Ugh, articles on topics like this are always so damn opaque.
It's like watching people go in and out of the empire state building. You could do it all day for a year, watching them go in, assume they're doing important things, watching them go out. At the end of the year you have no idea what they've done, though. You're still just people watching.
> Yahoo also confirmed that it paid Henrique De Castro $60m, whom Mayer fired for not delivering
Sorry for all my questions in the dark, but what does that mean?
It can't just be pegged to metrics. How could expectations possibly be set up so that you've recorded some stats and hired a COO, then 15 months down the line the numbers didn't change enough, therefore you think that firing the COO you brought on board will help? How do you get to that point, where firing him is a useful thing to do?
Maybe it's as simple as they needed an sacrifice to drown out some earnings noise. Could it be that simple? What else is in play here?
Reading this I get nothing but the feeling that there's clearly a lot we're not privy to. Instead we're just people-watching outside of the Yahoo office.
~~~
As a bystander it seems moves like this would make all Yahoo employees more risk-averse than they might otherwise be. What message does this send if the COO was ambitious?[1] That trying something and failing is not OK? That's not conditions developers want to operate under.
Could something like Tumblr (or any new popular service) be invented at Yahoo today? I imagine they have plenty of bright people, but I suspect there are unwritten penalties for sticking your head out or attempting a project of any ambition. And maybe there aren't, but this certainly doesn't help the impression.
[1] We must assume the COO was not brought on at great expense merely to stay the course.
Actually the article is wrong about De Castro's pay - he was only paid $50m for his 15 months with the company.
The CEO + CFO pay took away from the owners of the company (the shareholders, remember them?) a full 10% of the company's earnings. What did they do to earn this incredibly rich pay? Top line revenue dropped over 6% and operating earnings were flat.
I understand outsized pay for extraordinary performance - but paying 1%er FU money for caretaker performance seems like a recipe for a stockholder lawsuit.
It may already be too late but if MM is listening... (she must be on Hacker News, right?)
Step1: Fix the authenticating and POP/SMTP email servers NOW, their performance has sucked for close to a year. Read the comments to the article and every fifth one is complaining about email issues. Fix the security, Yahoo emails get hacked way too easily. I once opened a new Yahoo account and before I had even used the account it already had spam waiting for me.
Step2: Drop the zooming cars and flying coke cans on the home page -- have some respect for your home page, don't whore it out to the advertisers. Yahoo was my first home page and I miss it but when they started this crap I left immediately. Revamp the home page as it is too busy and get rid of the endless scroll of link-bait infotainment articles.
Step3: Your customers have spoken, and continue to be ignored -- they hate the webmail interface. Fix it or users will continue to move on.
Step4: Stand up to the NSA and the govt and make it a clear Yahoo policy to do so. We have a constitutional right to stop dragnet surveillance, don't cave in to the pressure. Given the situation you are now a political leader not just a CEO, if you can't handle the heat then resign. You can also make it a competitive issue, and state in your TOS that Yahoo won't read your emails (unlike Google) nor turn them over to the govt without a warrant.
Step5: (Here is the hard part) Come up with a grand, long term strategy (and financial plan) that will allow Yahoo to compete with Google, MS, FB, et. al. Good Luck, I think you can do it.
The valuation of their two main foreign assets actually exceeds the market cap of the whole company. This indicates that not only is the current strategy not working, even with billions of dollars available a new strategy won't be found.
"In her latest move, Mayer is now culling the board. Yahoo has announced that John Hayes, EVP and CMO of American Express and Peter Liguori, CEO of Tribune Company will be leaving the board. This now only leaves five: CEO Mayer, Chairman Maynard Webb, retired E&Y partner Sue James, former IAC CFO Thomas IcInerney as well as tech entrepreneur Max Levchin."
I thought that in a public company, the board of directors is elected by the shareholders and the CEO reports to the board of directors. So how can the CEO arbitrarily remove members of the board? (Yahoo board members own a minuscule percentage of the company's stock; most of it is owned by institutional investors and mutual funds.[1]) Could someone who understands corporate governance better than I do please explain how this could happen?
This seems like an aggregation of snarky Techcrunch articles bashing Yahoo for x "bad decision" over the last few years. It's based entirely on the flawed premise that we could draw some sense of Yahoo's bigger picture by looking at a collection of individual issues that may look bad to an outsider (like not letting employees work from home) without any new insight into what's going on internally. Throw in a few numbers and missed performance metrics, and you can only conclude one thing: Yahoo is doomed to die a slow, unspectacular death, like a star burning itself into a brown dwarf. Breaking news?
This article brings no new perspective to the table. But since hating on Yahoo is so fashionable lately, perhaps it will get the author invited to a few more tech conferences.
The problem with Yahoo is that it doesn't really serve a purpose. I haven't been to the website in years, because there is nothing that it offers that fulfills some need. If I want to search, I use Google (or less likely Bing or DDG).
I couldn't even tell you what Yahoo offers because they don't seem to offer anything. Sure they have news, email, weather, etc. But so does Google and everyone else.
Yahoo should have taken Microsoft's buyout offer. Microsoft needed a landing page ever since they lost MSN. I guess now they have Bing instead.
Yahoo has a lot to offer but they were dethroned as top dog and had nothing to fall back on.
Look at Google. They become top dog in their subject matter and then they start trying to compete in everything else. mobile OS, robotics, deep learning.
Look at MySpace and compare them to Facebook, who has gone out of their way to purchase up-and-coming Social networks, WhatsApp, Oculus.
My guess is that their problem isn't that they don't have something to offer it's that they didn't have the NEXT thing to offer. They have constantly been a step behind in their acquisitions instead of a step ahead.
They should ditch Bing and get back to their core business of building a search engine. Google isn't perfect, just look at Wolfram Alpha and Duck Duck Go, there's room for improvement and people like options. Yahoo should be one of them.
There's got to be a way they could leverage the data in Tumblr and Flickr and Alibaba to create richer search results than the few lines of text and low res pictures and weak shopping results that Google currently offers up.
Search engine was never Yahoo's core business. Being a portal is and it's still top dog in that area.
Dropping Bing to make their own might not be a good idea as building a crawler is a multibillions dollars business and Yahoo might not have the financial nor technical will to commit to something high risk.
It's true that Microsoft is benefiting more from its contract with Yahoo. Bing is powering Cortana and Microsoft's other big data services. Having Yahoo's traffic is indeed beneficial.
If Yahoo continue to see itself as a "media" company, perhaps buying Vimeo might be a good way to get there. The web can sure use a competitor to Youtube.
This is what I don't get about Bing though. $10 billion dollars, 5 years of investment, and I don't know how many man hours.
At BEST it's a mediocre imitation, and at worst, a disaster. Search is definitely not a solved problem; I think that there's still a huge potential for disruption there, but throwing money at it won't work if Microsoft's attempt is any lesson.
What an awful article. It doesn't explain how Yahoo is in "more turmoil" at all, with zero metrics to confirm this statement. It doesn't say anything interesting, just a bunch of questions with no answers. Hey, Mr. Author, you're the one who is supposed to be the smart guy who provides answers!
14 years ago I played online chess on Yahoo. The could expand it by providing J2ME, Symbian, Android, iOS and HTML5 clients... But no they still only have original Flash version...
Yahoo is irrelevant now, yet another wanna be internet company.
She never had any real options, no offense meant. her appointment was more of a Hail Mary of sorts. After Alibaba is public, they'll sell their stake and buy themselves a few more years...and then linger forever ala AOL.
>>A recent announcement showed that she received $25m in 2013, compared to $36m in 2012. The drop is the result of missing the operating income target.
Glad I'm not the only one that has to cut a few expenses, the economy is tough.
[+] [-] simonsarris|12 years ago|reply
It's like watching people go in and out of the empire state building. You could do it all day for a year, watching them go in, assume they're doing important things, watching them go out. At the end of the year you have no idea what they've done, though. You're still just people watching.
> Yahoo also confirmed that it paid Henrique De Castro $60m, whom Mayer fired for not delivering
Sorry for all my questions in the dark, but what does that mean?
It can't just be pegged to metrics. How could expectations possibly be set up so that you've recorded some stats and hired a COO, then 15 months down the line the numbers didn't change enough, therefore you think that firing the COO you brought on board will help? How do you get to that point, where firing him is a useful thing to do?
Maybe it's as simple as they needed an sacrifice to drown out some earnings noise. Could it be that simple? What else is in play here?
Reading this I get nothing but the feeling that there's clearly a lot we're not privy to. Instead we're just people-watching outside of the Yahoo office.
~~~
As a bystander it seems moves like this would make all Yahoo employees more risk-averse than they might otherwise be. What message does this send if the COO was ambitious?[1] That trying something and failing is not OK? That's not conditions developers want to operate under.
Could something like Tumblr (or any new popular service) be invented at Yahoo today? I imagine they have plenty of bright people, but I suspect there are unwritten penalties for sticking your head out or attempting a project of any ambition. And maybe there aren't, but this certainly doesn't help the impression.
[1] We must assume the COO was not brought on at great expense merely to stay the course.
[+] [-] asmithmd1|12 years ago|reply
The CEO + CFO pay took away from the owners of the company (the shareholders, remember them?) a full 10% of the company's earnings. What did they do to earn this incredibly rich pay? Top line revenue dropped over 6% and operating earnings were flat.
I understand outsized pay for extraordinary performance - but paying 1%er FU money for caretaker performance seems like a recipe for a stockholder lawsuit.
[+] [-] beachstartup|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmfdmf|12 years ago|reply
Step1: Fix the authenticating and POP/SMTP email servers NOW, their performance has sucked for close to a year. Read the comments to the article and every fifth one is complaining about email issues. Fix the security, Yahoo emails get hacked way too easily. I once opened a new Yahoo account and before I had even used the account it already had spam waiting for me.
Step2: Drop the zooming cars and flying coke cans on the home page -- have some respect for your home page, don't whore it out to the advertisers. Yahoo was my first home page and I miss it but when they started this crap I left immediately. Revamp the home page as it is too busy and get rid of the endless scroll of link-bait infotainment articles.
Step3: Your customers have spoken, and continue to be ignored -- they hate the webmail interface. Fix it or users will continue to move on.
Step4: Stand up to the NSA and the govt and make it a clear Yahoo policy to do so. We have a constitutional right to stop dragnet surveillance, don't cave in to the pressure. Given the situation you are now a political leader not just a CEO, if you can't handle the heat then resign. You can also make it a competitive issue, and state in your TOS that Yahoo won't read your emails (unlike Google) nor turn them over to the govt without a warrant.
Step5: (Here is the hard part) Come up with a grand, long term strategy (and financial plan) that will allow Yahoo to compete with Google, MS, FB, et. al. Good Luck, I think you can do it.
[+] [-] dlbarth|12 years ago|reply
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-04-17/how-can-yah...
The valuation of their two main foreign assets actually exceeds the market cap of the whole company. This indicates that not only is the current strategy not working, even with billions of dollars available a new strategy won't be found.
[+] [-] greenyoda|12 years ago|reply
I thought that in a public company, the board of directors is elected by the shareholders and the CEO reports to the board of directors. So how can the CEO arbitrarily remove members of the board? (Yahoo board members own a minuscule percentage of the company's stock; most of it is owned by institutional investors and mutual funds.[1]) Could someone who understands corporate governance better than I do please explain how this could happen?
[1] http://finance.yahoo.com/q/mh?s=YHOO+Major+Holders
[+] [-] rubbingalcohol|12 years ago|reply
This article brings no new perspective to the table. But since hating on Yahoo is so fashionable lately, perhaps it will get the author invited to a few more tech conferences.
[+] [-] Afforess|12 years ago|reply
I couldn't even tell you what Yahoo offers because they don't seem to offer anything. Sure they have news, email, weather, etc. But so does Google and everyone else.
Yahoo should have taken Microsoft's buyout offer. Microsoft needed a landing page ever since they lost MSN. I guess now they have Bing instead.
[+] [-] theboss|12 years ago|reply
Look at Google. They become top dog in their subject matter and then they start trying to compete in everything else. mobile OS, robotics, deep learning.
Look at MySpace and compare them to Facebook, who has gone out of their way to purchase up-and-coming Social networks, WhatsApp, Oculus.
My guess is that their problem isn't that they don't have something to offer it's that they didn't have the NEXT thing to offer. They have constantly been a step behind in their acquisitions instead of a step ahead.
[+] [-] wavesounds|12 years ago|reply
There's got to be a way they could leverage the data in Tumblr and Flickr and Alibaba to create richer search results than the few lines of text and low res pictures and weak shopping results that Google currently offers up.
[+] [-] ethana|12 years ago|reply
Dropping Bing to make their own might not be a good idea as building a crawler is a multibillions dollars business and Yahoo might not have the financial nor technical will to commit to something high risk.
It's true that Microsoft is benefiting more from its contract with Yahoo. Bing is powering Cortana and Microsoft's other big data services. Having Yahoo's traffic is indeed beneficial.
If Yahoo continue to see itself as a "media" company, perhaps buying Vimeo might be a good way to get there. The web can sure use a competitor to Youtube.
[+] [-] svas|12 years ago|reply
At BEST it's a mediocre imitation, and at worst, a disaster. Search is definitely not a solved problem; I think that there's still a huge potential for disruption there, but throwing money at it won't work if Microsoft's attempt is any lesson.
[+] [-] yuhong|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Grue3|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qwerta|12 years ago|reply
Yahoo is irrelevant now, yet another wanna be internet company.
[+] [-] whoismua|12 years ago|reply
>>A recent announcement showed that she received $25m in 2013, compared to $36m in 2012. The drop is the result of missing the operating income target.
Glad I'm not the only one that has to cut a few expenses, the economy is tough.