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Mozilla Could Walk Away and Still Get More Than $1 Billion If It Doesn't Like Yahoo's Buyer (recode.net)
Kara Swisher, reporting for Recode: Under terms of a contract that has been seen by Recode, whoever acquires Yahoo might have to pay Mozilla annual payments of $375 million through 2019 if it does not think the buyer is one it wants to work with and walks away. That's according to a clause in the Silicon Valley giant's official agreement with the browser maker that CEO Marissa Mayer struck in late 2014 to become the default search engine on the well-known Firefox browser in the U.S. Mozilla switched to Yahoo from Google after Mayer offered a much more lucrative deal that included what potential buyers of Yahoo say is an unprecedented term to protect Mozilla in a change-of-control scenario. It was a scenario that Mayer never thought would happen, which is why she apparently pushed through the possibly problematic deal point. According to the change-of-control term, 9.1 in the agreement, Mozilla has the right to leave the partnership if -- under its sole discretion and in a certain time period -- it did not deem the new partner acceptable. And if it did that, even if it struck another search deal, Yahoo is still obligated to pay out annual revenue guarantees of $375 million.
They really ought to just exercise the option unless the buyer is someone they really really want to work with. Its a lot of money and it would be very good for the foundation to get that money.
Yahoo investors were fools.
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Buy Opera and fully move to the blink engine?
That's a billion FUs.
You think designing a new UI every 6 weeks is cheap ?
$997 million of it will go into a program to get more lesbian Eskimo Little Person left-handed albinos into programming, and $5 million will go into studying ways to make Firefox more like Chrome, then they'll have emergency fundraising to keep from defaulting on the $2 million they're in debt.
Specifically for Marissa Mayer, the Peter Principle.
Marrissa Mayer knew what she was doing. If this agreement actually exists, it was intentionally engineered to help resist a hostile takeover or shareholders forcing a liquidation of assets. Mayer took this job knowing that if either of those scenarios played out, she would be dumped without the track record to get another job of similar scale. Setting up this contract with Mozilla is one way she has been able to retain her control thus far.
Poison Pill
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Marissa Mayer has to be post-menopausal and likely has short mannish hair. Bonus points if she's fat like all the other americans too!
Seriously? Live under a rock much? Not only does she have three very young kids, she is seriously attractive (in my opinion.... Actually, no, she is objectively, factually attractive). She might run tech companies equally as poorly as Meg Whitman, but she is way, way better looking than 99.8% of CEOs.
Stop that. Radio Shack sells batteries and cheap Chinese trinkets. That's more than Yahoo does.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Maybe that was actually the point. It's a "poison pill" clause. It's well known that Mayer has been against selling off the company all along but her hand is being forced by the board.
Breakfast served all day!
It's more likely that he thinks "if 99% of your users loudly declaim that your latest change is an utter bucket of septic arsedribble" then it may be worth at least considering that it might be, to a degree, a bit suboptimal round the edges.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This contract, her golden parachute if bought out, retention bonuses for key staff if bought out, and some other contracts that make a buyout look less appealing. My guess is that they were trying to swallow a poison pill -- make it too financially dangerous to get bought. But then they realized the next week that the best option was to get bought :)
If their marketshare went down so much it's not because of "some user somewhere", it has to be the majority of them and it means Firefox is just making one extremely bad decision after another, non-stop, for years.