Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz is leaving Intel's Board of Directors as she looks to concentrate full-time on her new role within search engine company Yahoo. In her place, desktop and notebook chip maker Intel's board elects eBay CEO John Donahoe and Frank Yeary, the vice chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley.Yahoo
CEO Carol Bartz is leaving Intel's
Board of Directors as she works to restructure and reorganize Yahoo after
taking over as its CEO in January.
Intel announced that Bartz would leave the board March 19. In her place,
Intel's board elected eBay CEO and President
John Donahoe and Frank Yeary, who serves as the vice chancellor of the University
of California, Berkeley.
Since joining Yahoo in January, Bartz has looked to change the fortunes of
the struggling search
company as it competes against Google. At the same time, Bartz has been
forced to deal with the pressure of whether to sell all or part of Yahoo to
Microsoft.
Earlier March 19, Microsoft CEO Steve
Ballmer told an audience that he still wants to have further talks with Yahoo, according to Reuters.
In a blog post titled "Getting
Our House in Order," Bartz wrote that it
is time to change the way Yahoo is run, and in addition to planning to
change the corporate culture, she has announced that several top executives,
including the chief financial officer, will leave the company.
Bartz
has also said Yahoo's strength remains with its e-mail platform, its
advertising base and storage, and she wants to continue to strengthen those
areas as the company moves forward. She has not said publicly whether she has
been in touch with Microsoft or Ballmer.
By stepping off Intel's board, it seems that Bartz wants to dedicate
additional energy to running Yahoo.
For his part, Donahoe also comes from a company undergoing changes. Donahoe
was appointed CEO of eBay after Meg Whitman
decided to leave the company earlier in 2009 as she gears up to run for
governor of California.
Intel itself made some additional news the week of March 16, when it
publicly challenged Advanced Micro Devices over the conditions of the two
companies' cross-licensing agreement for x86 microarchitecture. Intel
claims that when AMD spun off its manufacturing division into a new company
called Globalfoundries that move violated the agreement, while AMD denies
it broke the agreement.