Yahoo! Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker recently told Bloomberg News Yahoo! does not intend to gain market share in the search space. “It’s not our goal to be #1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share.” (via Steve Rubel)
Decker says Yahoo! will instead improve advertising on its search results pages to bring in more revenue. The comment may have been made on Decker’s appearance on Bloomberg Morning Call last week, but I have not been able to find the video. Yahoo!’s stock price is up about 2% this morning after a 20% slide over the last week.
Perhaps Yahoo! is focused on providing a good enough service for its 450 million users that they will not notice Google’s services are better. The Yahoo! Search team must be pissed and embarrassed at their CFO who basically just killed their motivation to succeed and perhaps their budget as well.