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Marissa Mayer Says Yahoo Continues To Make Solid Progress, Earnings Report Says Otherwise (fool.com)

tomhath quotes a report from Fool: Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer tried to emphasize the progress that the company has made. "We continue to make solid progress against our 2016 plan," Mayer said, and "in addition to our efforts to improve the operating business, our board has made great progress on strategic alternatives." The CEO argued that the results met or exceeded the company's own guidance. Yahoo! was able to post a revenue increase by changing the ways that it presents revenue related to its search agreement with Microsoft, and without that change, adjusted revenue of $1.055 billion was down 15% from the year-ago quarter. That was even worse than the 13% drop investors were expecting, and adjusted EBITDA fell by more than a third. That resulted in adjusted net earnings of $0.09 per share, missing the consensus forecast by a penny but also glossing over a $440 million net loss on a GAAP basis. The company took a $395 million goodwill impairment charge and an $87 million intangibles impairment charge related to its Tumblr unit, determining that the fair value of the division is less than the amount indicated on Yahoo!'s balance sheet. It was also revealed that Yahoo is writing down the value of its Tumblr acquisition by $482 million, citing lower projections for the social network's future performance, according to a report from CNNMoney. Last quarter, the company took a $230 million write-down on its Tumblr acquisition. Since Yahoo acquired Tumblr for $1.1 billion in 2013, Yahoo has written down more than half of its value.

130 comments

  1. Doowylloh Accounting by Hognoxious · · Score: 5, Funny

    If she told me the sky was blue I'd glance up just to check.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    1. Re:Doowylloh Accounting by XxtraLarGe · · Score: 4, Funny

      If she told me the sky was blue I'd glance up just to check.

      Yeah, with these kinds of numbers, she's almost as bad as Baghdad Bob saying the Iraqis were in full control as American tanks were rolling by in the background.

      --
      Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
    2. Re:Doowylloh Accounting by invictusvoyd · · Score: 2

      Dude don't insult the Iraqis and Baghdad Bob.

    3. Re:Doowylloh Accounting by roman_mir · · Score: 2

      She is literary Yahoo's Minister of Information.. She should be known as Yahoo Bob.

    4. Re:Doowylloh Accounting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      She was Larry Page's girlfriend when she was at Google. Totally qualified to be CEO of a major tech company.

    5. Re:Doowylloh Accounting by Alomex · · Score: 1

      Yeah, I otherwise always trust CEOs and politicians. Marissa is the only one among them that I wouldn't trust. /sarcasm

    6. Re:Doowylloh Accounting by I4ko · · Score: 3, Informative

      Well, she said solid progress, she didn't say in which direction. A solid progress towards the bottom is still a solid progress.

    7. Re:Doowylloh Accounting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Tch...Please...Buncha fig eaters tryin to find reverse on a Soviet tank..

    8. Re:Doowylloh Accounting by nitehawk214 · · Score: 1

      Still, they don't deserve to be compared to Yahoo.

      --
      I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
    9. Re:Doowylloh Accounting by Shoten · · Score: 1

      If she told me the sky was blue I'd glance up just to check.

      Oh, come now. She's never been misleading in the slightest...I've seen the blood test by Theranos that proves it.

      --

      For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
    10. Re:Doowylloh Accounting by MachineShedFred · · Score: 1

      I get the sentiment, but we've always got people crowing about corporations not taking the long view in favor of pumping up the next quarter's filing. What if the numbers from this 10-Q don't match what she's saying because Yahoo is looking farther than 3 months ahead?

      Given track record, it's unlikely, but still.

      --
      Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
    11. Re: Doowylloh Accounting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      He used her like a smallpox blanket to wreck Yahoo when he was done.

    12. Re:Doowylloh Accounting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If she told me the sky was blue I'd glance up just to check.

      Yeah, with these kinds of numbers, she's almost as bad as Baghdad Bob saying the Iraqis were in full control as American tanks were rolling by in the background.

      Topical. You know, that reminds me of a story from the French and Indian War...

    13. Re:Doowylloh Accounting by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      This isn't "we're making less profit because we're reinvesting", it's "we don't seem to have any money coming in". Unless I missed something in the article.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    14. Re:Doowylloh Accounting by lsatenstein · · Score: 1

      If she told me the sky was blue I'd glance up just to check.

      I use yahoo mail! I prefer it to Gmail. Occasionally I will use Evolution to access both Y and G. I prefer Y because I don't have to give Google information about my life.

      --
      Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
  2. Yahoo the brand .. by khz6955 · · Score: 2, Funny

    "Yahoo"... The brand is the problem. It sounds like a good name for a personal website in 1998 (with 85 gifs and a turquoise background). link

    1. Re:Yahoo the brand .. by PopeRatzo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "Yahoo"... The brand is the problem. It sounds like a good name for a personal website in 1998 (with 85 gifs and a turquoise background).

      Say what you will about those ugly old websites, but at least they weren't tracking your every move and trying to upskirt your personal data for profit.

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
    2. Re:Yahoo the brand .. by macs4all · · Score: 1

      "Yahoo"... The brand is the problem. It sounds like a good name for a personal website in 1998 (with 85 gifs and a turquoise background).

      Say what you will about those ugly old websites, but at least they weren't tracking your every move and trying to upskirt your personal data for profit.

      LOL! No doubt!

      And this comes just one day after I said in a staff meeting how our corporate website looked "amateurish" because it uses a fairly saturated background color on most pages.

      Now maybe I think we should keep that look, and perhaps change the font to "Courier New"...

  3. If Tumblr is free by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    How does it have ANY value?

    1. Re: If Tumblr is free by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Volume

    2. Re: If Tumblr is free by rudy_wayne · · Score: 2

      We lose money on every sale, but make up for it in volume!!

  4. If Yahoo dies... by ThosLives · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I fear for my email. Not because Yahoo! mail is great, but because I'd rather not have Google or Microsoft controlling my mail.

    --
    "There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
    1. Re:If Yahoo dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm sure Yahoo mail will live on, some Chinese investment firm will pick up the service.

    2. Re:If Yahoo dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I fear for my email. Not because Yahoo! mail is great, but because I'd rather not have Google or Microsoft controlling my mail.

      Honest question: why do you consider it better to have Yahoo control your email than either Google or Microsoft? I mean aren't they all just variations on the same theme of evil-overload-corporation? I personally use Google for my email, not out of any strong conviction, more out of convenience.

    3. Re:If Yahoo dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Get your own domain already. It's 2016, not 1996.

    4. Re:If Yahoo dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I find this a bit confusing. On the surface you seem to fear a large company having control over a freely provided email account which you depend upon personally. Perhaps you fear the company will scan and harvest information from such an account for the company's gain.

      But then you use Yahoo, which is fundamentally no different than Google or Microsoft in this respect. Is it just brand loyalty that's at the bottom of this?

    5. Re:If Yahoo dies... by mrlinux11 · · Score: 1

      There are many more email services out there besides Microsoft and Google.

    6. Re:If Yahoo dies... by invictusvoyd · · Score: 1

      Seriously.

    7. Re:If Yahoo dies... by Fruit · · Score: 1

      Yahoo! are too incompetent to do anything evil with his mail.

    8. Re:If Yahoo dies... by lucm · · Score: 1

      Microsoft has always been more keen on respecting users privacy with webmail (they don't even show the origin ip in the header when you email someone) and outlook.com works well for casual emails, they make it easy to block/unsubscribe/search, and it's also easy to create email aliases so you don't share your real addresss with say, Papa johns or Amazon.

      However for some reason when you start using Office365 (the paid one) you're forced to use this crime against computing called Outlook Web, and it's 100% horrible (performance, GUI, features, etc).

      Meanwhile with Google you always get Gmail, free or paid, and while I'm not a fan of their icons UI or the lack of basic features such as a mailing list in the paid version, at least it's consistent.

      --
      lucm, indeed.
    9. Re:If Yahoo dies... by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      I'm the owner and maintainer of a _active_ mailing list on Yahoo.
      However I had no need to log on to my "Yahoo Account", so they canceled my Yahoo Account.
      I funnily still get the mails from that list.

      Not sure if I ever do anything Yahoo related again.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    10. Re:If Yahoo dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

      Microsoft respect user privacy?? Hah! They were the first to sign up for PRISM, they even gave into the FBI's demand to backdoor their disk encryption when there is zero law requiring that backdoor.

      http://mashable.com/2013/09/11/fbi-microsoft-bitlocker-backdoor/#KSEgdi1EX8qJ

      That is just the tip of the iceberg with that shithole of a company. Have you ever looked at the vast swathes of the system that their Office Suite for Android accesses?? The office suite that Microsoft gets companies to bundle in their phones.

      It uploads megabytes of data from your phone, it access the camera, the microphone, lots of data files, sends a big encrypted packet up to Microsoft servers even if you never run their office app, or accept their EULA. Kill it's service and it will restart automatically after a suitable break.

    11. Re:If Yahoo dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Remember when it was 6 months plus two months for every year for expiration? Then they switched it to one year for everyone. Stupid move. I would have settled for one-year e-mail dormancy where no new incoming e-mails would occur until being logged into again, but with a greater than one-year account expiration.

      As for comment https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9402249&cid=52540353 made by someone else.
      Aliases are broken now in the "light version". You reply to an e-mail that was sent to your alias, it uses your default e-mail address. And the full version doesn't look correct in some browsers now. Their improvements are horrible and I don't think they care.

      Regardless of what we think about Yahoo!, if they go under, a lot of people who rely/are stuck on Yahoo! Mail are going to be hurt.

    12. Re:If Yahoo dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This cunt intentionally wrecked Yahoo.

    13. Re:If Yahoo dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why on earth would you consider Yahoo any better? You realize Yahoo provides data to law enforcement without a warrant right? At least Microsoft and Google require a warrant.

    14. Re:If Yahoo dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      At the moment, protonmail seems legit.
      Doesn't give you massive amounts of storage like gmail, though if you need multiple gigabytes or custom domains there's still a paid account option($50/yr).

    15. Re:If Yahoo dies... by lucm · · Score: 2

      Dude/dudette, chillout with the big brother stuff.

      I said they are more keen on respecting user privacy in *webmail* (not office or windows) and it was as opposed to google or yahoo.

      We all know about the NSA/FBI/etc stuff. None of the mainstream providers has a good track record when it comes to law enforcement or government snooping. Google has even provided the court with emails that were deleted and unavailable to the legitimate account owner. They all suck.

      My point is about privacy in your daily life, with people that don't have access to NSA supercomputers or stingrays or wiretaps.

      Suppose that you have a jealous wife to which you frequently lie. Consider this:

      -outlook.com won't show the original ip from which you sent a message, so you won't get busted if you sent it from Vegas while you're supposed to be on a business trip in Idaho

      -outlook.com won't use the content of your emails to tailor the ads you see on all Microsoft properties; unlike gmail, which can put you in an awkward situation if you've been pursuing a project that your wife forbids (ex: moving to Spain, or going to gun shows). When ads linked to that hot topic show up in your google or youtube searches or others, and your wife is not clueless, she will figure out what you're up to

      -outlook.com puts a big warning at the bottom of the screen when your account is configured to forward a copy of all your incoming mail to another address. That's tool #1 in the jealous wife arsenal.

      -outlook.com is a lot more suspicious of connections from a new device/location, even if people guess your password.

      So yeah, there's many aspects to privacy, and none of the above points apply to Office Outlook or other Microsoft products. If someone wants total privacy they need more serious stuff but this is just an outlook.com vs gmail thread.

      --
      lucm, indeed.
    16. Re:If Yahoo dies... by CanadianMacFan · · Score: 1

      Try getting your own domain. You can host it for free at https://freedns.afraid.org/ and then find a free mail provider. I have used https://www.zoho.com/ for the past couple of years and been pleased with them. You could also skip the domain and just get your mail at Zoho (or where you get your free mail from). With Zoho you get a number of mail accounts with their free program so if you create your own domain you can have accounts for your family or friends.

  5. What if they want to loose money... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    What if yahoo was just a straw man put together to finance acquisitions so that a few could sell their worthless unicorns, then die slowly so that it did not attract too much attention. What a great exit strategy that would have been if actually architected and executed.

    1. Re: What if they want to loose money... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Great? It would be fucking brilliant!

      Nevertheless, looking at that goodwill charge should be a lesson to companies buying over valued Silicon Valley companies and the fact that their valuation methods are all smoke and mirrors.

    2. Re: What if they want to loose money... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      As a shareholder, they're goal had better be to tight money...

    3. Re:What if they want to loose money... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's pretty much what Yahoo has been doing for the last 20 years. They made Mark Cuban rich by paying him somewhere around $5 Billion for his worthless bullshit company. Then there's $1.1 Billion for Tumblr, another worthless bullshit company that generates zero profit. Then there's a few hundred million dollars to buy several worthless bullshit companies started by former Google employees. The list goes on and on.

      But it's not just Yahoo. A lot of companies are doing the same thing. And why not? There's no penalty for failure. The worst that can happen is you'll get fired and walk away with a mulit-million dollar severance package that will hold you over quite nicely until you land your next CEO job.

  6. Bonus by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    She's just laying down the case for her upcoming bonus..

    1. Re:Bonus by invictusvoyd · · Score: 1

      She's just laying down the case

      Yeah right .

  7. What if they want to tight money? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What then? Huh?

  8. They need to sell off quickly. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yahoo has some valuable web properties, but they're hurting themselves badly lately.

    Take for instance Yahoo Finance. It's the largest, in terms of users, finance site online. Roughly 200m unique people. Many of them (including my self) are daily users for almost 2 decades. In using Yahoo Finance you typically use some other properties of yahoo, such as Email (required for an account), message boards, news (linked from the main page and from individual company information.), and video (which is forced down your throat in the last 2-3 years.)

    That's worth quite a bit of money, in fact I'd say it's one of the few properties left that yahoo hasn't screwed up in 30 years... until last week. You see, the site layout for Yahoo Finance hasn't changed in 20 years. Sure there have been a few new things here and there, but for the most part it was a simple, easy to load page, with LOTS of information on a single page or two.

    However a while back they merged Sports, Entertainment, and Finance into the same department. Probably because Yahoo wanted for a time to become a media company. Sports and Entertainment got a make over to make them more Mobile/web3.0 friendly. Large amounts of white space, infinite scrolling, minimal amount of interface/links, etc. They finally got around to doing it to Yahoo Finance. Only problem this sort of thing doesn't work for the type of people who use finance. As such it has been critically panned by pretty much everyone, it's completely useless, and seems to be designed by people who have zero financial literacy, or at the very least don't understand the basics/needs of financial markets. Nearly everyone is flocking to other sites which provide nearly the same amount of functionality as the old Yahoo Finance, including myself, my father, and a number of friends.

    Bit of a long rant, but Yahoo is eroding their own value. And its their own fault. Yahoo Finance and properties linked to it imo were about the only positive web properties Yahoo held. (Same could be said for Sports, and there is an over lap for most of those properties.)

    They just need to spin off their Baba holdings, and takes Verizon's billion dollar offer and be done with it. It'll be bad for the internet, but it's about the only good business decision they have left unless someone has a better offer on the table.

    1. Re:They need to sell off quickly. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Agree completely on Yahoo Finance. They just destroyed their one valuable asset. Makes you wonder if they did it on purpose as a tactic for their sale (but to what end?). Reminds me of The Producers.

      For the record, you can still reach the old Finance site by using the Canadian version, https://ca.finance.yahoo.com, or by appending "&bypass=true" to the old urls.

      https://finance.yahoo.com/?bypass=true
      https://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=YHOO&bypass=true

    2. Re:They need to sell off quickly. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nearly everyone is flocking to other sites which provide nearly the same amount of functionality as the old Yahoo Finance, including myself, my father, and a number of friends.

      As somebody who used to go to Yahoo Finance every so often to look up a stock price and history, which other sites do you now recommend? All the other ones I've tried take forever to load, and they don't give basic information like market capitalization or a graph of recent price history.

    3. Re: They need to sell off quickly. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What other good financial sites are there,
      that don't require I have a financial account with them?

    4. Re:They need to sell off quickly. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Same Anon you're replying to. I recommend Barchart and Finviz. Both will have the sort of information you're looking for. Finviz even has a crap load more information in a simple table than yahoo finance had on an entire company profile.

    5. Re: They need to sell off quickly. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Same Anon you're replying to,

      There are quite a few, but none of the really good ones are 100% free. I have been recommending to people to try Barchart and Finviz, however they both require payment for specific features. For instance, Finviz will not give you Intraday charts for free... But Barchart does! Barchart won't give you a Screener or Technical charts, but that's pretty much what Finviz is for free!

      There are a few other options, Morningstar, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal. None of them truly do what Yahoo Finance used to do for 100% free, but I found mixing and matching Barchart and Finviz pretty much covers all my personal needs. Your mileage may vary however.

    6. Re:They need to sell off quickly. by iampiti · · Score: 1

      IMO making websites (and, in general, computer UIs) mobile/touch friendly has made them much worse.
      I understand the benefits of having a single UI for everyone but that leads to the least common denominator which include sparse UIs which tons of whitespace.
      That's forcing users of traditional PCs to use a UI that's worse that's not optimal for what their screen and input interfaces allow and that's worse than what they had before.
      I understand that the mobile devices are now a majority but, please can't we get 2 UIs? one for desktop and one for mobile/touch. I'm not asking for much just for what we used to have.

    7. Re:They need to sell off quickly. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hi AC,
      A while back, Yahoo stopped caring about keeping their best people. A bunch of the good management got tired of the whole QPR (Quarterly Performance Reviews) game of "Survivor" and left (the guy I helped out with the last lead design left for OpenTable and I left once they decided you couldn't get out of QPR by contracting). ...but Meyer's fingerprints are all over it. For every good thing she did (free food!), firing the bottom 20% of performers every quarter gave an atmosphere of paranoia that no one wanted to stick around -- except for the people who enjoy ass-kissing and scamming.
      I remember the day Microsoft quit doing stacked ranking. I read it on /. while working at Y and thought "Wow, management are idiots"

  9. So sorry to see Yahoo go down. by LWATCDR · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I went and looked at the Yahoo home page and it is terrible. It is like the National Enquire vomited on People magazine not to mention the sponsored links. They need some quality control IMHO or maybe I am just not their target.

    --
    See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
    1. Re:So sorry to see Yahoo go down. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ya. Kinda like mashup twixt bing and google, and got neither right. the UX is amazingly fragmented.

    2. Re:So sorry to see Yahoo go down. by BrinkeGuthrie · · Score: 1

      Yeah the *Sponsored* content is awful.

    3. Re:So sorry to see Yahoo go down. by slavdude · · Score: 1

      Not to mention the fact that if one of your boxes (e.g., Spam or Trash) is empty, they now serve you video content which you can't block unless you completely block all scripts on the page, which makes it unusable. --At least, that last part is my experience.

    4. Re:So sorry to see Yahoo go down. by LWATCDR · · Score: 1

      Yes it really is terrible.

      --
      See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
  10. Re:I'm Outraged! by EmagGeek · · Score: 0

    Offtopic, but still the most contributory post in this thread. I was saddened that my spicy Christian chicken biscuit was taken off the menu. It costs almost $2 to have them put the spicy patty from the sandwich on the biscuit.

  11. Re:I'm Outraged! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Who goes to that horrible, exclusionary, hate spreading place anyway? Didn't they all go out of business? They should. Same with Hobby Lobby. Bunch of hateful, exclusionist folks. Both companies need to move forward in their thinking - which means new owners or going out of business. I'm surprised slashdotters would purchase from either of them.

  12. Yahoo! Finance?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's OK, but it's individual company data is loaded with mistakes. The news is filled with sponsored content - all of it shit and thinly veiled advertisements.

    I only use it on my iTouch (it was a gift, gimme a break) because it's there.

    Google finance has too much robo-content which tells you nothing that you don't already know.

    Bloomberg is the best.

    1. Re:Yahoo! Finance?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I'm the Anon you're responding to.
      There was some useful yahoo news nuggets in the non big cap stocks in the Old Yahoo Finance. Sure some of it was sponsored and useless content, like Zacks. But it also had all the robo generated stuff everyone else had as well. Likewise the message boards of companies that are not large and have not spiked in price had some decent thoughts and discussions as well. (There is/was still some issues with trolls and pumpers/dumpers... But as long as you stayed off the large known companies, they were easily ignored.)

      In any event, robo content and sponsored content is just the way it goes with the finance news these days. Unless you visit specific places for specific authors.

      As for the best replacements. I'm using Barcharts for my generic page. It's really good with commodities. Ok-ish with stocks. But it's very basic site with all the info I need for my existing portfolio.

      Then I use Finviz for a screener and researcher. It has a crap load of information that is easily formatted.
      So Barchart and Finviz... Between the two Barchart gives me most of what yahoo finance did (minus the message boards and videos) and finviz gives me one of the better screeners (that probably only paid or broker services can beat.)

      (And my broker has great tools as well, and sometimes I use them. However it's not wise to log in all the time, specially if you're not in your office with your secured internet connection.)

    2. Re:Yahoo! Finance?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Try investorvillage for the message boards. Pretty well policed, maybe they have yet to be hit by the masses that target yahoo so are not strained to much but the admins do seem to pay attention.

    3. Re:Yahoo! Finance?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What's an iTouch? I can't find one for sale anywhere.

  13. Some value to Yahoo by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 2
    There are some aspects of Yahoo that are worthwhile. Their groups are easy to run and maintain, and they have a sports section that beats the pants off of Disneyfied ESPN. And it is simple to get rid of the email ads, by just forwarding the email to your normal email program.

    The part that kills Yahoo is that they are around 50 percent clickbait, plus it seems they have an odd fixation on Kim Kardashian, the dumpster sex symbol. So I just link the sports, and stopped visiting the front page a good while back.

    --
    The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
    1. Re:Some value to Yahoo by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 1

      Can't fault them for picking up the last seasons of Community either.

      --
      If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
    2. Re:Some value to Yahoo by jfdavis668 · · Score: 1

      The Ads and clickbait are how they make money. Without them the aspects have no value. Yahoo giving us features without them making money is why the company is tanking.

    3. Re:Some value to Yahoo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Based on this, I'd say a lot of other people figured this out too which explains the constant year over year revenue drop.

    4. Re:Some value to Yahoo by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 1

      The Ads and clickbait are how they make money. Without them the aspects have no value. Yahoo giving us features without them making money is why the company is tanking.

      Yeah, but the mode of presenting them isn't working. This is like a parent who beats their child for every infraction, and steps it up with more intense beating. Eventually the beatings become lethal. So if the ads become a bigger pain in the ass, and people block them, but then they make tham more intrusive, leading to more blocking, then it fails. That's a positive feedback loop.

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
    5. Re:Some value to Yahoo by Agripa · · Score: 1

      There are some aspects of Yahoo that are worthwhile. Their groups are easy to run and maintain...

      That explains why after their latest Groups fiasco and the rumors of them being bought, alternative group content systems have been setup and groups are preparing to transfer all of their content to them.

      Let me be clear; Yahoo Groups are a total and complete disaster do to their "upgrades".

  14. Re:Is anyone still listening to this... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Now now. No need for body shaming. Would you do that to a male CEO - for example "balding, pudgy braying psychopath". I thought not. Let's cut it down to just "braying psychopath" please.

  15. Tumblr by 110010001000 · · Score: 1

    When they bought Tumblr I was like that is a TOTALLY good buy at a bargain of only $1,100,000,000. I mean, its like a website. What could have possibly have gone wrong? What geniuses they are over there.

  16. Re:I'm Outraged! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I am also very disappointed.

  17. That's what CEOs are for by damn_registrars · · Score: 0

    They aren't hired for their solid grip on reality, they are hired because they are narcissistic types who will tell the shareholders what they want to hear regardless of the actual situation. She probably isn't even allowed to look at the books; it would be bad practice for any CEO to actually know the state of the company they are tasked with managing.

    --
    Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
    1. Re:That's what CEOs are for by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There are two ways to become a CEO

      1) Extortion, blackmail

      2) being great in the sack

      Everything else is bullshit.

  18. Uncle Rico? Is that you? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Does anybody else feel like Yahoo has become the tech equivalent of Uncle Rico, from Napoleon Dynamite?

    1. Re: Uncle Rico? Is that you? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "I bet I can throw this ball over them mountains"

  19. Re:I'm Outraged! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    horrible? It's on the better side for fast food, not great, but not bad. Exclusionary? I've never seen them turn away anybody. In fact the welcoming atmosphere has always felt kind of cult like to me. Almost too friendly. Hate spreading? Again, I don't really see that, see my whole exclusionary statement. And no, they did not all go out of business. In fact, based on any time I go to one the line out the door, I tend to think they're quite the opposite of going out of business.

    Me's thinks you have a chip on your shoulder.

  20. Ms Mayer made a miscalculation... by bayankaran · · Score: 1, Funny

    Yahoo also acknowledged that Tumblr â" its biggest acquisition under its current chief executive, Marissa Mayer â" was now worth only one-third of the $1.1 billion that Yahoo paid for it in 2013.

    30% of $1 billion is $300 million! Tumblr is worth $300 million!! Indeed a revelation!!!

    Ms Mayer made a miscalculation. If she was patient and not going into Yahoo, she had a chance to become the first woman CEO of Microsoft. Her competition Nadella is the poster child of mediocrity and she would have wiped the floor during CEO search.

    Imagine the damage and the headlines she would have created if she played with M$. Yahoo is too small for someone of her talent.

    --
    Tat Tvam Asi
    1. Re:Ms Mayer made a miscalculation... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      >Yahoo is too small for someone of her talent.

      There is nothing too small for her talent. MM is terrible. She is a sloppy intersection of luck and self-promotion, with no substantive ability. She lives in a bubble of self-delusion and yes-men hangers-on. She 'succeeded' at Google because she got in early and had outstanding subordinates who didn't need to be managed.

    2. Re:Ms Mayer made a miscalculation... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      She 'succeeded' at Google because she got in early and had outstanding subordinates who didn't need to be managed.

      She 'succeeded' at google because she was dating the founder. I've seen a few mediocre woman rise to executive positions simply by sleeping with the right person. I've never seen a man rise to executive by sleeping with someone.

  21. Left earlier in the year by smooth+wombat · · Score: 1

    When they changed their website to the hideous, unusable pile of crap it is now I stopped visiting and contributing to their boards.

    I still have an account but never use it and only check Messenger once in a blue moon (which is also going away).

    You've dug your own hole, Marissa. You can't blame anyone else for Yahoo!'s failure.

    --
    We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
    1. Re:Left earlier in the year by Grishnakh · · Score: 1

      What are you talking about? Marissa has been extremely successful. Look at how much she's getting paid.

      Whether Yahoo! fails or not is irrelevant. What's important is that Marissa has amassed a sizeable personal fortune. I wouldn't call that a "failure".

  22. Ms. Mayer is useless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    She happened to be at the right place, at the right time, and with the right connections. Remove all those, and what do you have? Nothing. A person devoid of any particular talents. Worthless.

    1. Re:Ms. Mayer is useless by Kreplock · · Score: 1

      Her pay packet and golden parachute are just stunning. What on earth happened to bring those about?

    2. Re:Ms. Mayer is useless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Same as Carly Fiorina at HP, the company wanted a female CEO.

  23. Re:Is anyone still listening to this... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What does Hillary Clinton have to do with it?

  24. Trying to save herself now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I have no doubt she trying to save her nice paycheck. Failing is a bad thing when you have basically done nothing to improve Yahoo. Maybe she needs to go back begging to Google for her old job? I don't think anyone has faith in her at this point at Yahoo. Any new buyer will certainly clean house anyway given what is happening. Better for her to leave voluntarily then being fired by the new owners.

    1. Re:Trying to save herself now by Grishnakh · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Why would she need to beg for her old job? Have you seen the size of her golden parachute ($200M IIRC)? The longer she drags this out, the more she gets paid. Why should she resign? She can hang on and keep getting paid, and then when they fire her she'll still get that golden parachute. After she leaves this place, she'll have so much money she won't need to bother with working any more. Sounds like a resounding success to me.

    2. Re:Trying to save herself now by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      Not to mention she had $300 million in the bank to begin with......

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    3. Re:Trying to save herself now by Grishnakh · · Score: 1

      Yep, after all this is over with, she can retire to her private island and laugh at all the people calling her "incompetent".

    4. Re:Trying to save herself now by dyslexicbunny · · Score: 1

      Those kinds of people don't not work anymore. Odds are she moves onto another company and tries her hand at politics.

    5. Re:Trying to save herself now by Grishnakh · · Score: 1

      Yeah, you're probably right. Carly Fiorina is a good example of this. If I were in her position, I'd just go enjoy my millions and relax, but for some reason she feels compelled to make a fool of herself even more by running for office.

    6. Re:Trying to save herself now by dyslexicbunny · · Score: 1

      Imagine the people they have in their circles. Think about the people you have in yours. How many people kiss your ass and tell you how great you are on a daily basis? I think that's all there is to it.

      I say I'd buy some property that gives me privacy, build a lab to tinker, and live a life of leisure. But that might all change as your social circles change from getting wealthy. Bumping elbows with other CX level people doing "good" things and you feel like you have to keep up.

    7. Re:Trying to save herself now by Agripa · · Score: 1

      Why would she need to beg for her old job? Have you seen the size of her golden parachute ($200M IIRC)?

      It is too bad "golden parachute" does not denote a backpack loaded with a golden anvil.

  25. it's worse than that by tomhath · · Score: 1
    Read here what a Yahoo really is.

    Yahoos are legendary beings in the novel Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift.

    Swift describes them as being filthy and with unpleasant habits, resembling human beings far too closely for the liking of protagonist Lemuel Gulliver,

  26. marissa mayer is the bestest! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    How dare all these misogynists question her wisdom as CEO! This just shows that all men in tech are all misogynerds who think women should be in the kitchen and pregnant!

    Misogynerds! Why do you hate women?

  27. Talent can be situational by sjbe · · Score: 2

    If she was patient and not going into Yahoo, she had a chance to become the first woman CEO of Microsoft.

    I've seen no evidence to support that thesis. Do you have information not available to the rest of us?

    Imagine the damage and the headlines she would have created if she played with M$. Yahoo is too small for someone of her talent.

    Talent can be situational which is why we have the Peter Principle. She was good at her job at Google apparently but it doesn't automatically follow that her skill set will translate elsewhere. I'm willing to believe she is a talented person but that doesn't necessarily mean she is the right fit for a particular job. It also can depend heavily on the people you have around you. Maybe she had the right people around her at Google but not so much at Yahoo.

    A guy I used to work for was excellent at turnarounds. If you had a company that was ailing and needed someone to stop the bleeding and stabilize the company he was great at that. And he could keep the company profitable afterwards. But if you needed to grow the company, he wasn't the right guy for the job. He had little talent for sales, a brusque personalty, and wasn't able to invest with a long term horizon because frankly he was cheap. He was good at conserving money but not so good at making lots of it. Sometimes our talents fit a particular role well and when we venture outside of that role success becomes more dependent on luck.

    1. Re:Talent can be situational by bayankaran · · Score: 1

      I've seen no evidence to support that thesis. Do you have information not available to the rest of us?

      Half of the success is showing up, and she seems to be very good in that. She's talented to put up a show, may be like The Donald. There is no evidence of any particular skill other than the aura she projected which apparently fooled even people like you.

      There is not a single good decision I can think of she took when she was at Yahoo. What Yahoo needed was surgery and re-invention, a surgery which might have even killed the company. Instead what she gave was band-aid and placebo.

      --
      Tat Tvam Asi
  28. Re:Is anyone still listening to this... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Who's body shaming? I like horse-faced thunder-thighed women. Like Andrea Rosu for example.

  29. This is what happens.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...when you promote a woman purely on the basis of how well she can suck the bosses cock.

    Mayer would have been a middle manager type if she hadn't of put out for Larry Page.

    She should write a book "How I made 300 million dollars with only one cunt working for me".

    1. Re: This is what happens.... by cunina · · Score: 1

      Based on this comment, you are a far worse person than she is.

    2. Re: This is what happens.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      He would still be a better CEO though.

  30. Golden Parachute by Jfetjunky · · Score: 2, Funny

    Nothing to see here, just a CEO stuffing her parachute a little more before jumping out of the plane and letting it go down in flames.

    1. Re:Golden Parachute by Ogive17 · · Score: 2

      To be fair, the house was already on fire. She just ran in and grabbed a few valuables before the structure collapses.

      --
      "Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
    2. Re:Golden Parachute by pnutjam · · Score: 1

      you misspelled dumpster....

  31. Re:Is anyone still listening to this... by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 1

    You forgot "chair throwing" ;-)

    --
    Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
  32. Re:I'm Outraged! by Grishnakh · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Dude, you're on the wrong site. This is Slashdot, which is full of both extremist libertarians and conservative Christian evangelicals. Neither one of those cares about LGBT rights.

    If you're looking for intellectualism or socially progressive politics, this isn't the place for it. This is the place for curmudgeonly assholes to spew venom.

  33. Marissa was likely unprepared for the job by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Although I am willing to believe that Marissa is talented, she was very unprepared for to lead Yahoo. To me, the first indication of it, was when she was hoodwinked into paying U$30 million for 'Summly', a news aggregation and summarization solution. It was a very relatively simple and rather rudimentary tool designed by a British teenager. They claimed the AI technology used had been vetted by MIT researchers. Such claim caught the attention of folks at Princeton who are working on the technology and obviously know who is whom in the field but that had never heard of this kid. So they contacted their fellow researchers at MIT but they had never heard of the guy, either. Assuming that Marissa did not perform appropriate due diligence when acquiring Summly, it makes one wonder about the other deals :-( I also heard that Marissa personally vets each and every new hire. Regardless, she will be giggling all the way to the bank.

    1. Re:Marissa was likely unprepared for the job by ciurana · · Score: 2

      Although I am willing to believe that Marissa is talented, she was very unprepared for to lead Yahoo. To me, the first indication of it, was when she was hoodwinked into paying U$30 million for 'Summly', a news aggregation and summarization solution. It was a very relatively simple and rather rudimentary tool designed by a British teenager. They claimed the AI technology used had been vetted by MIT researchers.

      We never claimed such thing. All the technology that we had was developed by a core engineering and data science group (Inderjeet Mani for NLP/summarization, me for engineering). There are a lot of misconceptions and rumors about how we put this together. If you bother to search for the patents under our names you'll get a glimpse of what we built, how we built it, and why we kicked the pants out of anyone else doing summarization of breaking news at the time. And Nick, the British teenager in question, helped design some of the algorithms that we plugged to a high volume pipeline; he was a contributor to a larger engineering and science team that I managed.

      Cheers!

      --
      http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
  34. Well she finally figured out how to do SEO by Idisagree · · Score: 1

    1) Google "solid progress"

    2) The top hit is this article

    3) profit ???

    Nice work Marissa, here's that extra bonus for you!

    *google.co.uk was used for this demonstation

  35. Plagarising Hillary? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "How I made 300 million dollars with only one cunt working for me".

    That would be stealing Hillary's autobiography.

  36. Non-GAAP by mattwarden · · Score: 1

    I'm a billionaire on a non-GAAP basis

  37. Re:I'm Outraged! by EmagGeek · · Score: 1

    Um, have you ever BEEN to a Chik-Fil-A? Nothing but love and inclusion to be experienced in that place. Do you know why? It is because Jesus commands us to love each other as he loved us. Jesus loved all people, regardless of their sins, transgressions, and shortcomings. He died on the cross to pay for our sins, and believe you me, we are all sinners.

    As a Christian, I know I am not endowed with the right to pass judgment. I live my life dedicated to loving my fellow man as Jesus loved me, and the folks at Chik-Fil-A do the same.

    John 13:34-35 reads: 34 A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. 35 By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

    Colossians 3:12-17 is one of my favorite passages:

    12 Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, 13 bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. 14 And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. 15 And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. 16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. 17 And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

    Nothing in the great word preaches hate and intolerance, for we may not judge. Matthew 7 spells it out:

    7 âoeJudge not, that you be not judged. 2 For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. 3 Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your brother, âLet me take the speck out of your eye,â(TM) when there is the log in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.

  38. Slid progress by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Solid as opposed to liquid. In other words it is progress #2

  39. Don't forget her successes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    She redesigned the Yahoo logo and contracted a personal daycare.

  40. Yahoo is circling the drain by superdave80 · · Score: 1

    Given the horrible design, layout, and execution of the parts of yahoo I visit, they have outsourced all of their web design to a guy living in a hut in India. About the only thing I hang onto yahoo for is fantasy sports. If my league ever folds, I'm outta there.

  41. Re:I'm Outraged! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "7 âoeJudge"

    Oh that matthew, doesn't know the bible doesn't have unicode.

  42. Are They Even Relevant by tanner_andrews · · Score: 1

    I am not sure they are really relevant any more. Their headline business, search, gets about 15 hits per day, and a third of them are typos for people thinking they want Yandex.

    I may be making up these statistics, or I may have gotten them thanks to an efficient yahoo search.

    --
    Tilt at windmills. Occasionally one will fall over out of sheer surprise.
  43. Because the latter 2 rolled over to the gov... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And yahoo at least attempted to stand against it, up to the point where they were being charged millions per day for denying requests, and losing a court case REQUIRING THEM TO.

    Can't remember if it was just before or after Mayer took over, but it was one of a number of things yahoo has done over the years to attempt to be a good netizen, even if they were a corporation.

    Not many places even do that much anymore.

  44. Re:I'm Outraged! by pnutjam · · Score: 1

    I care about Human Rights and LBGT rights fall under that umbrella. It's nothing controversial.

  45. Silly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    How's all that no work from home policy working, Marissa? Already improved worker productivity and creativity I see...

  46. Re:I'm Outraged! by Grishnakh · · Score: 1

    Yes, actually, it is.

    If you were in a crowd of leftists, centrists, Democratic voters, liberals, liberal leaners, etc., you'd be correct. This is not a site like that; this is a site full of extremists, both conservative and libertarian. Conservatives hate LGBT rights, and while good libertarians support them since they support equal rights, the extremist libertarians on this site are basically a bunch of assholes who combine social conservatism with extreme economic libertarianism so they don't care about LGBT stuff either.

  47. Opposite of the Midas touch... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The Tumblr acquisition is just another example of how they thought they could buy themselves out of their slump, a common error of many CEOs & boards. They completely failed to factor in the fact that everything they touch turns to shit.