Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz Full Interview at Tech Crunch Disrupt New York

New York, NY - (Zennie62's trip to TechCrunch is sponsored by Christine Smith Associates, Inc., the Premier Female Contractor in NYC.) On Tuesday, TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington's interview was punctuated by Bartz telling the legendary tech blogger to f-off. But from that has been a tremendous demand for the actual full video interview, which is above.

That was and still is the buzz of the conference and of the Internet to a degree, but the actual Bartz / Arrington talk was over 25 minutes and covered a large range of topics.

Bartz said that the Yahoo! web front page has 32,000 front page variations "So you don't even know what I'm seeing," Carol informs. It's part of what Yahoo! called "The web of one" or a more personalized content delivery system. "In fact we serve a million front page modules a day."

The Yahoo! application most widely used is Messenger, so "getting Messenger on the handset companies outside the US is important to us," Bartz said. Moreover, she added that they already have deals active with a number of carriers, but are just working to expand its presence in that area.

The conversation heated up a lot when Michael Arrington turned to Yahoo!'s hiring of former Microsoft exec Blake Irving. Arrington was critical of the decision, trying to "walk this carefully" but then asking pointed questions about Irving's role in the company and mentioning Apple CEO Steve Jobs by comparison. The mention of Jobs caused Bartz to bristle and state she didn't know any VP of product who could be compared to Steve Jobs. Then she explained who reports to Blake in the Yahoo! corporate structure.

The point I think Arrington was trying to make here is that companies like Apple, even if they have huge employment structures, have one person's vision that is reflected in the entire company. While Bartz is certainly combative, it's hard to say that translates into an overall vision that can be evangelized.

After a time the conversation went to an edgy level, with Bartz and Arrington trading barbs on what men look at versus women online. That was valuable, in that we learned women look at the banner on the top right, where's men have what Bartz calls "banner blindness" but do look at text ads.

Why the difference? "Because you're odd," Bartz playfully says to the male Arrington. "Now that you say it, Arrington said, it makes more sense," causing Bartz to respond, "You're so slow."

Bartz continued to talk about "science" and "process" whereas Arrington summed it up with one question: "Where's the soul?" And that's the disconnect which led to the friction between Bartz and Arrington.

From that point on Bartz communication with Arrington was more pointed and (there's that word again) edgy, and then she dropped an s-bomb on the idea of ownership of social content when she said "Oh, I'd like to own it. S---, why not?...I'd like to be queen pooba of the World, but I'm not."

Then it went downhill from there. On the matter of tech blogger Robert Scoble "trolling" Charlie Rose on Monday, Bartz said "Oh. He looks like he's slow."

She was referring to Charlie Rose. Bartz could have been kidding, but it didn't come out that way.

Shortly after that Michael asked Bartz if she was the right person to run Yahoo! I think that's what got under Bartz' skin and not too much later, she got off her glorious f-bomb.

Could Michael's approach have been considered sexist? Frankly, that did cross my mind more than once. I wondered if Michael's questions would have taken a slighly less "put-downish" tone if he were talking to a male Carol Bartz.

Hmmmm..

Stay tuned.