Yahoo To Spin Off Everything That Makes It Yahoo (nytimes.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Yahoo has confirmed reports from last week by saying it plans to spin off all of its assets aside from its $31 billion stake in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba. "In the reverse spin off, Yahoo's assets and liabilities other than the Alibaba stake would be transferred to a newly formed company, the stock of which would be distributed pro rata to Yahoo shareholders resulting in two separate publicly-traded companies." Their decision was spurred by how stock market traders were weighing the tax risk of spinning off the most valuable part of the company.

The article notes that this probably means trouble for CEO Marissa Mayer: "Ms. Mayer, who was hired in 2012 to turn around Yahoo, had planned to spin off the company's 15 percent stake in Alibaba, bundled with a small-business services unit, into a new company called Aabaco. She then planned to focus on improving the company's core business, the sale of advertising that is shown to the roughly one billion users of Yahoo's apps and websites. Ms. Mayer is now effectively back to square one. Yahoo's core Internet operations are struggling, even though the chief executive has made dozens of acquisitions, added original video and magazine-style content, and released new apps."

Comments

Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

So, new CEO from Google comes in, sucks up a huge salary, drives Yahoo further into the ground, and is still there after almost four years. Does anyone else think that "Ms. Mayer" may have been planted at Yahoo to keep the old Internet giant from 1) threatening Google in any meaningful way 2) keep Yahoo out of the hands of Microsoft (remember that?) and 3) keep Yahoo large enough to keep Google out of antitrust trouble (here in the states anyway)? [/conspiracy]

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Only an unthinking paranoid moron would think that. The rest of us will just see this is as normal business SNAFU.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Captain Splendid]

That would be a great theory if, post-1999, Yahoo actually had the ability to threaten Google in any way.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[bigdady92]

You could make the popcorn device in Real Genius with all the TinFoil that you wear with that theory...

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

No. This is just what happens when you put people with no engineering background in charge of tech companies. This has happened more and more often as the money starts rolling in the "big talkers" start seeing green and horn their way into companies to "take charge". And no, she was never an engineer at Google: she was Larry's girlfriend. That is the dirty secret that no one ever mentions.

You see it more and more with people like Ballmer, the crazy HP CEO lady, etc. They are big talkers, but not doers.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

I look at it the way that Microsoft threw Apple a $150M bone (http://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-to-invest-150-million-in-apple/) to stave off antitrust action.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[DarkOx]

In fairness she is probably on the right track.

Their balance sheet isn't all that bad. Probably the thing to do was and still is turn it into an investment house. By that I don't mean the lets buy and re-brand start-ups kind of investment, I mean the Berkshire Hathaway type of operation.

A lot of people suggested Microsoft should go in that direction around 1999-2001 or so. Frankly in terms of maximizing shareholder value they were probably correct. MS had really lost its way there for awhile. Shortly after they got some focus back and started producing 'quality' well marketable software again. Here we are in 2015 and I kinda think they are headed back off the deep end trying to change the revenue model for Windows and Office and continuing to muck around in the mobile space where they are simply to late to the party. MS has remembered where their bread is buttered before and probably will again.

Yahoo I am way less optimistic. In terms of technology, they have produced a gem or two along the way like 'web pipes' I think called it? Most of those never really took off though. In terms of their technology being relevant in the market place they have been floundering since before Google showed up. With the resources they have handy they could probably print money if they had a plan and drove some cool products, but they don't seem to have a technology plan. So this move probably is the best option.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[SecurityGuy]

Yahoo was already dying. Nobody needed to do anything to drive it into the ground. For years people have been saying the best thing about Yahoo is that it owns a chunk of another company. I think Marissa Meyer was probably looking at no possibility of taking the helm at Google, through no fault of her own, so looked elsewhere. She got a chance to try to turn it around and a pile of money if it didn't work. I don't think we need a conspiracy to explain it.

Re: Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think so. Yahoo even at triple-everything is still an ant next to Google.

This is just another case of person taking on something they have full control over but having no idea of where to actually point it. A problem too big for her to fully grasp from one side to the other.
She, most likely, tried to do the typical approach and try to minimize the problems in her head which led to her solutions being equally small, so really not moving much at all. Sort of like moving debt around instead of paying the debt off.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, who would invest money with a Yahoo investment company (or a Microsoft one)? Neither one of them have proven they can make a return on any investment, including investors in their own stock!

These companies are "one trick ponies". Yahoo used to make money off of adverts, until Google "one trick pony" stole their pony. Microsoft makes money off of "Windows and Office". They have been trying the ride different ponies for decades but haven't been successful. That is why Gates retired and gave up. Google is a one trick pony too, and so is Apple.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[RabidReindeer]

But she got rid of all those unproductive work-at-home employees! Surely that would have turned them around!

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[gstoddart]

So, new CEO from Google comes in, sucks up a huge salary, drives Yahoo further into the ground, and is still there after almost four years.

Welcome to the world of CEOs, where competence and results have nothing at all to do with how much damned money you get paid.

I don't think she's a plant, I think Yahoo was a company which was far too screwed to readily turn itself around, and they've utterly failed to do it.

Inability of a CEO to turn around a company which has been floundering and lurching around for years doesn't necessitate a conspiracy. I think it points to the fact that people act like CEOs have any actual idea of what they're doing.

I mean, I can incompetently manage Yahoo for half the money.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

More like it was a combination of Yahoo!'s tanking business, then they saw this superstar engineer at Google, then they hired her and put her in charge to try to make another Google.

Except Google came about as a unique confluence of people, talent, and technologies, and won't be duplicated. Especially not with one "superstar" employee trying to force the transformation.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[invictusvoyd]

CEO's don't make companies. They are pseudo-celebrities who generally know nothing other than how to liquidate or bump up the stock . Reality is bitter

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's not put the female part into it. What I see is a typical worker who goes through the motions of the right university degrees, the right employer, the right talk, but also a person who has never run a company before, let alone start one, or display any great vision. It was a completely random appointment of an unproven person. They risked their multi-billion company on that. Idiots.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[lucm]

It's only her second job. Give her a chance.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a problem of perception I see a lot around here. The idea if someone isn't number one then whatever they're doing doesn't matter. The idea that having a bigger slice and being number 15 is irrelevant and unthinkable.... unless it's Microsoft (sorry, Micro$$$oft for the big shots around here) or Apple in which case beating a relatively small player like Yahoo around would make perfect sense.
 
Meh. I wonder if the Slashdot crowd would still have these kind of feelings towards Google if Google wasn't involved in Android. A lot of Google love for a company that is just as dirty as most of the hated entities around here.
 
I've said it for a long time, Slashdot isn't the place to go for business insights.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

She is the worst kind of idiot, an arrogant one.

She convinced herself she is brilliant and surrounded herself with yes men. She deflected valid criticism as sexism.

I survived the great culling in 2013 but left shortly after. Even back then you could see where things were headed.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you imagine any situation where Yahoo would come back, no matter who was running it? With the full support of the behemoth Microsoft, Bing is a very minor second compared to Google.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[elrous0]

Yeah, it took Ellen Pao at least 4 or 5 jobs to show how incompetent she really was.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[elrous0]

Let's not put the female part into it.

Tell that to all the SJW's who treat the appointment of every female CEO as if it were the second coming of Jeebus. They act like a vagina is some sort of magic wand that can only do good things. And way too many Silicon Valley liberals are buying into the hype.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[lucm]

MS had really lost its way there for awhile. Shortly after they got some focus back and started producing 'quality' well marketable software again. Here we are in 2015 and I kinda think they are headed back off the deep end trying to change the revenue model for Windows and Office and continuing to muck around in the mobile space where they are simply to late to the party. MS has remembered where their bread is buttered before and probably will again.

Microsoft is selling more tablets than Apple, making more money than Amazon in the cloud business, and based on market cap is the 3rd biggest company in America (after Apple and Exxon). Microsoft is bigger than Berkshire-Hathaway, bigger than Wells Fargo, than JP Morgan. Twice the size of Coca-Cola, Chevron or Verizon. I don't think they need the advice of some dude in the peanuts gallery as to how they should manage their business.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[KGIII]

About a year ago, I sold a bunch of Yahoo! shares and made a mint. I believe it was a year ago last November, mid-month. You can probably find the valuation at one of the many stock ticker sites. I'm not sure of the exact dates but I believe I'd held the shares for about a year and a half. It was pretty lucrative and those should let you figure out some of the numbers involved.

I'm kind of thinking that you're not really up-to-date with that whole investor thing. I'd suggest hiring a professional if you opt to go that route. No, I am not a professional. However, myself and a number of other people certainly enjoyed the ride. Depending on what the market does, I may even loan 'em more money. They've already shown that they pay it back with a very good interest rate.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Captain Splendid]

They act like a vagina is some sort of magic wand that can only do good things.

That's a function of all straight males, not just SJWs, and of course they're entirely correct.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know why you made a "mint"? Because Alibaba. That is it. Without Alibaba, Yahoo would be trading in the single digits. I'm not sure what you think a "mint" is, but I noticed you "happened" to pick the top of the stock as your sell date (mid-Nov) which was 51. The stock doubled between that time and a year and half before that. Congratulations you timed the market perfectly (liar).

Even if you did time the market perfectly, Yahoo is a bad investment. Because they are one thing: Alibaba. And they are hoping the IRS isn't going to screw them over it.

I know much more about investment than you do. Have the people who "lost" 30% value in YHOO shares this year "enjoyed the ride"? That isn't investment, that is just trying to time the market. And you can't time the market.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[lucm]

Would you rather sleep with Ellen Pao or systemd?

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[luis_a_espinal]

But she got rid of all those unproductive work-at-home employees! Surely that would have turned them around!

As from the many internal communications that came out of many Yahoo employees' mouths, she did the right call with this one.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> she was Larry's girlfriend. That is the dirty secret that no one ever mentions.

Well..back to my question about being a plant. She was hired by Yahoo's board to f*** Google and steal market share. What if she's really still just f***ing Google's founder instead?

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

/. passim yahoo maps is much better than google's because it has everything in its right place and not often within 1700 yards as google has and has no ghost places ghosting onto them inaccurately. Naturally yahoo shut ti down in June after being unable to find users.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[KGIII]

Of course you can. Just read things like your post. A fine example would be that I bought a buttload of shares in Tesla when they were $24 each. Why? Well, I read a *lot* of comments and pay attention. Timing the market doesn't appear to be too difficult at all, if you're not greedy. I am not a professional but if I include the first year and a half of rather miserable investment performance, I'm averaging a 17 or 18% growth as of six months ago when I crunched the numbers. They're higher now but that's without excluding my first year and a half where I lost about 43%.

It does not appear difficult. ;-) So, you might know more than I (and I'd not contest that) and that's likely a good thing but, frankly, it's been pretty damned lucrative. I don't do the short-term investing thing. I invest for at least a year. Then, I'm just patient. My next one will be to watch VW to see how low they go this spring (maybe summer) and then I'll jump on that and probably buy at least 1000 shares while they're dirt cheap as it finally reaches the court systems and they're being dragged through the mud. Then I'll hold it, perhaps for years.

So far so good. But, certainly, I've not had much trouble timing the market. I just read comments like yours and know enough to know that I don't know everything so I learn from 'em and use the comments and use them to aid my decision making. I tend to buy and just wait. I've got patience. Then when it reaches a reasonable value, I bail. I'm not that greedy and there's no reason to stay all in if I can make a healthy profit. Hell, I don't even check stock prices daily, sometimes not for weeks.

Re: Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

especially when the superstar was actually a russian called sergey. not the girl they hired for yahoo.

yahoo search was always crap.email not better than gmail.

she slept her way to the top, nothing else.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[JonnyCalcutta]

Yawn

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that systemd, considering all the tasks it does, pretty much never sleeps.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[gweihir]

I don't think so. Yahoo never was any good at what it does. I once had a domain there and even the tenth Customer Services Person did not understand what I meant by wanting to run my own DNS and I finally had to move it somewhere else. My guess is that level of understanding is common there. Hence the only thing needed to kill Yahoo is to wait. Mayer cannot really do anything, she just has the usual big ego and lack of understanding so common and usual in large company CEO's these days.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[sacrilicious]

She is most definitely a plant.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[MightyMartian]

What exactly would another CEO have done differently? Attacking Mayer doesn't really deal with the fact that Yahoo has been in decline for a decade, and what she inherited was a listing ship with no obvious solution. Everything that is wrong with Yahoo is Jerry Chang's fault, including the stunningly stupid move of not just selling the whole fucking thing to Microsoft.

Re: Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

He is right. Marissa was Larry's girlfriend at Google. You didn't know that I guess. Did you think she rose to the top at Google because she was brilliant?

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Zak3056]

Do you know who uses the term SJW?

Assholes, losers, and whiny little fucking punks with little tiny penises who have nothing to do but piss and moan about such things.

Given that the above is what your side of the argument means by "having a conversation" the reason for the skepticism (or even outright hatred) thrown your way becomes clear. When having a conversation consists of screaming "SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!" at someone whom you disagree with, you've proven that you're not worth listening to.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you rather sleep with Ellen Pao or systemd?

Ellen's a dom with a dildo who's going to fuck you up the ass?

If not, why'd you compare her to systemd?

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> What exactly would another CEO have done differently? Attacking [Specific_CEO] doesn't really deal with the fact that [Company] has been in decline for [Period], and what [Pronoun] inherited was a listing ship with no obvious solution.

Replace all those variables with "Steve Jobs", "Apple", "Seven Years" and "He" and see if you are still convinced that what CEO's do doesn't matter.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft makes billions upon billions of dollars because companies are stuck with their cruddy software due to organizational inertia. $50 per seat per month for every corporation in the world adds up fast.

Other than that, they really aren't very good at anything. Their OS is terrible. I guess the Kinect is kind of cool. People use their cloud services? Really? We have OneDrive for business here at my company, but nobody uses it. Do people actually use it for hosting and virtualization? Never heard of that. AWS pretty much owns that space.

But, yeah, you basically have a bunch of dudes getting paid because of a de facto monopoly that left enterprises all over the world stuck with terrible software that costs way too much. Which is great. I mean, that's the American Way; money for nothin' and your chicks for free...

Re: Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have thought this since forever. She destroyed Yahoo.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sculley saved Apple from the insanity that was inherent in the company. Stock price went up but he could not get rid of the insanity and so Apple went through CEOs until they finally hired an adult as distinct from childish Steve Jobs. Jobs was able to manage the insanity for a while until it started making a comeback which nobody can notice because his handpicked successor is a nice young man from Alabama.

Yahoo on the other hand was always a basketcase.

CEO's don't make companies. They are pseudo-celebrities who generally know nothing other than how to liquidate or bump up the stock . Reality is bitter

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[k6mfw]

nothing to do but piss and moan about such things.

OK, now tell us what you really think.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's not put the female part into it.

Tell that to all the SJW's who treat the appointment of every female CEO as if it were the second coming of Jeebus. They act like a vagina is some sort of magic wand that can only do good things. And way too many Silicon Valley liberals are buying into the hype.

It seems that the anti-SJW crowd is just as active in whining about this issue at any and all opportunities.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[ranton]

Can you imagine any situation where Yahoo would come back, no matter who was running it? With the full support of the behemoth Microsoft, Bing is a very minor second compared to Google.

I can absolutely imagine a situation where Yahoo became a profitable tech giant. But that most likely would require Yahoo management to focus on becoming profitable instead of just becoming bigger. They have been acting like a startup who only cares about gaining market share at any cost, instead of a responsible established company looking out for their shareholder's interests.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[UncleGizmo]

to be clear, what SJWs are lauding is the overcoming of the very real barrier posed to women at senior levels when "every female CEO" is named.

You can't be so stupid to think that gender relates to success in management - either gender. But then again, seeing how you attack the liberal straw"man" in your post, perhaps you are.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[UnknownSoldier]

So how's that:

- $8 billion purchase on Skype
- $7.2 billion on Nokia
- $2.5 billion on Minecraft
- $2 billion investment into Xbox

working out for them?

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[UnknownSoldier]

> I think Yahoo was a company which was far too screwed to readily turn itself around

Agreed. /oblg. Yahoo vs Google homepage history

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Microsoft is selling more tablets than Apple,". Please prove this. Links please. I just don't believe this.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

That was certainly a thorough, intelligent response to a cogent argument. Did you have your fingers in your ears, yelling "LA LA LA" while you were coming up with it?

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[UnknownSoldier]

> MS had really lost its way there for awhile.

And they've found it now ??

LOL

The UI clusterfuck of Windows 8 proves that they still don't have a clue.

As I mentioned

So how's that:

- $8 billion purchase on Skype
- $7.2 billion on Nokia
- $2.5 billion on Minecraft
- $2 billion investment into Xbox

working out for them?

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[dAzED1]

except jobs was still starting with a rabid fanbase still in place, very strong in academia. Why is that important? Because at that same moment, things were being pulled from academia to The Rest Of Us. Case in point: Myspace was already around with a large user base, Facebook was just college students. Facebook (full of people using macs) opened the doors to The Rest Of Us, and boom - now it's practically illegal to not have a facebook account. Same bit, the positioning was still very much there. So where's Yahoo's positioning? Well, old farts that were too lazy to spend the time giving people a new email address to use...yeah, that's about it. People who didn't like it, but were too lazy/stubborn to change. I mean for fark's sake, whenever I go to Yahoo I get these auto-play audio ads; they've literally trained me to not go to their website if I'm doing something important. They're actively killing themselves.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Graymalkin]

Microsoft is selling more tablets than Apple

No. A single report had them outselling Apple in tablets online. The report didn't bother to list sources but they definitely didn't include online sales figures from either Apple or Amazon. Apple and Amazon are easily the two largest online iPad retailers so without their figures that report is absolutely meaningless. It also doesn't count the thousands of brick and motar locations selling iPads.

making more money than Amazon in the cloud business

This is not a very meaningful statement. Microsoft offers a lot of managed Windows Server services on Azure and charges a pretty penny for them. Azure is where businesses go to outsource their Active Directory needs. Money is just shifting from Windows Server CALs to Azure.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[RobertM1968]

Other than spinning off and closing all of the former Yahoo and keeping only Alibaba, there was no saving Yahoo at the point she took over. SImple fact is, she's doing what she was hired to do - save Yahoo.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo is an index site, Google is a search engine. Those are two completely different types of sites and both their GUI correctly reflect what they are. Yahoo had (has?) the biggest manually categorized catalog of websites.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[dAzED1]

"making more money than Amazon in the cloud business" - you clearly don't know where AWS came from. They already had that infrastructure in-house for their own stuff, and just decided to make it cheaper for themselves and make a bit of money off the engineering effort. IE, if you're going to figure out how much they're "making" you need to also figure out how much they're saving. There's not much to Azure, and for a large part it's actually just MS cannibalizing itself. AWS was a completely new market segment for Amazon, they're not just shifting some of their own customers from one thing to another thing.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[jcr]

Do you know who uses the term SJW?

I do. Go fuck yourself.

-jcr

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[jcr]

I disagree. Pao's incompetence was blatantly obvious very shortly into her stint at Kleiner-Perkins.

-jcr

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[jcr]

Microsoft is selling more tablets than Apple

The bullshit meter just bent the needle. On what do you base this claim?

-jcr

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[jcr]

The UI clusterfuck of Windows 8 proves that they still don't have a clue. ...and all previous versions of Windows prove that they never had one in the first place.

-jcr

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft is selling more tablets than Apple, making more money than Amazon in the cloud business, and based on market cap is the 3rd biggest company in America (after Apple and Exxon).

Your facts are a bit out-of-date. Microsoft is still #3, but it's now behind Alphabet and ahead of Exxon.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[g01d4]

CEOs have any actual idea of what they're doing

I think in most cases they're glorified administrators occasionally attempting to promote something like the management trend du jour. If they're at the right place at the right time they're lauded. If they're not they move on. To be fair, CEOs of large companies have quite a lot to administer, though they're most certainly overcompensated for what they do.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft is selling more tablets than Apple, making more money than Amazon in the cloud business,

Wow, Microsoft fanboys are becoming more and more divorced with reality each passing day. Let me guess, you also think Windows Phone is just about to take the world by storm any day now...

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[hairyfeet]

Actually last numbers I saw had Yahoo mail beating Google mail by a pretty large margin, sadly only stats I can find not behind a paywall are for cellphone usage and naturally that is controlled by Gmail and Safari.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[ColdWetDog]

Is paranoia and misogyny all that Slashdot has to offer these days?

Nope. We got spelling errors. Grammar issues. Non sequitors and logical fallacies up the wazoo.

Not to mention ad hominen attacks.

We're quite well rounded, actually.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[schnell]

It's not necessarily even a SNAFU. The non-paranoid view would be: Yahoo! was a mess and most in the industry viewed it as impossible to turn around. Ambitious Google executive - who wasn't going to be getting the top spot at her current employer anytime soon - decided to take the challenge. Three years later it turns out everyone was right, it was an impossible task.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Kurrelgyre]

Thanks for digressing and telling us about these other people who focus on inconsequential and unrelated details.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> except jobs was still starting with a rabid fanbase still in place, very strong in academia

I was in academia at that time and we were ripping half the remaining Macs out to replace them with PCs, and the other half out to replace them with off-brand Macs (Umax, etc.) Meanwhile, we were experimenting with running Photoshop and Illustrator on PCs, and wondering how long the one remaining campus Mac store would be open (so we could reclaim the space). Long story short, I wouldn't have called us "rabid fans" in the mid-1990s.

>> Yahoo's positioning? Well, old farts that were too lazy to spend the time giving people a new email address

And that's different than academia? (Instructors anyway.) :) But seriously, as other posters have pointed out, plenty of other advertising and media companies make bank off just a subset of those demographics, so it's almost mind-boggling that Yahoo couldn't figure out a way to make money off the eyeballs that hit it.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[lgw]

I've started to prefer the term "crybully". It emphasizes the infantile nature of these people more than "SJW" does.

Re: Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[CrashNBrn]

Yes I do think she rose to the top because she was brilliant. You don't get anywhere at Google by being a lackey. Period.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree. Pao's incompetence was blatantly obvious very shortly into her stint at Kleiner-Perkins.

-jcr

I guess that's why she was perfect for reddit...

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[ravenscar]

Analysts in many areas have been calling for a different approach for a long time: Concentrate on the areas in which you are successful - cull the rest. Yahoo is strong in email, fantasy sports, news aggregation, and a number of other things. Concentrating on these key areas would have made for a smaller, more focused enterprise.

Instead, Yahoo did the exact opposite - go out and buy a bunch of other companies and increase scope to include a bunch of new areas - further diluting itself.

Yahoo wanted to be some giant tech innovator instead of a focused and established service provider. It's pretty clear that investors are convinced the former is never going to happen, but the latter could still add value

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[xrobertcmx]

I got one for free, used reward points. Alarm clock or Nokia, alarm clock or nokia. I already have an alarm clock. Used it for less than a day.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[xrobertcmx]

Yahoo has a lot of traffic, and a lot of users still out there. I know a few who read the news, and use yahoo finance. I can't stand it, the way they mix the ads in with the headlines drives me up a wall. I would love to see them find their way though. I wonder how that yahoo deal is working out for Firefox though.

Re: Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[xrobertcmx]

I think if they had focused on content and features it might have worked. Take the core features, and build on them. Dump the search as that will never be a primary focus, and it might have worked out.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

no we don't, you ugly fucker. We gentlemn and ladies all, and fuck you and your stupid SJW coat. you stupid nazi fuck.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[unixisc]

So would Marissa Meyer now be the CEO of the spun off company, whatever it's called?

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[unixisc]

Let's not put the female part into it. What I see is a typical worker who goes through the motions of the right university degrees, the right employer, the right talk, but also a person who has never run a company before, let alone start one, or display any great vision. It was a completely random appointment of an unproven person. They risked their multi-billion company on that. Idiots.

While my instincts tell me to agree w/ you, so far, I find it hard to see a successful female CEO. Mayer seems to be continuing in the tradition of Jill Barad, Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, et al. I'd be more than happy to accept what seems to be your contention that there are good female CEOs around. I'd like to see evidence of one (aside from Martha Stewart).

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[jcr]

Personally, I sill like the term "commie rat bastard".

-jcr

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not wrong, but people will call you crazy for suggesting this. She basically pulled a Stephen Elop.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[ncc74656]

Do you know who uses the term SJW?...

Who let the crybully in here? Go away, kid...you're annoying us.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[ejasons]

The bullshit meter just bent the needle. On what do you base this claim?

There was a story last week that, if you pick a month (October) where Apple didn't have any new tablet products, while Microsoft introduced a new line (Surface Pro 4), and if you ignored sales from apple.com and the like, then Microsoft shipped a greater number if measured in dollars (not units).

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Apply Ockham's razor: successful malice implies competence. Ms. Mayer is just incompetent. She happened to be at right place, at the right time, with Google. She is not at the right place in Yahoo, and the last four years were most certainly not the right. Without those two assets she's revealed to be just another incompetent executive.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? They're not an investment house. Just the idea is ridiculous. Before they did something like that, they should have sold the parts of the company at a fire sale, and then distributed the money to shareholders as a one-time dividend.

Come to think of it, that's probably still what they should do.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[UnknownSoldier]

> ...and all previous versions of Windows prove that they never had one in the first place.

Nice!

I guess the proof is that Windows 95 copied Apple's Mac OS.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[lucm]

People use their cloud services? Really? We have OneDrive for business here at my company, but nobody uses it. Do people actually use it for hosting and virtualization? Never heard of that. AWS pretty much owns that space.

Microsoft has 2 things going on "in the cloud": Office365 (similar to Google Apps) and Azure (similar to AWS). Both are immensely profitable. Annual cloud revenue for Microsoft is about 8 billions. Amazon makes about the same with its cloud platform (AWS).

For both companies, about 8-9% of the annual revenue comes from the cloud, but Microsoft's business is growing faster (total and %).

Microsoft also appears to be more profitable but it's part of Amazon's model not to make profit (they want to "buy" markets) so it's hard to compare.

Re: Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Karlt1]

The report was that Microsoft was selling more tablets "online".

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[lucm]

I don't think anyone is defending the acquisition of Nokia, but Xbox and Minecraft are actually good investments. The revenue for that segment (including Xbox live) is in the 2.5 billions range per year.

The Skype business also brings in 2.3 billions per year. They basically tripled the revenue of pre-Microsoft Skype.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[lucm]

You can spin things the way you want, but bottom line is that Microsoft is both making more money as a whole and more in the cloud. Put it in billions, in profit or in %, they're basically printing money.

Amazon is stuck in its Walmart strategy of razor-thin margins and price war. They don't make money.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[lucm]

You know the crazy thing, at some point I wanted to try a Windows phone and I simply couldn't find one! I wanted to try that Lumia with the big camera but I couldn't find it unless I agreed to sign with a specific carrier. I saw a few ones online but the price was out of touch with reality. Only unlocked ones I could find at Best Buy were low-end.

Anyways you're way off, but it's nothing new. Can't say a thing about Microsoft without being labeled pro-Microsoft.

Truth is, I'm a bit disappointed with them. I gave up on my last Windows VM since Windows 10 (running Linux on my machines), and I also moved virtual two clients SQL Server instances to AWS RDS because Azure SQL is terrible. I gave up on Xbox Live (which is flaky as hell) and switched back to PS4. I tried a Surface and hated it. OneDrive? Terrible, plus now you can't access your drive on Windows 10 if you don't login with a Microsoft account.

The only money they make with me nowadays is with Office365 and that's for a peculiar reason: I own a shitload of domains and Office365 is the only decent cloud provider that supports unlimited domains with their email/DNS hosting service. Google won't allow more than 20, and while AWS has the lowest price for domain names ($12 including privacy) I won't host there because they charge $0.50/zone per month (it adds up when you have a lot of domains).

I've done the math. Running my own SMTP/DNS on a rented VM is at least $9/month (the t2.micro on AWS), and that's only 1 VM, not great for high-availability. Office 365 costs me $5 per month for unlimited domains with reliable email and DNS, and I don't have to deal with maintenance, patching or antispam. Even low-price hosts like Bluehost are more expensive after the first year.

With Office365, on top of my 50GB inbox (unlimited aliases), I get 1TB of OneDrive (it sucks but that's a good place to archive stuff), and many things I don't use (Lync, Skype, etc). For $5 per month.

If Google was to remove their 20 domain limit I'd switch immediately. Gmail is a lot better than Outlook Web, and their antispam is better too. But Office 365 does the job cheap cheap. No wonder they're grabbing the market one mailbox at a time.

Re: Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Same story as with Nokia. At Nokia, Microsoft installed their villan so they could buy it off the market later, although the strategy has clearly failed big time. It took Microsoft about 18 montha to fulfill the mission. Same story here. Mayer just took a bit longer to make things obvious.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[KGIII]

Sometimes it is hard for professionals to accept that other people can do their job as well, or better, than they can. The thing is, I openly admit that I don't know what the hell I'm doing - for the most part. I mean, yeah, I get it now but I didn't when I started. I just figured that I'd start acting on the information that people shared and, sure enough, it seems to work.

To tie in with an earlier sentiment, it pays to shut up and listen to smart people. You just have to not have a frail ego and be able to admit that there's things you don't know. There's lots that I don't know. That's why I ask smart people. I gave a couple of good examples and they seemed displeased with them and then refused to listen. Ah well... 'Snot my job to help 'em. They're professionals and know more than me. (Sometimes, the people who speak the loudest aren't the wisest.)

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-ceos-sp-500

Re: Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[pnutjam]

Well, that explains the 130 hour work week...

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[dAzED1]

Well while the two of us might be acclaimed economists, so hey who knows, obviously someone out there thinks Amazon is doing ok since the amount of money Bezos made this year alone would put him in the top 10

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Shirley Marquez]

She didn't drive Yahoo farther into the ground. It's still in pretty much the same place it was when she took over. She just failed to elevate it, which was a difficult task at best given the market dominance and technical strength of Google. I doubt anybody else would have done better.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[david_thornley]

The stock market professionals (like those who run mutual funds, etc.) do not in general seem able to do better than an index fund. Timing the market doesn't seem to be something most people can do.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[david_thornley]

A rabid fan base is good, yes, but while it can get a company through hard times it can't make it grow. To grow, a company has to appeal to people who weren't its customers before, which by definition aren't in the rabid fan base. Jobs grew the company a lot by appealing to people outside the Apple base.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Rakarra]

I look at it the way that Microsoft threw Apple a $150M bone (http://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-to-invest-150-million-in-apple/) to stave off antitrust action.

That's not a bad analogy, especially considering that Yahoo brought Mayer to be the next Steve Jobs. She was product person at Google and an engineer, but unfortunately that's not necessarily the best sort of person to put at the top of a Fortune 500 company. Yahoo hoped she would introduce new products at the company that people would want, but CEO is maybe not the best position to do that.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Rakarra]

No. This is just what happens when you put people with no engineering background in charge of tech companies.

You're kidding, right? Do you know anything about her background, other than she was Larry's girlfriend?

She has far, far more engineering and CS experience than the vast majority of Silicon Valley CEOs.
Being an engineer is not necessarily a good quality for a CEO.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Rakarra]

X-Box is a great investment.
Minecraft at $2.5 BILLION (yes, with a B), not so much. They bought a good studio that made an excellent game long after that game was released -- clearly they're investing in the future there in the hopes that the studio's next game is just as successful.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[Rakarra]

But she got rid of all those unproductive work-at-home employees! Surely that would have turned them around!

A pretty good move -- more companies should follow that example.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[lucm]

That's not the amount of money he made, that's how much he's worth, largely based on stock he owns.

Amazon doesn't make money, they post losses very often. But a company doesn't have to make money to see its stock go up. That's how the market is nowadays.

Re:Anyone else think she could be a plant?

[KGIII]

They should probably be patient, less greedy, and dumb enough to know that you should watch and learn from other people. I referenced a very specific plan (concerning VW) which you're willing to track if you want. I can look and give a bit more details and let you know when I'll be buying and I can let you know the price at which I'll be selling.

As near as I can tell, most of them are just buying and moving quickly or buying and holding indefinitely. I find something that's trendy or entrenched and buy when they have people bitching about them. I then wait, patiently, and the price goes back up. Nobody ever goes fully out of business (that I have bought) so the results are the ones stated. The first year and a half, or so, I did abysmally.

If you want to play along, watch VW - specifically any time before this summer but longer if I have to wait for them to go to court. If you want, you can ping me on occasion and I'll remember to tell you how it's progressing. I really don't do much more than check their finances and watch to see how trendy they are. I'm also fond of checking to see what name brands people are buying in a store. I don't even know what makes 'em go down a lot of times. I just look at the history, maybe read a report or two (skim, really), and then decide if I'm going to buy and where I'll buy in at. Then, I'm just patient and not greedy.

I am a mathematician and, well, it's hard to explain but I "see" patterns and am somehow pretty good at figuring out odds without even thinking about it. I've been pretty lucky in my life and I think part of that is because I weigh the risks against the potential benefits and then decide. I'm also not greedy so I'll wait. It also helps that I can afford anything that I gamble or I'd not risk it. I never go all in, I just use the profits to buy more. I don't *have* to wait for maximum returns and I don't have to pull the money out for an emergency.

In other words, I don't know what they're doing wrong and the only thing I can think of that I do different is that I see patterns and weigh risks. I don't read many stock reports. I don't read the business news. I don't check them daily (or even weekly). I'm not even sure what all I own unless I go look - instead, I notice when someone says something and then I remember to look.

*shrugs*

I dunno? It's been effective for me. It's actually pretty damned lucrative. I had no idea that you could make this kind of money because I'd never paid attention to it before. If I see a company being mentioned a lot on Slashdot, good or bad, then I'll go take a look. If it's bad and they're a long-term business then I go ahead and think about buying. If they're new *and* they're doing something not too unethical (nobody is perfect) then I might buy them but I prefer a company that's down and out but isn't done fighting.

Even if they just go one more "round" then I'll settle for that little gain though I prefer to hold much longer. I usually hold for at least a year - the tax rate is then capital gains as opposed to income. Man, I screwed up something fierce that first year and a half. Those are *not* pretty numbers. I've only been at it for around 6 years now I think. A little less, actually? Hmm... I'm not entirely sure. Not that long, really.

Am I being naive

[Chrisq]

Am I being naive, or just is this just a way of moving Alibaba into American ownership?

You have two companies, Alibaba (Chinese) and Yahoo (US). Yahoo takes over Alibaba to make one company (US). Yahoo disinvests everything into a different company, call it exactly-what-yahoo-was-before.com (US) and is now a new US company, called Yahoo but being exactly what Alibaba was before.

Re:Am I being naive

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I being naive, or just is this just a way of moving Alibaba into American ownership?

You have two companies, Alibaba (Chinese) and Yahoo (US). Yahoo takes over Alibaba to make one company (US). Yahoo disinvests everything into a different company, call it exactly-what-yahoo-was-before.com (US) and is now a new US company, called Yahoo but being exactly what Alibaba was before.

If I was a Chink I'd be pwitty pwissed off

Re:Am I being naive

[DarkOx]

That sounds about right. There might be some really exiting fraud happening too.

Those shares in Alibaba at that are not exactly unencumbered in terms of legal questions surrounding their value. It depends on Alibaba doing what they promise to do with the subsidiary the shares are actually in.

What legal recourse the share holders have if Alibaba ultimately decides to alter the terms is an open question. It also supposes the Chinese government won't for whatever reason decide to interfere with something that is well playing a bit fast and loose with their foreign investment laws.

While (G|W)all St. has largely convinced itself the Alibaba deal is 'ok' I still would not put a dime into that stock. There are plenty of other companies with similarly good growth prospects to gamble on. I'd rather invest in something where there is legal clarity about what I actually own and how it may be converted than forgo that safety just to net another few points. I wonder if Marissa knows something we don't since she appears to be betting the farm on it.

Re:Am I being naive

[ranton]

Am I being naive, or just is this just a way of moving Alibaba into American ownership?

Yahoo only owns 15% of Alibaba, so it certainly is not a US company.

Re:Am I being naive

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> is this just a way of moving Alibaba into American ownership?

I saw it as a defensive move by Yahoo bigwigs. Alibaba is the only thing in the Yahoo portfolio that's worth anything. If Yahoo's CEO/board sells Alibaba, the rest of Yahoo gets liquidated and they're quickly out of their cushy jobs. By hanging onto Alibaba, Yahoo's CEO/board forces Yahoo stockholders have to get even more creative (e.g., invest in bigger golden parachutes) to get them out of the way. And by hanging onto the assorted businesses, Yahoo's CEO/board look busy "managing" them or spin them off (like chaff) to distract any pesky press continuing to ask why Yahoo continues to fail.

Re:Am I being naive

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo only owns ~15% of Alibaba. This is a way of getting Alibaba out of Yahoo without paying taxes on the enormously appreciated value of that 15%.

Re:Am I being naive

[DNS-and-BIND]

No, Chinese law does not work like that. Yahoo is the junior partner and will never be allowed to own more than 49%. For some odd reason the Chinese don't allow foreigners to seize control of vital parts of their economy.

Re:Am I being naive

[luis_a_espinal]

Am I being naive, or just is this just a way of moving Alibaba into American ownership?

You have two companies, Alibaba (Chinese) and Yahoo (US). Yahoo takes over Alibaba to make one company (US). Yahoo disinvests everything into a different company, call it exactly-what-yahoo-was-before.com (US) and is now a new US company, called Yahoo but being exactly what Alibaba was before.

How can you take a massive foreign company with just a 15% stake? Certainly 15% is much greater (in relative numbers) than Elliot Management 7% activist stake in Citrix (for example.) But I have a hard time believing a 15% stake on a Chinese company the size of Alibaba will somehow translate into American ownership.

Re:Am I being naive

[Anonymous Coward]

If I was a Chink I'd be pwitty pwissed off

Oh that's just ruverry you lacist clap

Re:Am I being naive

[torqer]

If you really have your tinfoil hats ready:

According to the Helms-Burton Act of 1996, 15% ownership by an American company is enough to stop Alibaba from dealing with Cuba.

Re:Am I being naive

[Anonymous Coward]

It won't. It gets you a seat on the board... maybe.

Re:Am I being naive

[unixisc]

Am I being naive, or just is this just a way of moving Alibaba into American ownership?

You have two companies, Alibaba (Chinese) and Yahoo (US). Yahoo takes over Alibaba to make one company (US). Yahoo disinvests everything into a different company, call it exactly-what-yahoo-was-before.com (US) and is now a new US company, called Yahoo but being exactly what Alibaba was before.

Translation: Yahoo becomes Alibaba, while remaining a US company, while what was previously Yahoo is now spun off into a new company?

Maybe the new company should be sent over to China and sold to the Chicoms? That way, they'll make some money

What?

[crow_t_robot]

Yahoo isn't relevant anymore as a technology company. It's just a stagnant e-dinosaur that holds billions in hardware and patents and a CEO that shut-ins enjoy beating off to.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Was yahoo ever relevant as a technology company?

Re:What?

[unixisc]

Yeah, before Google came around and hit it big

What would Yahoo be exactly?

[ranton]

If Yahoo is just an entity that owns 15% of Alibaba, is it just a holding company? Would they just need to be staffed by a dozen people who file quarterly reports? Does anyone know if Yahoo's stake in Alibaba includes actual management and/or engineering responsibilities?

Re:What would Yahoo be exactly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, Yahoo's market cap is $34b while Alibaba's is $83b.

Yahoo to acquire the integrated face system

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo will acquire the integrated face system to boost revenues.

tax avoidance

[AndroSyn]

The reason this is being done is that Yahoo couldn't get a promise from the IRS that selling off Alibaba shares wouldn't be tax free. So they are doing this game of making the current company a holding company for the Alibaba shares, then putting the rest of the company in a "new" company. This is just tax avoidance, nothing more.

Re:tax avoidance

[Kohath]

Yeah. Taxes are so low that all these companies are merging or otherwise completely changing their structure to avoid paying them. All of these executives must not be able to add and subtract, because they are making strategic decisions based on taxes -- which some Slashdot commenters insist are low -- instead of anything about the actual business that they do.

Why aren't these executives happy to pay taxes for the extremely valuable benefits they get from extra government? These executives must be doubly stupid to not realize the value -- which some Slashdot commenters insist is very large for even a small difference in government spending -- that they would receive for the additional taxes they'd pay.

If taxes are very low and extra government is very valuable, then why are these people avoiding paying them? Do they hate themselves and so they're going out of their way to increase their own suffering? Are they just extremely stupid?

It can't be that taxes are high enough to be among the most significant factors in these businesses, can it? It can't be that the value from extra government isn't worth paying extra for, can it?

Re:tax avoidance

[Anonymous Coward]

"If taxes are very low and extra government is very valuable, then why are these people avoiding paying them? Do they hate themselves and so they're going out of their way to increase their own suffering? Are they just extremely stupid?"

Because greed. And shortsightedness. Taxes ARE low. But if they can save 5% that can be billions that they can pocket themselves TODAY. They aren't worried about five years from now. They will pocket that money now.

You are the one that is extremely stupid, or naive. Companies will do many stupid short term things to make a few dollars now to enrich the people at the top.

Re:tax avoidance

[ScentCone]

Taxes ARE low

Other than the part where they are actually among the highest in the world. Other than that part.

Re:tax avoidance

[Kohath]

"If taxes are very low and extra government is very valuable, then why are these people avoiding paying them? Do they hate themselves and so they're going out of their way to increase their own suffering? Are they just extremely stupid?"

Because greed.

If it's greed, then shouldn't they be greedy for more of the extremely valuable value they get from extra government? You aren't trying to say that the value they get from the extra government is worth less than the cost in taxes, are you?

And shortsightedness. Taxes ARE low. But if they can save 5% that can be billions that they can pocket themselves TODAY. They aren't worried about five years from now. They will pocket that money now.

I see. So all these executives are just very low IQ, stupid individuals.

Or they're super smart and somehow know they'll personally be dead in 5 years so they won't need the extremely valuable value they'd get 5 years from now for the extra government spending.

You are the one that is extremely stupid, or naive. Companies will do many stupid short term things to make a few dollars now to enrich the people at the top.

Yeah, maybe I am. Because all these things I see people do don't seem to fit the explanations from those who insist taxes are low. I wish someone would explain it all, step by step, in plain language, so my limited brain could understand what's going on and be happy paying my taxes.

Re:tax avoidance

[Solandri]

It's not tax avoidance per se. The IRS issues a huge number of "written determinations" each year to clarify ambiguities in the tax code. Unfortunately, its vastness makes it difficult to search (while providing a steady income for tax attorneys), and many of the clarifications are so specific that you can't be certain if it'll apply to your case because a variable or two are different.

This isn't like math or physics, where there's an immutable grand order and self-consistency which allows perfect predictability. It is pure, unadulterated case law - constantly changing, frequently inconsistent, and sometimes even self-contradictory. If you can find several similar cases in the IRS determinations which say what you're planning to do is OK in the IRS' eyes, then you can be reasonably sure that they won't audit you over it and say you violated tax law. But you can't be certain.* The only way to be certain is to find a case which exactly matches what you're planning to do - no different variables.

If you can find an exact match, of course you're going to do that instead. Not because it lets you avoid taxes, but because it removes any uncertainty about the tax implications, and thus eliminates any chance of the expense of a future audit and possibly having the IRS make you pay back taxes or even force you to reverse what you did, potentially undoing years of work you've done restructuring in the interim. It sounds like Yahoo wanted to spin off the foreign asset into a different holding company, and found IRS determinations saying spinning off domestic assets weren't taxable, but couldn't find one saying spinning off a foreign assets weren't taxable (the one different variable). So they went the route which had the most certainty - spun off all the domestic assets.

* I've run across this too. My father and a business partner constructed a pair of strip malls, and operated them as 50%/50% partners. Two decades later, the partner wanted to part ways, with my father getting one building and him getting another. But if they sold their share of each building to each other, that would be a taxable event. They would have to pay capital gains taxes on the appreciated value of their 50% of the buildings as if they were selling them for cash, even though they weren't actually keeping any of the cash - the "money" was immediately being reinvested into buying the partner's 50% share.

Fortunately, there's a tax vehicle which covers exactly this situation - the 1031 exchange which allows swaps of like-for-like property without being a taxable event. Unfortunately, in the case of 1031 real estate swaps, all the IRS determinations they could find applied to real (owned) property. My father and his partner owned the buildings, but leased the land. Because of that one different variable, they had to do the 1031 exchange, then wait several years to see if there would be an IRS audit which might force them to reverse the swap. During the wait, they had to avoid any work or corporate restructuring which might be difficult to reverse should the IRS decide their 1031 exchange was invalid.

Re:tax avoidance

[Anonymous Coward]

"You aren't trying to say that the value they get from the extra government is worth less than the cost in taxes, are you"

No, I'm not trying to say that. They are probably getting more value than what they are paying in. Fortunately they have us little people paying those taxes for them. So they get the value out, without having to pay in as much. Because little people like you are helping to pay their share.

"I see. So all these executives are just very low IQ, stupid individuals."

Um, no. They aren't stupid. They want to get rich, fast, now. Why wait 5 years? Get rich now. In 5 years move on and get rich again at another company. Being shortsighted or greedy doesn't mean you are stupid.

"I wish someone would explain it all"

I already did. Greed. Why would companies pay more than they have to? They can take that money now and make the people at the top rich. Now. They can get the benefits from the government without paying in as much. It isn't that complex. Greedy and shortsighted people dont want to pay taxes, no matter what benefits they are getting back. They want you to pay instead. That is why you should be happy paying your taxes: it goes to help offset the lower taxes paid by corporations. Don't you want the corporations to make more money so they can pay people like Marissa $50 million a year?

You are really monumentally stupid.

Re:tax avoidance

[Kohath]

No, I'm not trying to say that. They are probably getting more value than what they are paying in. Fortunately they have us little people paying those taxes for them. So they get the value out, without having to pay in as much. Because little people like you are helping to pay their share.

When they pay less, other people pay more? What's the mechanism for that? I didn't see that line on my tax forms last year. Is this a new thing?

Um, no. They aren't stupid. They want to get rich, fast, now. Why wait 5 years? Get rich now. In 5 years move on and get rich again at another company. Being shortsighted or greedy doesn't mean you are stupid.

But they're potentially losing out on the extremely valuable value of extra government. Slashdot commenters insist that value is worth a lot more than the tax amount.

I already did. Greed. Why would companies pay more than they have to?

Because, as Slashdot commenters insist, extra government is super valuable to them.

Don't you want the corporations to make more money so they can pay people like Marissa $50 million a year?

Do you get paid less because she makes that much? Does anyone? I don't. If no one gets paid less, why not just be happy for her?

Re:tax avoidance

[Anonymous Coward]

"When they pay less, other people pay more? What's the mechanism for that? I didn't see that line on my tax forms last year. Is this a new thing?"

It isn't new. Its been going on for decades. You are too stupid to realize it. For every dollar they don't pay in taxes, the dollar needs to come from another source.

"But they're potentially losing out on the extremely valuable value of extra government. Slashdot commenters insist that value is worth a lot more than the tax amount."

No, they aren't losing out. They know YOU are going to make up the difference. They are getting the same value, without having to pay in as much.

"Because, as Slashdot commenters insist, extra government is super valuable to them."

It is valuable to them. They get the services, while you pay for it.

"Do you get paid less because she makes that much? Does anyone? I don't. If no one gets paid less, why not just be happy for her?"

Yes. I get paid less in the end because my personal taxes stay high, in order to offset the lower amount of tax revenue brought in by the corporations. You do too, but as I said you are monumentally stupid and don't realize how you are getting screwed.

Re:tax avoidance

[Anonymous Coward]

When they pay less, other people pay more? What's the mechanism for that? I didn't see that line on my tax forms last year. Is this a new thing?

It's called "we need to pay for this and don't have money" and then "Oh, I know! Let's increase taxes on everyone!" while some dodge taxes.

It's also called "a free ride".

Re:tax avoidance

[Kohath]

It's called "we need to pay for this and don't have money" and then "Oh, I know! Let's increase taxes on everyone!" while some dodge taxes.

When did taxes get increased on "everyone"? The way I remember it, tax increase bills are rare, and the ones that pass never increase taxes on "everyone".

It's also called "a free ride".

Are you saying it's wrong for one person to pay a smaller tax bill than another person while still receiving the extremely valuable value we've all been told we receive from government?

Seems like the answer is to give those people less of the extremely valuable value if they want to pay less.

Re:tax avoidance

[Kohath]

It isn't new. Its been going on for decades. You are too stupid to realize it. For every dollar they don't pay in taxes, the dollar needs to come from another source.

Why not just spend less? Then we'll all desperately miss the extremely valuable value we all receive from government and everyone will be eager to pay more when they see the consequences.

How bad has she fucked up?

[Hognoxious]

The article notes that this probably means trouble for CEO Marissa Mayer

Did she actually fuck up big-time, or did she just sort of muddle through without actually achieving much?

Because if it's the former, she could run in 2020.

Re:How bad has she fucked up?

[orgelspieler]

Yes, everything she touched at Yahoo turned to complete shit:

Acquisitions: Stamped, OnTheAir, Snip.it, Summly, xobni, Astrid. Basically everything but Tumblr or ad companies.

"Improvements" to: message boards, Flickr, sports, the logo, mail

Other shenanigans: NSA webcam pics, Java ad exploit

It was not a good 3.5 years. The only smart things she did was 1) approve repurchasing of some more Alibaba shares that they had sold back right before she took over, and 2) purchasing Tumblr (at least until they Yahoo! it all up. Full disclosure: I avoid Tumblr anyway, so they might have already scuttled this ship, I don't know).

That backwards anti-work from home thing

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate that Yahoo's employees are basically screwed. However, I have to say, I love that Yahoo is failing as a company because every time a manager thinks "Maybe we should stop all this telecommuting stuff and go with communal desks" I can point at Yahoo as an example of how well that will work out.

Thanks for being an example to the world of how not to do things, Marissa Mayer!

Re:That backwards anti-work from home thing

[luis_a_espinal]

I hate that Yahoo's employees are basically screwed. However, I have to say, I love that Yahoo is failing as a company because every time a manager thinks "Maybe we should stop all this telecommuting stuff and go with communal desks" I can point at Yahoo as an example of how well that will work out.

Thanks for being an example to the world of how not to do things, Marissa Mayer!

I love telecommuting when it works, but we now for a fact that Yahoo was laden with thousands of people who never set foot on company premises for years just milking their bi-weekly check by logging here and there from home. I've been in such companies, and I've seen the financial havoc that such practices break on the company.

When telecommuting works, use it. When it doesn't, cut it. Yahoo's case was the later. She did the right call on this.

Re:That backwards anti-work from home thing

[gweihir]

And by what magic would non-productive employees actually get productive when they have to be on-site? Do you put a watcher behind each one of them that makes sure they actually work?

The only thing that move accomplished is make the non-productive ones more expensive and to drive away productive ones that liked the freedom. Stupid.

Re:That backwards anti-work from home thing

[ranton]

And by what magic would non-productive employees actually get productive when they have to be on-site? Do you put a watcher behind each one of them that makes sure they actually work?

When Yahoo removed telecommuting, it was because of problems with management not with the individual workers. Management at Yahoo was too incompetent to manage telecommuting employees. Fixing this level of gross incompetence would have been too difficult and take too long, so Yahoo ended the telecommuting option.

The only thing that move accomplished is make the non-productive ones more expensive and to drive away productive ones that liked the freedom. Stupid.

If management was not capable of managing their employees, what makes you think they could properly identify non-productive employees? Marissa Mayer simply did not trust her managers enough to make these calls, and she wasn't going to investigate thousands of employees herself. She took to least bad option once she noticed how incompetent the Yahoo management was.

I obviously don't have enough information to know if Marissa was correct in believing Yahoo's management was not up to the task, but if she was correct then her actions seem justified.

Re:That backwards anti-work from home thing

[wyHunter]

The bigger question is, where is the management in the company? I work from home 100% of the time and I guarantee you, if I didn't produce my boss would be asking me why.

Re:That backwards anti-work from home thing

[gweihir]

Well, you might be right about the management. The problem is that if management is this grossly incompetent, you still have to fix management, not piss of the people doing actual work. The only justification for what she did would be that she wanted to obscure that she cannot fix the problem. Which makes the problem worse.

Re:That backwards anti-work from home thing

[ranton]

Well, you might be right about the management. The problem is that if management is this grossly incompetent, you still have to fix management, not piss of the people doing actual work. The only justification for what she did would be that she wanted to obscure that she cannot fix the problem. Which makes the problem worse.

To put this into more IT terms, Marissa Mayer inherited a gigantic rotting code base built upon decades of poor architectural choices. When put into that situation, you don't do a massive rewrite immediately. You find ways to treat sections of the code base as a black box so new code can interface with it but be kept in separate modules. Once you have divided the old code base into modules as best you can, you start identifying its core functionality so you can determine what rewrites make the most impact.

I agree that ideally Marissa Mayer could have completely overhauled management, just like a new software architect could ideally rewrite the entire old code base. But neither are really feasible.

I wouldn't be surprised if experienced managers view new management who overhaul an entire company structure similarly as experienced developers view new developers who want to rewrite everything from scratch.

Re:That backwards anti-work from home thing

[gweihir]

This seems to be a good comparison. One problem with rewriting things from scratch is that it is hard to find out what the old code actually does. In many cases you will end up with worse code, not better code, due to the old code having a log of maturity and most of its problems being known.

Well, yes, from that perspective that move makes some sense. While it does a lot of damage, this may actually not be avoidable.

Duck duck go

[Anonymous Coward]

What's is Yahoo's USP?

DuckDuckGo has privacy as its core gain. Sick of Google spyware and tracking? DuckDuckGo.com for search... not Yahoo.com
For maps, Here.com is upcoming, it's USP if a very very good offline more for the Android App, the here.com website's USP is privacy... not Yahoo maps.

etc.

They just seem to be poor copies of Google, with all the privacy and surveillance issues that make Google sites bad.

Re:Duck duck go

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't USP that delivery service with the brown trucks? ;)

Re:Duck duck go

[torqer]

unique selling proposition (point)

BTW I do welcome any and all references to pulp fiction.

Something has to be done

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't making any money.

Re:Something has to be done

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't making any money.

Fire the CEO and hire more employees who get stuff done maybe?

1 billion users?

[serviscope_minor]

The estimate of the number of users of Yahoo stuff is 1 billion. That's not all that far off the estimated 1.5bn for Facebook. It's also got an annual income a bit north of 7 billion dollars.

It seems remarkable that the value of that is considered so low in Yahoo compared to other companies. I guess people don't like seeing the future of those rather overvalued companies...

Re:1 billion users?

[Dan East]

Good point. How any business can have 1/7 of the entire population of the planet as users and be considered "struggling" is a bit strange. Unless they are bleeding money giving it all away for free in order to have that many users.

Re:1 billion users?

[ScentCone]

How any business can have 1/7 of the entire population of the planet as users and be considered "struggling" is a bit strange. Unless they are bleeding money giving it all away for free in order to have that many users.

Answers own question.

Re:1 billion users?

[Rakarra]

The estimate of the number of users of Yahoo stuff is 1 billion. That's not all that far off the estimated 1.5bn for Facebook

I think the difference is that those Facebook users actually go to Facebook and use Facebook services.

I suppose I would consider myself a "Yahoo user" even though that interaction was limited to Yahoo being the default start page on the web browser that came with my mobile phone. It's the default search engine for Firefox as well.

How many Yahoo users actually sought out yahoo?

Trouble for Marissa Mayer? How about employees?

[JoeyRox]

Marissa's salary at Yahoo (wages, options, and bonuses):

2014: $42 million
2013: $25 million
2012: $36 million
And I'm sure she'll be getting a nice parachute as well. That's pretty steep compensation for a company that has performed so poorly.

Meanwhile employees had their remote-work privileges revoked, allowing them to watch this slow-motion trainwreck of a CEO up close. And employees were recently asked by Mayer to reup for a long-term commitment to the company. Where does this leave all of them?

Re:Trouble for Marissa Mayer? How about employees?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> I'm sure she'll be getting a nice parachute as well

CNN calculated her current parachute could be $110M if Yahoo sells itself (which they are positioning themselves to do by shedding crap like Yahoo) or "just" $25.8 million if the board makes her redundant.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/0...

Re:Trouble for Marissa Mayer? How about employees?

[XxtraLarGe]

Meanwhile employees had their remote-work privileges revoked, allowing them to watch this slow-motion trainwreck of a CEO up close. And employees were recently asked by Mayer to reup for a long-term commitment to the company. Where does this leave all of them?

At least she's easy to look at. I'd hate to go through all of this while looking at Michael Dell or someone like that.

Re:Trouble for Marissa Mayer? How about employees?

[JoeyRox]

haha, true. That voice though - she sounds like Marge's sisters from the Simpsons.

Marissa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Patty and Selma: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Trouble for Marissa Mayer? How about employees?

[Anonymous Coward]

She's a mutt. Your standards are very low.

Re:Trouble for Marissa Mayer? How about employees?

[XxtraLarGe]

That voice though - she sounds like Marge's sisters from the Simpsons.

I could deal with that. If she had one of those Kardashian voices though, that would be impossible.

Re:Trouble for Marissa Mayer? How about employees?

[Dragonslicer]

And her time as the CEO of Yahoo will make her an experienced, qualified candidate for President.

Re:Trouble for Marissa Mayer? How about employees?

[swb]

I think she is quite attractive.

I'm curious about the psychology of how that works.

I would bet more than a few men she's worked with have spent at least some time thinking "I wonder what she looks like naked" or "I wonder what she's like to have sex with".

Does she think about that? Does it undermine her confidence -- "these guys aren't taking me seriously, they're thinking about what I'm like bent over a couch".

Or increase it somehow, knowing that maybe its something she can use against them -- "these morons are so preoccupied with my sexuality, I can get what I want"?

And how does it affect her relationship with her husband? IIRC, he's no slouch, but he's also not at her level of CEO-ness. Does their relationship have kind of a clinical neutrality to it, or is there some kind of top/bottom aspect to it?

Strangely, none of these questions come to mind when I think about Meg Whitman.

Re:Trouble for Marissa Mayer? How about employees?

[XxtraLarGe]

Strangely, none of these questions come to mind when I think about Meg Whitman.

That's not strange, that's perfectly normal.

Re:Trouble for Marissa Mayer? How about employees?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yikes, she's got those Downsy eyes.

Re:Trouble for Marissa Mayer? How about employees?

[unixisc]

From Wiki, it says that she gives birth to twin daughters this month. That should keep her busy. But if she has to run, the GOP field is too crowded - she should run against Hilary. Need a replacement for Chafee and Webb

Re:Trouble for Marissa Mayer? How about employees?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow.. that's disgusting. Really. I can't understand that sort of compensation for a single person. How can any one person offer that much REAL value? ...yet we see this sort of thing every day.

Re:Trouble for Marissa Mayer? How about employees?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow.. that's disgusting. Really. I can't understand that sort of compensation for a single person. How can any one person offer that much REAL value? ...yet we see this sort of thing every day.

Thought about it for a moment and came to the answer for my own question:

no ethics
no values
no humanity
no sympathy
no redeaming qualities

Thanks, sorry to waste your time.

Re:Trouble for Marissa Mayer? How about employees?

[kamapuaa]

Current Market Cap of Yahoo: $32.9 Billion
2012 Market Cap: $13 Billion.

I guess she's not doing everything wrong. If she's even a small part of that $20 Billion increase in Market Capitalization, the money shareholders are spending on her salary is well spent.

Re:Trouble for Marissa Mayer? How about employees?

[JoeyRox]

Yahoo's increase in market cap is entirely from the appreciation of Yahoo's stake in Alibaba. That would have happened even if a monkey was the CEO and conducted every board meeting by throwing his feces at the board of directors. The value of Yahoo's core business has dwindled to only $2B by recent analyst estimates.

Re:Trouble for Marissa Mayer? How about employees?

[david_thornley]

That would have happened even if a monkey was the CEO and conducted every board meeting by throwing his feces at the board of directors.

I've worked at places that would be improved by that management method.

Re:Women shouldn't run businesses

[Anonymous Coward]

especially tech businesses. This horse-faced braying donkey has the IQ of a pencil eraser and the competence of a Quebcois civil servant.

Women majoritarily just aren't meant for this.

I have only known one successful female-owned consulting company during the 20 years I worked in IT.

Long gone

[Ultra64]

Yahoo hasn't been yahoo for many years.

They need a name for the new company

[14erCleaner]

I'd suggest "Yay!" to save valuable screen real estate on smartphones.

Right here

[PopeRatzo]

Spin off this.

1.5 billion unprofitable users

[Anonymous Coward]

One piece of data explains it all. P/E = 138.

Sound investment

[hAckz0r]

So, so we are supposed to invest all our retirement funds in an American company that is betting that the Chinese will beat us economically with their socialist version of free trade? Their stock market just tanked not so long ago, should we worry?

Oh, and remember that their stock market reporting and analysis services are completely non-biased. What could go wrong?

what should the name of the new company be?

[goombah99]

YooHoo (to acknowledge the google plant Marisa mayer's undermining strategy"

suggest your own below

Re:what should the name of the new company be?

[Anonymous Coward]

AliIncomeFree
ChinaMooned
AliBoned

Re:what should the name of the new company be?

[Anonymous Coward]

YooDooDoo
HooVille

Re:what should the name of the new company be?

[goombah99]

The Company Formerly Known as Yahoo
YaHole or maybe YaHolio
Yarbles (as in a kick in the Yarbles during a little ultraviolence).
YaFoo

Re:what should the name of the new company be?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yenima

Re:what should the name of the new company be?

[Spy Handler]

It would just be a holding company of some sort. Obviously the new company will have the yahoo.com domain and all the other assets associated with their online business. Seeing as how name recognition is probably the only thing they still have going for them, it would be stupid beyond belief to change their domain.

"Yahoo.com is now xyz.com. Please visit our new site at xyz.com!" - can you imagine?

I predict the original company (which will consist of just Alibaba shares) will rename itself to YahooBaba Inc, and the new online business company will continue to call itself "Yahoo!" while being a subsidiary of a new parent company with a generic name... something like Alphabet Holdings.

Oh wait, that one's taken... how about Betazoid Holdings, Inc?

Re:what should the name of the new company be?

[goombah99]

YahooBaba cries out for 'YeahBaby' or YaBaby

Re:what should the name of the new company be?

[Anonymous Coward]

YabaBabaDo

There goes my e-mail!

[McLae]

What a pain! Will the Yahoo mail systems close down? I do not know how many places my e-mail is at. (Including /.) Nothing else seems to work as well for me.

Ok, so it is called ATT mail. Still yahoo app.

Re:There goes my e-mail!

[k6mfw]

I'm concerned as well as I have a yahoo email. I'm also on a few yahoogroups that are informative and useful even if the formatting these days is worst than it used to be (hotmail is worst). Everyone says go to gmail and googlegroups, but it seems I continually have to upgrade to upgrade in order to meet the next upgrade of google systems (OK so I don't fully understand all of google services, I don't work for them nor do I do work for them for free).

What's in a name?

[ScooterComputer]

When I first read this, gotta admit, I kinda thought "Whaaaa?"

But it hit me. This will be an EXCELLENT opportunity for Yahoo! (YAHOO!? Yahoo!? Yahoo?) to finally move past an 800lb elephant standing in the corner...right over there...IN THE CORNER!

THAT NAME.

C'mon. "Yahoo!" was fun back in the '90s. That was the internet then. But it doesn't carry the same reverence now. And this move provides a chance. If Yahoo was named something...BETTER...maybe some of its issues would be different. Sure, getting a DOMAIN NAME is going to be a pain in the ass, but they do still have some money. Whether it be for prep'ing for acquisition or trying to move forward, moving away from that name has been an (mostly) unmentioned problem for a long while now.

And with competition like BING!, Google/Alphabet, "-i-" Cloud, and DuckDuckGo, I think they CAN do better.

(However they need to NOT bring the folks into the decision-making circle who worked on the logo redesign; clearly they're idiots.)

Re:What's in a name?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they should go with meatspin or possibly goatse.

Sell Company, New Way To Ditch Bitch CEO

[Anonymous Coward]

This is GREAT.

Board can't fire Marissa. So the Board sells off the original company so Marissa has nothing to boss around.

Ha ha

Split-N-Splat

[Tablizer]

Tech companies used to have merger fever, now they have splitting fever. Is it a fad thing, or are there other factors at play?

Most tech mergers haven't gone well, and maybe financiers and investors finally got a clue and stopped rewarding merging.

Is there enough data to show the opposite works: that splitting on average increases net profit of the parts?

Aabaco? That's genius!

[OakDragon]

Meyer chose that name so that it will be in front of the phone book!

Hold the phone!

[fahrbot-bot]

Ya-who ?

Re:Hold the phone!

[UnknownSoldier]

Touche! Mod +1 Funny

track record of ex-Googlers

[Anonymous Coward]

Just Curious:
Of all the ex-googlers that have the left, how many have helmed other companies, that resulted in increased shareholder value or increased market presence?

Spin-off as in "Circling the drain"?

[ntsucks]

Core Yahoo is nothing. It will just circle the drain until someone snaps it up for cheap.

Nothing to see here, just tax minimization at work

[Steve1952]

Yahoo (present) renames it self to Acme Holdings, and spins off the Yahoo part as Yahoo. Presto! Yahoo now divested of non-Yahoo parts, and can even keep calling itself Yahoo. Acme Holdings then renames it self to whatever.

my concern: Other Space

[dAzED1]

Yahoo Screen has a cute/fun show called /,a href="https://screen.yahoo.com/other-space/">Other Space, have been patiently waiting for season 2... The show has Milana Vayntrub in it - the woman in the AT&T commercials, for people who go crazy over women in commercials. She wasn't why I watched the show, but she did a great job.

Yahoo's (lost) opportunities were/are legion

[fyngyrz]

What exactly would another CEO have done differently?

From the perspective of a long-time and fairly active flickr user, one thing they could have done was given the users the features they have constantly been asking for, instead of constant "UX" changes that (a) no one wanted and (b) removed useful features.

From the perspective of a groups user, bringing the groups up to, oh, say, the 2005 level of message display and convenience might have done something for them. It would have been nice not to have to wade through pages-long dumps of people's CSS, and to have some kind of rational quoting mechanism, too.

Their email system is junk. They could simply have had someone write them a decent email client. Although I have to say, Google hasn't got one either, so that appears to be a more general failure of vision than just a Yahoo-centric problem.

I'm not sure how others feel about this, but when Yahoo tossed out the curated tree of sites and replaced it with just another clumsy search along the lines of Google's, I stopped using them to find anything. Google, which has the best search I've found so far, is awful compared to a decently curated list, which, for a while anyway, was a reasonable description of Yahoo's offering. Yahoo failed to give that effort the resources it needed, and consequently fell so far behind in keeping it up to date it became fossilized, while also attempting to monetize it in a way that was both inherently offensive and reduced its value via link-buying (much as Google has done with search)

I still go to DMOZ for many things instead of Google, because Google is nothing less than inundated with irrelevance. The problem with Google's search is that "popularity" is the underlying metric, whereas what I'm typically looking for is quality -- whereas "popularity" is the metric that reliably retrieves mediocrity. Once you get through the advertising spam, of course.

Speaking of popular, Yahoo's early bought-it property Geocities was a hive of... well, you know. But it was also 10+ million web pages that they just tossed in the garbage. I doubt that earned them any friends. At all. The stats had Geocities as the 3rd most-visited place on the web originally; good job wasting that opportunity.

And that's just what I know about. With all of the services Yahoo has offered over the years, I'm sure there were (and are) other visible points of weakness that could have been addressed. For the services I have used, not one of them was ever given the time and resources they needed to extend their potential in even the most obvious ways.

What I see here is a company that really doesn't know what its doing and doesn't pay attention to its customer input. All they do is in the crudest and ham-handed way possible, take whatever they have and try to monetize it no matter what that does to the user's experience, resources, and data. Of course you want to monetize things, but you have to monetize things that have value to the user, and if you don't pay attention to the latter, why, you could end up having to "spin off" your stuff because with all your user-abusive monetizing in place, you don't end up with, you know, users.

at least they admitted there is nothing to sell

[swschrad]

Yahoo has recently been valued in the negative by a Wall Street weasel. probably accurately. I haven't been to the site for a decade. Oh, wait, I take that back, I was looking for instructions online on replacing the suspension air shocks on my car, and looked like an interesting link. well, it went to a crap page with thousands of unanswered questions... and the ones that were answered, on the order of "how do I apply nail polish?" had lame joke answers.

Yahoo can die now.

Oh snap!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh snap!

A guess at the reason for the spinoff

[Joe Branya]

IRS has said it will not bless the sale of the Alibaba stock, so any sale would lead to a huge tax bill for Yahoo shareholders. The same rule will apply to the Softbank shares. To avoid the issue the Yahoo Board is apparently doing the following: 1) Spinning off all the operating parts of Yahoo to a new company so the sale of the old Yahoo company (meaning the Alibaba and Softbank shares) can be "clean"- no antitrust or national security objections to a sale; 2) sell "old Yahoo" (the shell company that owns the stock) in a reverse takeover to Alibaba or some Chinese ally (probably a Chinese-based company funded by government-controlled banks). This was the route used by Pfizer in the takeover of Allergan last year; the surviving entity was an Irish company so the tax was low and the foreign cash could be unlocked with no tax consequences. People call it "tax avoidance" but it is legal.

If I'm right expect the sale of "old yahoo" a few months after the spinoff and a huge cry of "this sort of thing must be stopped!' by the NYT editorial page

ONELIST is Back!

[tmjva]

Does this mean they'll spin off THAT acquisition and bring back a simple list-serv?