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After Firing CEO, Yahoo Puts Itself Up For Sale
Reeses writes "Fare thee well, Yahoo: In addition to firing CEO Carol Bartz, Yahoo's board has now put the company up for sale. From the article: 'It was once the world's leading search engine, its founders held talks about a merger with Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation – and it even managed to fend off a $44bn takeover bid by Microsoft. But Yahoo has put itself up for sale, after firing its chief executive of 18 months Carol Bartz by phone.'"
I have fond memories of using it briefly between Alta Vista and Google.
I'll offer $1
if the CEO has no personal deep financial stake in the company's success, then they are worthless.
Require a CEO to buy a large chunk of your company. IT's why the people that built the company are always far more successful at running it than some idiot that got his masters in Business Administration, and has connections.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
So, yahoo is up for sale? If everyone empties their pocket change and we pool together we can own a piece of Internet history... ;-)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Do I need a PayPal account?
They couldn't give that stupidity bomb away.
For historical reasons, I have a Yahoo! Messenger account, plus Freecycle for some reason uses Yahoo! Groups. I can't think of any other interaction I or anyone that I know has had with them in half a decade. If they went dark tomorrow, it would be a minor inconvience at most.
For them to still be valued in the billions just goes to show how much our personal information is worth. That purchase price? That's what buyers think that they can recoup from our pockets.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Who still uses Yahoo? I decided to take a quick trip to Alexa to get some sort of info about their demographics: "Relative to the general internet population, people over 65 years old are over represented at yahoo.com. Confidence: high"
That pretty much explains it. Grandpa learned to use the internet in the late 90's with Yahoo, and any other dangblasted, newfangled search engine won't be built like they used to be.
Working...
Yahoo's Fantasy Draft Pools are the only reason to login to a yahoo account anymore.
Microsoft buys Yahoo
Summation 2
The Guardian says that Yahoo! put itself up for sale.
Yahoo! doesn't say that it is up for sale.
If all that newspapers wrote was or became true, the world would be a very scary place.
There's a slashdot icon for Yahoo?
It may be 7 digits, but at least it's a semiprime
Whats up with company sales?
Nokia effectively sold to MS
Motorola sold to Google
HP -> on the market
Yahpp -> on the market
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Jerry Yang has commited suicide.
Is this confirmed news, or is this likely to turn out to be a false alarm?
The old history: Suits are overvalued, the techs are treated like shit. So, the thinking part spreads and the glorified millionary czars believe the company is lacking "quality control" and clutter the place with spreadsheets, metrics and all the control-freak mumbo-jumbo. To improve margins, let's order the salary spreedsheet and fire the better paid employees. Then crap hits the fan, and the omniscient suits don't know what is going on, since the luck has changed so "unpredictably".
Coward, A., "Traditional recipes for tech saavy inc. failure", vol I, pg 1
Microsoft will buy Yahoop before Google does it.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Probably should have taken that $42 billion from Microsoft when you had the chance. But no, instead they let the MBAs run the place into the ground and now it's not really worth much of anything.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Sometimes the askers make it too easy to pass up. Yes, I'm a proud troll.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
... they had to fire her by phone!
That's no fucking different from any other job. Boss makes a bad call, and you can be eliminated.
Look at the mass numbers of peons who get laid off or downsized because the CEO or someone higher on the food chain makes a bad call. While the execs and managers are the last ones to be laid off.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
It's publicly traded for years, if that doesn't count as "for sale", what does?
The only "news" to this "announcement" is that management might not fight a takeover as strongly, or that individuals with sufficient stock might be willing to sell their share.
That is all.
That's a "paint everyone with the same brush" statement and I'm sure it wrongs the 5 or 6 people who are good CEOs and hold a B.A. or Accounting degree.
However, after many long conversations with my brother-in-law (accountant CFO), they are *purely* concrete numbers folks. Their scope and vision extends only as far as they have reliable corporate ops statistics. "Target market size, revenue, expenditures, etc" are the extent of their vocabulary. This is what they are taught, it works in the short term and in "commodity" companies with established long-running products. They are very good at maximizing revenue (or minimizing loss) with the window of "good data" they have. Long term R&D activities that take more than a couple quarters to reach fruition and profitability are like spending good money on lottery tickets to them.
In tech and sciences, when they get control they *will* kill the company. Imagine if the teams that built the iPod & iMac had been cut a year into their effort because they were just draining Apple's financial reserves and were still 18 months away from launching product? Accountants at Alcatel-Lucent did that to several projects, including a web services security gateway that beat out IBM and HP offerings to win contracts from major telco providers.
I am willing to be hired for the position of a CEO for any company. I know how to screw up a company. I am really really good at it. I am also really good at taking a big severance pay check. Any takers? Please...!!
Yahoo sucked anyway. Although I did meet my husband on their personals site....he's the best thing I ever found on the Internet! :D
Proclaim how they are getting into the search business then shut it all down 60 days later.
AOL should buy Yahoo! It'd fit right in with the new media conglomerate that they've been trying to build. TechCrunch, Engadget, HuffingtonPost and now Yahoo. I think it'd be a great fit.
HP and Apotheker! Or perhaps Yahoo should look into PC hardware? :-p
Man, I would love to have a copy of that phone audio. The floor is open for guesses as to how the conversation went:
"Um, hey Carol, this is the Board speaking. You suck. Security will be escorting you from the building."
-or-
In my best Jean Baptiste Emanuel Zorg voice "I am...very...disappointed. And if it's one thing I don't like...it's to be...disappointed." *BLAM*
There was a time when a CEO would take over a troubled company for a dollar a year, and earn the reward.
Yahoo was great - a categorical index of noteworthy websites. You could drill down through the hierarchy looking at sites in categories or subcategories of those you were interested in. Back in the day there were even huge listings of personal homepages indexed by last name.
Yahoo was a portal to that huge, amazing index. But over the years they slowly hid the index and became a portal to a world of crap services.
I've actually been wondering about the process of a business putting itself up for sale. Out of pure self interest, I've got an online business I've been thinking about selling, and I wasn't really sure how to go about it. In part I don't know how to advertise without causing panic amongst the customers. I'm also not really sure what sort of valuation process applies to an online business.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
I love responding to idiots.
Sad day. I do like Yahoo! and I used to prefer Yahoo! over any other, including Google. I think the issue with the state of their business is that their site has significant issues, and they've never fixed the problems. Case in point: I can't watch any videos on Yahoo! News or other places throughout the site. I didn't know it was possible to totally fuck up Flash, but apparently it is.
Yahoo has some good services. The one that I use most often is Yahoo sports. It's much easier to navigate than espn (and only a bit less comprehensive).
former Yahoo CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang fought to keep Yahoo out of Microsoft's hands but Carl Icahn was too powerful. Although it took three years, he's now won and did what he said he would do in 2008. Oh well, another one bits the dust.
There seems to be a pattern here. Products and industries where there are many competitors quickly drop to only 2 or 3 competitors when Microsoft comes in and drops billions into their money losing products to "enter" the market. Companies who made enough profits to stay in the market can no longer stay profitable when Microsoft comes in and finances their entry year after year after year with profits from Windows.
So long Yahoo, it really was nice knowing you.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Being yet another person who only cares about how something will personally affect me, the only thing I have to ask is: does this mean someone will come along and make Yahoo! Mail competent? We'd love for free accounts to have IMAP and forwarding to other addresses. Why am I still on Yahoo? Because it just seems tacky to send an e-mail Bcc'd to every person I haven't talked to in a year about my new e-mail.
Of course, the decision would be easier if Yahoo Mail died and went away. The world would be a better place then.
The Wiki has replaced Google as my search engine of choice UNLESS I'm surfing to purchase. Yes, the wiki has issue with integrity, but much less than the ad's on Google. Now if Yahoo had provided a better search VS desired results than Google it would be number one in popularity despite Google's better revenue return.
Please mod me 1 or troll. It's where the truth is these days, even on Slashdot. Beware the power of moderators everywh
But I can only remember of female CEO who have screwed over tech companies.
Any success stories to prove me wrong?
They're employees. Their power should have strong and affective counterbalances, be that an autonomous board or shareholder input. In any market for any company, there's likely a few good decisions you can make and infinitely bad ones. You put one guy in charge with absolute power and the odds are he's going to F up at some point.
Hell, maybe do away with CEO authority for anything but managing day-to-day ops and let the board make the big decisions.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
In February of 2000 I interviewed for a job at AltaVista in Palo Alto CA. The place seemed really cool to me, but one of the people I talked to there told me management was worried because the number one search term on AltaVista at the time was the word "Yahoo." People were using AltaVista to find Yahoo. I agreed that was a bad sign, went to work for someone else and a few months later their IPO failed and they were ultimately bought out and shuttered by Yahoo.
In January 2007 I was on a date with a girl who was a marketing director at Yahoo at the time (I know, I know, you're going to call BS because this is Slashdot and guys here don't actually date real women. For the sake of legitimacy, I should point out that this was our first and only date.). I told her the story about AltaVista and respectfully asked what the top search term on Yahoo was these days. She immediately said, "Google." Not every day, but frequently. But they weren't too worried.
As an aside, I have to say these are sad days for the city of Sunnyvale (in Silicon Valley). Sunnyvale is home to Palm (over by the post office), which was bought out by HP and with the cancellation of the TouchPad is in limbo right now. Nokia consolidated its area offices in a new office building here (across the street from Target), and now that it has given up its operating system in favor of Microsoft's, its only a matter of time before it disappears. And now Yahoo, which used to be on Central Expressway but is now in the towers east of the freeway, has fired its CEO over the phone and put itself up for sale.
mv /owner/yahoo/* /owner/microsoft/
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
... when Yahoo was a 7 page text file that you downloaded with FTP. You printed it and kept it next to you acsii terminal and typed in the URLs that it listed.
i remember back when the only few "safe" internet companies left were Yahoo, Amazon and Ebay. Not much of the old (first?) guard are remaining. In the case of Yahoo, I think they ended up whoring themselves out way too much to their shareholders. Yang never really seemed to care about the company once he made his $$$ and who knows what the heck happened to Filo. This company is a prime example of having too many cooks in the kitchen. I think one major issue they've had forever is just never moving past the whole "portal" identity thing. Rather than focusing on a specific thing and doing it well, they tried to enter too many markets, buying up any company that might show their investors potential growth. And as for management, just wrong move after wrong move in bringing in MBA types or people with big profiles. But who cares about those people when it seemed that they just wanted their own little golden parachute piece of the pie. This company really needed (needs?) a starving tech visionary to lead it. (Hey, I'm starving!)
Revealed one after another..
I'll buy that for a dollar!
Wait, no I won't.
It was a serious mistake from Yahoo to give up their search engine. Currently there are only two international
search engines which are much to few. A search engine is also important to sell things like email or
Webspace because it attracts people.
It was a serious error from Yahoo to sell their search engine. Now there exist only two search engines any more which is
far to less.
The President of the USA should have a salary of minimum wage, given that it is considered as sufficient to live off of. Why should the President demand more money? The "job" is really an opportunity to make things better, and being able to make things better should be the reward in itself. If the PotUSA does a good job, then their reward will be a better country.
Twinstiq, game news
Yes, and flickr... I use flickr constantly, and as near as I can tell, the service is thriving. I'm worried about what will become of it.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
So long Yahoo, it really was nice knowing you.
Yahoo! was done at the point where they were buying Google's search results and pushed out pop-up ads.
Why stick with Yahoo! for search and get pop-up ads when one could just go to their supplier?
I like the idea of options that can't be exercised for 10 years or so.
Challenge there is that the average tenure of a Fortune 500 CEO is something on the order of 3-4 years. If there was a 50/50 chance I'd be fired 7 years before the options vest, I'd be less than thrilled about that compensation plan. Not saying long term incentives are bad (I actually agree with you and think long term incentives are the way to go) but there are reasons why CEO candidates might not be interested.
ya, I was thinking more about their other services and biz even if they were still fringe player in search.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
and they cost upwards of $1 trillion.
"Obama has had three full years to deal with the economy"
Now we know you are not serious about having any kind of thoughtful discussion.
Do you have any idea how much vacation time GWB took? Good lord you are retarded.
I think it's that "business" folk in general are shit. They're great at fiddling spreadsheets, and ensuring they get awesome payouts for the most random reasons, and they're great at acquiring companies, ripping them to shreds and making headlines that give investors hardons.
Sterotypes are easy. If you think "ensuring they get awesome payouts" is an easy thing to do, why aren't you doing it? Fact is that actually starting, running or turning around a business is hard. VERY hard. If you think that "fiddling spreadsheets" is all it takes, you pretty much are admitting you are clueless about how to buy, own, operate, start or sell a business.
The reason original founders do well isn't because they have a stake in the company...
Actually founders of business very rarely continue to operate the business once it grows to a significant size. The skill set to start a bootstrap operation and the skill set to run a mid to large sized company are completely different. It is exceedingly rare to find someone like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs who manages to make that transition. Once the company gets large enough to have outside investors it is fairly normal for the founder to step aside or even step away because they quickly get out of their depth. The Google founders hired Schmidt precisely because they knew they did not have the necessary experience or skill set needed to run a large and fast growing company.
This is why Google dumped Schmidt and handed things back to Larry, because Schmidt is a businessman. He's great at lobbying politicians and so forth, but creating worthwhile and innovative new products? That's not really Schmidt's area of expertise.
It's not Larry's demonstrated area of expertise either. If it was he'd still be doing engineering. Someone else is making the products. The CEO job is to look at the bigger picture. They make major decisions but they don't create any products. Even Steve Jobs doesn't create the products, he provides feedback and direction but someone else creates the "worthwhile and innovative new products". The only reason Google could hand the job back to Larry is because he's been able to learn from Schmidt for the past decade up close about what it takes to run a company the size of Google. They don't teach that at Stanford, even in the business school. Whether Larry will do well or will make a hash of it remains to be seen.
Upon getting a job with a company, employee gets a set amount of employee stock.
Exactly what do you define as "employee stock"? How does it differ from common or preferred stock? How is it valued, what are the terms of holding, under what circumstances can it be sold or transferred, what is its liquidation preference, etc.
No bonus are given. Instead, dividends are paid to employees or (employees AND common stock).
A dividend paid to an employee is a bonus. Call it whatever you like but the result is the same.
With this approach, all have a common interest in seeing the company make the most money possible over a long term.
Hah! You think that cannot be gamed for short term interests? All it takes is for the board to declare a special dividend. You are talking about problems of agency and those are not easy problems to solve. I seriously doubt you can devise an incentive scheme that cannot be gamed by someone determined to do so.
With your approach, executives have a strong incentive to play the stock market game, instead of focusing on the company's long term gains.
The job of executives is to increase the value of the shareholders investment. If the shareholders desire short term gains then that is the failure of the shareholders, not the executive they hired to deliver those short term gains. If the shareholders (the owners of the company) desire longer term gains, they have the ability to direct the company officers to take a longer term perspective.
Upon getting a job with a company, employee gets a set amount of employee stock.
Exactly what do you define as "employee stock"? How does it differ from common or preferred stock? How is it valued, what are the terms of holding, under what circumstances can it be sold or transferred, what is its liquidation preference, etc.
Employee Stock is not available on the stock market. Only Employees can own it and it is sold back to the company and no other places. All ESOPs have this. It is well known stock.
No bonus are given. Instead, dividends are paid to employees or (employees AND common stock).
A dividend paid to an employee is a bonus. Call it whatever you like but the result is the same.
No, a bonus is decided by a person, typically the manager, but it can also be higher.
A dividend is paid to ALL stock of one or more classes.
With this approach, all have a common interest in seeing the company make the most money possible over a long term.
Hah! You think that cannot be gamed for short term interests? All it takes is for the board to declare a special dividend. You are talking about problems of agency and those are not easy problems to solve. I seriously doubt you can devise an incentive scheme that cannot be gamed by someone determined to do so.
That is why I wrote in there that dividends are paid to (employees || (employees && regular stock)). Can it be gamed? Probably.
With your approach, executives have a strong incentive to play the stock market game, instead of focusing on the company's long term gains.
The job of executives is to increase the value of the shareholders investment. If the shareholders desire short term gains then that is the failure of the shareholders, not the executive they hired to deliver those short term gains. If the shareholders (the owners of the company) desire longer term gains, they have the ability to direct the company officers to take a longer term perspective.
That is right. And if the employees are a major part of that shareholders, then issue solved. In particular, it is normally in the employees best interest for long-term profits, rather than short-term payouts. Note that with the employees, they get little if the company gives up long-term assests for a short-term stock gain.
However, other than mutual funds, etc, AND EXECUTIVES THAT WANT TO JUMP, most stockholders do not want short-term gains. They are in it for the long haul.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Someone had to say it.
Make it like China: You fuck with People's Bicycle Factory, You get a visit in the night, the last visit you'll ever get.
If Yahoo were ever sold to that slimy, dirt bag Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation I would never use it again for anything.
From what I have read, the infrastructure at Yahoo is seriously dated. Selling to Microsoft with their large cash reserves might prove to be a wise decision. On the other hand, Microsoft tried once and failed. At this point in time Yahoo is by no means as an attractive commodity.
Pigskin-Referee
Linux: Yesterday's technology, tomorrow