Yahoo! stays on course after CEO ouster

Yahoo! argued that the ouster of its chief executive has not knocked it off course, and that it was building on its strategy of making offerings more social and mobile. "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 chief executive Carol Bartz on September 6 less than three years after she was brought in to help turn around the struggling Internet company. A new chief executive has yet to be selected by the Yahoo! board, which Bartz has derided as "doofuses" who handled her departure poorly. Yahoo! on Wednesday showed off its first Flickr application for mobile gadgets powered by Google-backed Android software and enhancements to the popular photo sharing and storage service. A Photo Session feature lets Flickr users 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 capitalizing on location-sensing capabilities in smartphones to tag images and creating chat forums to let people discuss pictures in text-message exchanges. "Mobile and social are really infusing everything we do," said Yahoo! senior director of product management Jonathan Katzman.