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Starboard Launches Proxy Fight To Remove Entire Yahoo Board (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Activist hedge fund Starboard Value LP moved on Thursday to overthrow the entire board of Yahoo Inc, including Chief Executive Marissa Mayer, who has struggled to turn around the company in her nearly four years at the helm. Starboard, which has been pushing for changes at Yahoo since 2014 and owns about 1.7 percent of the company, said it would nominate nine candidates for the board. The proxy fight comes as Yahoo is pressing ahead with an auction of its core Internet business, which includes search, mail and news sites. Yahoo and Starboard could still come to an agreement before the company's annual meeting, expected to be in late June. If they cannot avoid a proxy fight and the Yahoo board election is taken to a shareholder vote, attention will swing to the large mutual and index funds that own the stock and will carry heavy weight in the final tally. Yahoo and Starboard representatives met on March 10 to discuss ways the two sides could avoid a proxy fight, according to people familiar with the matter. But those talks broke down, in part because Starboard was upset by Yahoo's announcement that same day that it appointed two new board directors, these people say.
They could probably make a few bucks selling their office chairs.
One of the problems of public companies is this sort of thing...
Someone who owns less than 2% of the company is drawing massive attention towards something that will keep the leadership from doing what the company needs long term.
I would not be shocked if Marissa Mayer has had to devote a lot of time and energy to this sort of thing over the past 4 years, and probably has a much greater awareness of how hard the big chair is. Not because running a company is so hard, but because she has to deal with thousands of investors who all want to give their 2 cents.
This is one of the reasons that Dell went private, it was the only way to plan longer than 3 months in advance. Wall Street is so focused on quarterly numbers, it is really hard to make 5 year plans. If a company doesn't post impressive results quickly, the CEO gets tossed out and someone new brought it.
The only thing a proxy fight can do is devalue the company even more. Just as the stupid fight to oust Marissa Meyer has devalued the company. Yahoo lost as a Big Internet company when it outsourced search to Google and focused on content. Content is hard, expensive, competitive and very hit or miss. By the time you know whether or not you have a winning combination you may have already moved on to try something else. And as far as I can tell Yahoo has just a few brand/content offerings that are very popular with everything else just kind puttering along. The Internet needs some more non-Facebook-Google-Twitter Internet companies to remain vital and it is too bad Yahoo has been on the long slide down.
Frankly, Marissa Mayer faced a nearly impossible job, turn around Yahoo!, a company that by 2012 was largely pointless in the Internet space and had failed to move into new spaces and allowed new companies to run right over it.
Ten years before, in 2002, it was a household name, however it largely has lost that due to not keeping up with the times.
It might well not have mattered who became CEO in 2012, the company was probably already past the point of no return. My mother uses Yahoo, as does my older brother. Our friends who have teenagers? They likely don't even know what Yahoo is.
If Starboard has taken over they should fire every web developer and person involved with the crapfest they call a web site. Since they changed to the horrid design I, and many others I know, haven't gone back.
It had to have been "redesigned" by a web developer because no one with any sort of common sense or scintilla of design comprehension would have thought it looks good or is usable.
The next up to be fired are the idiots who force people to give up their phone number to make an account. It doesn't do anything for security or prevent spammers from generating accounts. All it does is annoy people.
This is probably one of the few times a hedge fund taking over a company may actually produce something useful.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Anyone willing to give a tl;dr explanation for those of us who don't want to get lost on Wikipedia for the next couple hours?
Wait wait....Yahoo has a board of directors? I'll need more proof than just this bland assertion.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
You know what's a lot less productive than a telecommuting employee that's already working for the company?
Nobody working in that position.
BTW: Another winner company has your same opinion with the same butts in seats position on employees. You may have used their products. BlackBerry.
No, you have that wrong. You can't serve on the boards of two competing corporations. When you say "in the same market" it does not mean the same thing.
Here's the article again. You should read it:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/ce...
And here's the study behind the article:
http://jom.sagepub.com/content...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Another one, before they started losing customers en mass: IBM. Before they consolidated their employees to the GDC model (which had them working from homes or perhaps if they had a local IBM office), customers would have dedicated IBMers with them for a particular role. Now that many of those dedicated people were told to either move to a remote location or lose your job, well... And all of this was before the massive overseas transition, too. This was when IBM still had a sizeable portion of their workforce in the US. Not even 8 years ago.
I'd like Failbook to become irrelevant, but we're not quite there yet. Give it time.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!