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

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.

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.

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:Yahoo brand

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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.

Re: How much?

[HornWumpus]

The user data is available for _much_ cheaper than that.

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.