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The End of Yahoo: Marissa Mayer To Resign; Yahoo To Change Its Name To Altaba (arstechnica.com)
maxcelcat writes: Spotted on The Register's twitter feed: Yahoo! Submission to The SEC. Most of the board is leaving, including CEO Marissa Mayer. The company has been bought by Verizon and is changing its name to Altaba Inc. I'm old enough to remember when Yahoo was a series of directories on a University's computers, where you could browse a hierarchical list of websites by category. And here I am watching the company's demise. According to the regulatory filing, the changes will take place after the sale of its core business is completed with Verizon for roughly $4.8 billion. The Wall Street Journal notes: "Verizon officials have indicated all options remain possible, including renegotiating the terms of the deal or walking away."
It's not and I hope Verizon sees that and walks away. My only hope is Flickr finds a proper owner so I can keep using it.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Except for that last line:
So it's not really final.
They are telegraphing their business plan.
The Yahoo name is worth about as much as AOL's name. Fuckall. A way of painting 'I'm clueless, please abuse me' on your account.
But Yahoo owns 20% of Alibaba. Yahoo could greatly increase their value by just becoming an Americanized version of Alibaba, competing with Amazon but with 100% chinese made knockoffs and junk (rather than 50%).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I've seen some estimates (googling "Marissa Mayer Severance" as high as $110 million.
That's pretty good for running a company further into the ground. I would have done it for half the price.
"Time to spend more time with the family" as they say.
Bullshit. She was known as a shitty project manager but had a relationship with Larry and later a few other higher ups so most people just let it go and she rose through the ranks.
She didn't fail at Google, she was widely respected both internally and externally. Hence why the Yahoo board chose as CEO of the company.
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While at Google, she was demoted and left shortly after. Yahoo hired her because "she worked at Google, she must be smart".
This sort of shit happens all the time. Helwett-Packard, world's largest computer hardware maker hired a CEO from a software-only company, who had recently been fired after only 2 years as CEO. And then, after only 11 months at HP, fired him and replaced with him the the former CEO of Ebay.
Maybe instead of "Altaba," they should call the new company "Alta Vista."
My first thought was that the name was going to be a concern. One company with major search engine roots changing its name to one that starts with the same five letters and ends on the same as another major search engine? Will HP (or whoever owns the rights to altavista these days) let that happen without unleashing the lawyers?
What's next? Google renaming to altabeta?
She didn't fail at Google, she was widely respected both internally and externally. Hence why the Yahoo board chose as CEO of the company.
The reality is Yahoo has been a zombie for years, only the investors weren't ready to admit it and put it down.
Her reputation was for working at Google. Not for being some kind of super worker. No. Her rep was for being there and having been there early on and long enough to be somebody important without actually contributing a hell of a lot. It's really a lot like having a low /. user number. It gains some respect and whatever but it doesn't really mean much.
The only reason Marissa's adventures at Yahoo lasted this long is that she was fairly smart and it helped obscure that she had no clue what the hell she was doing.
Sig for hire.
And this, ladies and gentlemen is what a parade of mismanagement looks like. Corporate raider CEO after corporate raider CEO trying to pump up short term valuation at the expense of long term viability.
That got you a +5 on /., but it is a load of crap. Mayer wasn't a raider CEO and she didn't try to pump up short term valuation. Quite the opposite, she tried to find some way to build real value in what was clearly a moribund company. I'm not saying she did a good job -- it's entirely possible that a good CEO could have found a way to preserve and grow Yahoo. But it's also entirely possible that there was just nothing there to work with, and in fact that looks most likely to me.
Yahoo! had been coasting for a very long time when Mayer took job. Basically, the company's reason for existence ceased when Google proved in the late 90s that hand-curated directories were a dead end (up until that point, the general consensus was that search engines were doomed to failure; they were better at indexing but terrible at relevance and expected to get dramatically worse as the size of the Internet grew). But because Yahoo! had established itself as a major player it continued attracting capital, and thanks to some good deals with PC makers which got the Yahoo! search bar pre-installed on lots of machines, built considerable mindshare as a landing page and an email service. That ensured a small but decent ad revenue flow.
But Yahoo! was never able to find a way to build a compelling product. Its ad revenues on the desktop were in decline, thanks in large part to the demise of the landing page concept and it basically completely failed to make the transition to mobile (though it did make some nice apps). What Mayer needed to do to be successful was to take the talent and the revenue and use it to create an entirely new business. Pulling all of the employees back into the office was part of her strategy for doing that, based on the theory that co-located people are more capable of generating innovative ideas (which is true, but "more capable" is not a guarantee of a result).
But creating an entirely new line of business isn't an easy thing to do, even given a large pool of talent and plenty of money. Or, rather, it's easy to do on a small scale, but it's hard to create something that will scale rapidly up to become a multi-billion dollar business. It's actually a little easier to find a promising startup to acquire and then grow that... but even that is a crapshoot, and none of Mayer's acquisitions panned out.
So, Yahoo!'s failure had nothing whatsoever to do with corporate raiding CEOs or pump 'n dump schemes. Mayer attempted to succeed, and failed, plain and simple.
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A lot of people make the mistake of judging Chinese output by the quality of what is done there as paid for by western companies. In effect, many western companies are pretty much getting scammed by getting the worst of the worst in China, and the western company doesn't realize they are getting the bottom of the barrel because they also buy into the 'China just isn't that good' story.
Meanwhile native Chinese companies understand the lay of the land and can be quite competitive by leaving the bottom of the barrel to the foreign companies to deal with.
It's the biggest pitfall of offshoring to any nation that the leadership is not intimately familiar with. If the business leadership has stereotypes about a popular offshoring destinations, they can get pretty much scammed into thinking they have average work for the region when they really get the rejects that aren't employable by the good local companies.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.