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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.