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Yahoo Replaces Half Its Board of Directors
itwbennett writes "Yahoo's restructuring continued Tuesday with the ousting of 4 board members, including chairman Roy Bostock, according to an IDG News Service report. The move follows the resignation of Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang in January and gives investors something they'd been calling for, says analyst Greg Sterling: 'Investors have felt for a long time that the board was just rubber stamping what the leadership was doing. They want a reinvigorated board with some independence. People will wait to see what's different but I think this will be seen as a positive.'"
Doesn't seem to have had much effect
http://www.google.com/finance?q=YHOO
I'd give a link to a YHOO page for their financials but no one uses YHOO anymore.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I just went to yahoo.com, and what a confusing mess! It's packed with tiny pictures, lists of links, and generally seems like the site doesn't know what it wants to be. Where do I make a blog, or a Yahoo! store, I don't know. The AOL-style 'be all things' isn't going to work when competitors can be better at just one thing.
Revenue declining year after year isn't going help either.
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
These ousters are more interesting than they first appear...
Judging by this summary (now out of date) of the Yahoo board, 2 of the removed board members (Arthur Kern and Gary Wilson) were financial/investment guys (i.e. not technical people), 1 (Vyomesh Joshi) was a former "printer guy" from HP (whose technology credentials are highly suspect given his probable ties to Carly Fiorina), and 1 (Roy Bostock) was the current CEO.
Almost all of the people left on the board appear to have some decent technology credentials. If you wanted to "cut the fat" from the Yahoo board, you could do a lot worse than removing these four people.
Translation: they want a board that will do what Microsoft wants.
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One of the biggest innovations the new board members could bring with them would be a time machine that would enable them to travel back to 1999 and prevent Yahoo! from squandering $5.7 billion in capital on its acquisition of Broadcast.com from Mark Cuban.
These time travelling board of directors could then safeguard this capital from other potential blunders by locking it up in Apple Computer stock, which according to this inspired 1999 Motley Fool article admits Apple is "a very meaningful distance away from being a top tier Cisco, Intel, Microsoft or Yahoo!. That said, Apple is directionally on target and looking quite strong among the pack of PC makers." It would have been a much cheaper buy than Broadcast.com and left Yahoo! with pockets full of cash in 2012.
Yahoo!'s biggest problem over the years has been their leaders who have been suckers for hucksters who can deliver a good dog-and-pony-show and their organization itself has been unable to successfully deploy any new business concepts.
Seth
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