Yahoo shareholders are unhappy with the CEO of the Internet giant. The company’s stock price and revenue are stuck in reverse. Amid speculation about the CEO’s impending departure, the board uses the annual investor meeting to say the CEO and the company are heading in the right direction.  That paragraph could be about Yahoo and current CEO Carol Bartz. Instead, it is taken straight from the yellowed newspaper pages of 2007.  Then, Yahoo’s CEO was Terry Semel, the former Hollywood studio executive hired to run the company in 2001. He promptly became one of the highest-paid executives in corporate America, and yet under Semel’s watch Yahoo lost its Internet dominance to a little company called Google.  In the 2007 annual meeting, Yahoo co-founder and director Jerry Yang reassured unhappy shareholders that the company was on the right path — an implicit vote of confidence in CEO Semel.  “I understand the questions that you’re asking and the frustration you might be experiencing, but these are pretty exciting times for Yahoo because I think our perception of what we can accomplish as a team is different from what external perception is, and we can’t wait to prove it,” Yang said in June 2007, according to a transcript of the meeting.  Less than a week after the annual meeting, Semel was out as CEO.  Today, the current version of an embattled CEO, Carol Bartz, got a more explicit thumbs up from Yahoo’s board chairman. According to the story from Deal Journal colleague Amir Efrati:  “Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock said the board of directors “is very supportive” of Ms. Bartz and her management team, adding that “we’re confident that Yahoo is headed in the right direction. Mr. Bostock added that the board is “so encouraged by the demonstrable progress Yahoo has made in its turnaround” and complimented Ms. Bartz for “fixing the engine room of this company.”  We’re not saying Bartz soon will feel the purple, Yahoo-branded long knives. But it might not be a bad idea for Bartz to watch her back.
Embattled Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz got a vote of confidence today from the company's board. Last time that happened, the CEO tenure was measured in days.