And Now a Folksy Update From Carol Bartz, Massive Outage Relegated to "PS"

Talk about burying the lead. For your Friday reading pleasure, the latest memo from “fearless leader” Carol Bartz, talking up how far the company has come and how the outage just proved how important Yahoo is.

Read it for yourself:

“There sure are a lot of folks writing about us. There are some pretty incredible stories out there.  I’m not letting it distract me, and you shouldn’t either. Because the really incredible story to me is how far we’ve come to build a better Yahoo! – something you’re all making a reality.

I’ve been traveling the last four weeks to New York, Atlanta and Washington DC, seeing customers, partners and visiting our offices. I want to call out the U.S. Account Management folks who have been working non-stop to transition our advertisers to Microsoft’s Ad Center. Microsoft should be powering paid search in the U.S. and Canada by the end of this month, right on schedule. Our Yahoo! transition team under Mark Morrissey deserves the BIG THANKS for steering us through this important transition.

I met with the News product and engineering teams yesterday. On Monday, we’re going Alpha in four countries on a totally new platform for global News. We’ve had nine different News code bases around the world and haven’t brought up a new country in two years because of the complexity! With “new” News we can bring a new site up in a month. To compose a new page it used to either never happen, or took engineering and editorial weeks. Now it only takes FIVE minutes with just the editor. Why am I going into this detail? First, I’m really, really proud of the Media and Content Agility Platforms teams. They started in July ‘09 and have delivered a kick-ass product on time. Secondly, I want you all to know that this is the new Yahoo! – great technology driving great content for a great user and advertiser experience. No one will stop us!

Now after all that happy talk, we have a lot to do. Change is very hard but no company or no one person can stay the same. Let’s all look out the windshield, not the back window. That’s how we move forward.

OK, Yahoos, that’s all for today.

Your fearless leader,
Carol

P.S. – You all know Front Page was down yesterday. Our teams worked hard and got it fixed fast. And looking on the positive side, I thought you should see some of the comments. Several outlets indicated their surprise at such a major issue with one of the world’s largest Websites, noting the importance of Yahoo! to the daily lives of users and the fact that Yahoo! is never down.

•                   “Yahoo.com was offline this PM. Friends/readers wrote to us, underscoring the site’s continued relevance.” – Tweet from a Wall Street Journal reporter

•                   “The people have spoken, bring us back our Yahoo!” – The Next Web

So remember, Yahoo! is still an important destination for folks on the Web. Let’s give them the best experience we can.”