Yahoo is still a big player in the search world sitting in the number two spot behind the Google behemoth with Microsoft trailing in a distant third position. The poor financial performance of Yahoo and failed talks with Microsoft to purchase the company ultimately led to Yahoo's Jerry Yang stepping down as the CEO of the company and Carol Bartz was appointed as the new CEO.

Bartz was at the Morgan Stanley Technology conference where she spoke about the company and what its future plans are at this point. Bartz was asked about new negotiations with Microsoft to buy Yahoo's search business and she said, "We're going to negotiate as companies negotiate, privately."

The new CEO of Yahoo also said that she and the company are looking at all areas of operation and will make whatever cuts are needed to return Yahoo to profitability and its former glory.

Bartz said, "Everything is open for examination. I feel in this time we need to make sure we are running very tight fiscally so we can spend. Where we should do M&A, where we should sell, acquire, whatever … then we can make a decision based on a sound organization."

EWeek reports that Bartz also told attendees that Yahoo is in a strong negotiating position with other companies given its assets. Of course that is what Yang thought too when negotiating with Microsoft and that got him ousted from the company.

Since taking the top spot Bartz has been making significant changes at Yahoo that have resulted in some executives leaving the firm. Yahoo's CFO Blake Jorgensen left the company recently along with other upper management personnel.

Bartz talked about the changes at Yahoo and executive departures in a blog post writing, "We’ll be able to make speedier decisions, the notorious silos are gone, and we have a renewed focus on the customer. For you using [Yahoo] every day, it will better enable us to deliver products that make you say, 'Wow.'"

Bartz is looking at email as one of the anchors for Yahoo's business and she says that she ordered ads to be stopped on the companies email service in countries with low bandwidth to provide a better user experience. She said that the ads were slowing down the service and frustrating users. Bartz also said that she prefers Google Maps to Yahoo Maps and thinks that Yahoo has paid little attention to the application.

Bartz's future vision for Yahoo is to turn it into a portal that is continually visited by its users. She said, "I want the users to wake up in the morning, log into Yahoo, see what’s important, and I want them to do that before they go to bed at night. To do that, we owe them a fun experience, an easy experience, [and] a non-frustrating experience."