Yahoo! ‘We know exactly what we want to do’

Yahoo! says that it has not been knocked off course by the firing of CEO Carol Bartz and that it would continue trying to extend its offers into the social and mobile realm.

“We are heads down; we know exactly what we want to do,” Yahoo! vice president of applications and mobile Steve Douty said during a briefing with reporters at the California company’s office in San Francisco.

“Is there some amount of uncertainty? Sure,” he continued. “But we have been really successful at focusing on products that are going to move the needle for us and there is no reason to change them.”

Yahoo!’s board of directors fired Bartz earlier this month and is yet to find a replacement for her.

Bartz was axed less than three years after she was brought in to turn around the fortunes of the struggling internet giant.

Following her firing Bartz derided the board as “doofuses” and said that they had handled her dismissal poorly.

In doing so Bartz forfeited US$10-million of her severance package.

The company continues to release new products, the latest of which is an Android version of its Flickr app.

The app, Yahoo! claims, allows users to in different places flip through an online photo album using iPhones, iPads, or desktop computers “as though they were sitting together looking at the images with friends”.

Flickr was capitalising on location-sensing capabilities in smartphones to tag images and creating chat forums to let people discuss pictures in text-message exchanges.

The app offers a number of features, including filters, similar to those of iPhone image-sharing service Instagram.

Mashable editor at large Ben Parr predicted that Flickr would “punish” Instagram by being the first to launch on the Android platform.

“Mobile and social are really infusing everything we do,” said Yahoo! senior director of product management Jonathan Katzman.

It was also recently reported that Yahoo! was looking at an advertising deal with AOL and Microsoft.

The deal would see the three companies sell advertising on each other’s sites. At the time, some speculated that the potential deal was an attempt by the three to recover market share lost to Google in the lucrative online advertising business.

Following the initial report, which appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo! issued a statement, saying:

“At Yahoo!, we’re fortunate to have deep, longstanding relationships with brands, publishers and agencies, and are working on dynamic and innovative ways to put value where value is due,”

It added that Yahoo! had “longstanding relationships with AOL and Microsoft and will continue to partner and compete in the years to come.”