Slashdot Mirror
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.
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."
"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
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)
We lose money on every sale, but make up for it in volume!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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