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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 $44bn takeover bid by Microsoft. But Yahoo has put itself up for sale, after firing its chief executive of 18 months Carol Bartz by phone.'"
if the CEO has no personal deep financial stake in the company's success, then they are worthless.
Require a CEO to buy a large chunk of your company. IT's why the people that built the company are always far more successful at running it than some idiot that got his masters in Business Administration, and has connections.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Who still uses Yahoo? I decided to take a quick trip to Alexa to get some sort of info about their demographics: "Relative to the general internet population, people over 65 years old are over represented at yahoo.com. Confidence: high"
That pretty much explains it. Grandpa learned to use the internet in the late 90's with Yahoo, and any other dangblasted, newfangled search engine won't be built like they used to be.
Working...
Microsoft buys Yahoo
Summation 2
They own Flickr, which is pretty widely used. It might be a good candidate to be spun back off, though.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I've never had fond memories of using Yahoo: their front page has always been bloated, I preferred Altavista search results back when it existed for real, Yahoo made a mess of Egroups when they bought it and turned it into the loathsome Yahoo Groups of today...
I say good riddance.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
So, yahoo is up for sale? If everyone empties their pocket change and we pool together we can own a piece of Internet history... ;-)
Do they accept BitCoins?
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
This dude has a different take on Yahoo, and is actually big on it:
http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-is-an-asian-holding-company-the-next-ceo-should-act-accordingly-2011-9
cheers,
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.
Valuation is just an estimation.
List the income, liabilities, costs, and monthly profits.
If you make 1000$ in profit a month, that's a 12k a year business.
Now, it may be that someone can swoop in and supercharge that business to incredible revenues and profits. But most likely they'll be making 12k a year after they buy it from you. This will help you figure out how much to sell it for. After that though, the terms can be anything.
As to WHO to sell it to. I'd sell it to a competitor, unless your customers hate them. After that, I'd sell it to a friend who is online savvy and needs the money.
The problem is, I'm not sure I would buy that business. Imagine you sell it to me for 48k. That would mean I would be working for you, for free, for the next 4 years. Unless I could take that business and increase the profits I would be better off working with my own business. (I also run a small online business, selling downloadable files)
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
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
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.