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."

Comments

How much?

[Frosty Piss]

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.

I'm genuinely surprised it's worth that much.

Re:How much?

[SeaFox]

Except for that last line:

The Wall Street Journal notes: "Verizon officials have indicated all options remain possible, including renegotiating the terms of the deal or walking away."

So it's not really final.

Re: How much?

[HornWumpus]

The user data is available for _much_ cheaper than that.

Re:How much?

[geekmux]

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.

I'm genuinely surprised it's worth that much.

I'm genuinely surprised they managed to find a worse name than Verizon.

Re:How much?

[Grishnakh]

I'm confused. Is $4.8 billion how much Verizon paid for Yahoo!, or is it how much Yahoo! paid Verizon to take it over?

My new ringtone

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Yahoo brand

[david.emery]

I always thought that Yahoo was well-named, a company run by a bunch of Yahoos...

Yabba Dabba Doo!

[Tablizer]

If they paid branding consultants millions to come up with "Altaba", somebody deserves to be beaten black and blue with a briefcase, including the consultants.

Re:Yabba Dabba Doo!

[phantomfive]

It's like someone is trying to typo-squat Alibaba.

Carly Fiorina 2.0

[Chas]

This version actually crashed a company permanently!

Re:Carly Fiorina 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure how many have been granted, but I have over 30 patents submitted with IBM. One really good, one ok, and 30+ other pieces of crap. I honestly don't get the point. They're so fluffy they have no teeth or they are just crap. I felt dirty submitting some of them, but the bonus cash was awesome. We would literally watch Sci-fi movies as a group and start calling stuff out for potential patents. Multiple patents are direct rip-offs of things in Minority Report, yea no prior art there. Then we would have brainstorming parties where they would have lists of words like sight, smell, hear, taste, and touch and then they would just yell out things like printer, what about a printer that prints taste, what about one that prints smells, etc, and they would write up a patent for every one. I honestly have no idea how they passed then non-obvious hurdle. They also often lacked a major component, hey we're patenting faster then light travel all I need is a faster then light engine. I'm down to one patent every 18 months, but they're solid things that unfortunately net me a lot less cash.

What... WHAT?

[ckatko]

"Yahoo" is still an powerful brand name that's decades old.

Who the hell throws away a household brand name and comes up with a brand new one? That's one of the biggest assets they still had. Yahoo as a brand name, Yahoo News (which tons of women still use as their primary source), and Yahoo e-mail (eww.) That, and of course as the older poster mentioned, their existing customer data. (Which everyone has now, hint hint, wink wink.)

Altaba? I mean, what is that? People are going to confuse it with "Alibaba."

Re:What... WHAT?

[HornWumpus]

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%).

Yahoo brand

[PCM2]

I think everybody's jumping the gun here. What's left of Yahoo after the sale -- which will basically just be an investment holding company -- will change its name to Altbaba. I see no reason why Verizon wouldn't continue to operate Yahoo's core web businesses under the Yahoo brand. To not do so sounds like a tremendous waste of money.

Re:Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

Angela Merkel.

Re:Yahoo brand

[Anonymous Coward]

same thing happened to the poor guy who had "suckingdownacoolone@home.com" was changed to suckingdownacoolone@cox.net

Re:Yahoo brand

[AthanasiusKircher]

I always thought that Yahoo was well-named, a company run by a bunch of Yahoos...

I know, right? (For those that don't get it, here's what the word yahoo actually means when not yelled by a cowboy.)

To the guy in the summary who said: "I'm old enough to remember when Yahoo was a series of directories on a University's computers"... well, I'm old enough to remember when 'yahoo' was a name for a boorish idiot.

some of you really don't get it

[slashdice]

Yahoo (including the name), is being sold off to Verizon. Altababa is the parts that are left (ie, a big pile of Alibaba stock). The yahoo name, domain, etc are not going away, they'll just have a new corporate overlord.

Kind of like how slashdot wasn't renamed (or improved!) when bendover.net bought them, or VA Linux, or VA Research, or SourceForge, or Geek.Net or Dice.com, or BizX. Other than (fuck) beta, there have been no updates whatsoever since 1998.

Sad

[DaMattster]

A yahoo email address was my first official email. Melissa Mayer ran the company into the ground and she is gonna get a golden parachute.

Re:55 million golden parachute!!

[MouseR]

I haven't seen any figures but regardless, she did manage to sell a worthless company for 4+ billions. That's worth a bonus.

Re:Finally!

[msauve]

Fiorina? How about Elizabeth Holmes? Ellen Pao? No debate there.

Re:Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

She didn't fail at Google, she was widely respected both internally and externally

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.

Re:Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

>

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.

Microsoft offered $45 Billion

[Anonymous Coward]

The stupidest move was when Yahoo refused the Microsoft offer. It was just down hill from then on.

Re:Finally!

[lucm]

"She failed at Google"

Yeah. She was in charge of search, and we all know how much Google search sucks. Maybe instead of "Altaba," they should call the new company "Alta Vista."

Wrong. She was not in charge of search at all. She had a role in the design of the search page, then she was in charge of user experience and the shopping stuff. The search stuff was (is) handled by engineers not by a PM/QA person.

Re:Finally!

[lucm]

Dude not only do you suck at being snippy, you're wrong and that "Israeli Engineering Open House" blog page is not a reference.

She was not in charge of search - she was actually removed from that team because the real search guy (Amit Singhal) complained and they sent her to the shopping division ("Products Search") where they eventually put someone above her because she was a pain in the ass.

And This is What Mismanagement Looks Like

[LeftCoastThinker]

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.

I have said it before, I will say it again. Every executive level and board member should be required by law to receive all compensation above 10x median employee salary as stock options that start to mature in 5 years and mature 20% per year. Thus, if they get $10M per year pay, something like $9.4M is tied up for 5 years and they don't get 100% out of their first years pay until the 10th year. Force these slash and burn CEOs who are only looking to line their pockets to ensure long term corporate viability.

Re:And This is What Mismanagement Looks Like

[swillden]

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.

Re:Finally!

[RubberDogBone]

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion