’s $44.6 billion bid to acquire the company. Yang reportedly held out for $4 more per share than Microsoft was willing to pay and effectively killed chances for a deal. As the company’s stock continued to slide, impatient investors bayed for Yang’s head. When he finally resigned as CEO, few on Wall Street expressed regret upon hearing the news. Of course, they also ignored the fact that Yang helped build one of the biggest Internet properties in the world.
Carol Bartz
January 2009-September 2011. When it came to speaking her mind, Carol Bartz wasn’t a shrinking violet. In fact, she was the sort of down home #$%! bad*&$ who let you know where she stood – any time, anywhere – on any particular issue. Along with her extensive tech industry resume, Bartz’s unusual frankness helped convince the board that Bartz indeed had what it took to get Yahoo back on track. But Bartz, a former Autodesk CEO, had no background in media and advertising – and here she was appointed to run a company build around media and advertising. Hello?The strange denoument came when she announced the news in an all-staff email from her iPad: “To all, I am very sad to tell you that I’ve just been fired over the phone by Yahoo’s Chairman of the Board. It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward.”
Scott Thompson
January 2012 to May 2012. This one is destined to become a Harvard Business case study one day. Scott Thompson, hired earlier this year, lost his job because of he fudged his resume, falsely claiming to have had a computer science degree. And like Bartz, he had zippo experience in media and advertising – Thompson’s previous stint was at online payment company PayPal. But in his short time at the helm, Thompson was active. He pushed a controversial patent lawsuit against Facebook that most of Silicon Valley treated with disdain. And he orchestrated a massive layoff but raised questions for not really articulating how he intended to retool Yahoo to remain relevant in our increasingly Google-centric world. But it was the bizarre inclusion of a phony academic credential which ultimately brought Thompson down. Any other company and you’d say, `Well, stuff happens.’ But given that it’s Yahoo, one can be excused for wondering whether they build the place on the site of an ancient Indian burial ground.
[cnet]
