Yahoo! Ceo Drops F-Bomb on Conference Call

Updated 2:05 PM EDT, Wed, Apr 22, 2009

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It's not often that you hear a CEO drop the F-bomb on an earnings release conference call, but that is what happened Tuesday for Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz.

Early in the call she said her company needed to "create kick ass experiences for our users."

Then with the final question from journalists, which was about the announced layoffs of 700 employees, Bartz said, ""We had a lot of people telling engineers what to do, with nobody f---ing doing anything."

Followed by, "I knew that would slip out one of these days."

Bartz is known for having a potty mouth.

As for the earnings? Yahoo Inc.'s first-quarter results tread familiar ground as the Internet company's financial erosion triggered another round of layoffs and management promised better days ahead.

With its three-year slump worsening, Yahoo said Tuesday that it will lay off nearly 700 workers. It's the first significant payroll purge since Yahoo hired Bartz as its new chief executive in January, but marks the Sunnyvale-based company's third round of job cuts during the past 14 months.

Meanwhile, investors are hoping that the challenges still facing Yahoo will persuade the company it's finally time to work out an Internet advertising partnership with Microsoft Corp. after more than two years of intermittent talks. Both companies would like to lessen Internet search leader Google Inc.'s dominance of the online ad market.

In a Tuesday conference call with analysts, Bartz refused to comment on recent media reports about the Microsoft negotiations heating up again.

But the possibility of a Microsoft alliance, coupled with potential savings from the upcoming job cuts, helped lift Yahoo shares by 61 cents, or more than 4 percent, in Tuesday's extended trading after finishing the regular session at $14.38, up 72 cents.