9 ms·

Yahoo had to do this. They had been hanging onto the belief that the IRS wouldn't tax their Alibaba spin out, a belief that they and their tax accountants alon

• plinkplonk 11y ago
  "Sadly this probably means 3 things are going to happen in the next 6 months" (Genuine question, not snark). Why "sadly"? Companies, even technical companies, get obsolescent and die all the time. Maybe it is just Yahoo's time to go.
  • fluxquanta 11y ago
    I can't speak for chollida1, but for me as an "older millennial" (28) Yahoo was how I came to discover the internet. Between the chats, instant messenger, search before Google, multiplayer games online with strangers (albeit simple ones like chess and poker), and Geocities it was my first taste of the types of things I do online to this day. I think it's okay to mourn a bit for how we remember the company.
    • mmsmatt 11y ago
      Yes, those yahoo chess ladder rooms burned through a ton of dial up hours at my house.
    • MrApathy 11y ago
      As an even older millennial (35), I have very fond memories of Yahoo. I remember receiving a two-disk copy of Netscape Navigator from a local ISP at a computer show in early 1995 and setting the home-page immediately to Yahoo. At the time I remember seeing hard copies of "The Internet Yellow Pages" at the local Barnes and Noble, but most search was through Yahoo or Alta Vista. Back then AV had several fewer orders of magnitude web pages to crawl and SEO/spam hadn't yet taken off, but even still the AV results weren't always useful. Without page rank or a decent sorting algorithm, I remember often going through pages of results. Yahoo had it all: games, continuously updated stock quotes (at a time when I would look up share prices in the morning's paper, priced to the nearest eighth of a dollar), weather, news, and hand picked results from around the web. It was all I was previously getting from CompuServe/Prodigy, but at no cost. But now I haven't visited Yahoo in years. It's like when your favorite teenage band breaks up. You're a little sad, but you've moved on. The fond memories are for life. Edited to add: we all used a home page back then because tabs hadn't yet been invented, meaning the restore previously opened tabs option that we all use today also didn't exist. One's home page had a much greater importance back then.
      • encoderer 11y ago
        Fwiw, stocks were all priced in 8ths. A few remain that way today. But the newspaper quotes are still a quaint memory regardless.
      • valhalla 11y ago
        I'm a young millennial and even though Google was more or less my first search engine/portal (I used Alta Vista until my 1st grade teacher showed me Google around '99) I also have fond memories of Yahoo!. I won a Final Four bracket against high school classmates on the site's fantasy sports page and knowing nothing about college basketball. I made $150 from that. Even though they clearly made strategic mistakes and Mayer's revival may have been too little too late it's still sad when an "old-school" tech firm goes under, especially one that touched so many lives.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • function_seven 11y ago
    That's true, but just like when people die—even when it's their time—it can be sad. I haven't used Yahoo in months, but like my sibling comment, it was a large part of introducing me to the web and what was possible.
  • potatolicious 11y ago
    Agree with the others re: our first experiences on the internet. But even now Yahoo is still hanging on to some valuable things we're likely to lose in this change. I'm still a heavy user of Flickr for example - and though many others have tried, it's still IMO the best photography community out there (sorry 500px). It's been a perennial money-loser for Yahoo, kept around because what self-respecting tech giant doesn't have a photo hosting service? I fear with this spinoff we're seeing the end days for that product.
    • wlesieutre 11y ago
      I'll agree with flickr having a lot of good photography, but did they actually fix the community? When I used it, all I remember is that 90% of comments were sparkling banners saying "YOUR PHOTO HAS BEEN AWARTED BEST FLICKR OCEAN SUNSET AWARD MAY 2010! CLICK HERE TO JOIN OUR GROUP! JOIN JOIN JOIN!" to the point where it interfered with anyone trying to have an actual conversation. Which was a shame because outside of the enormous volume of spam they had a pretty good thing going.
      • ghaff 11y ago
        I just tired of most of the community aspect of flickr aside from folks I already knew IRL. I found a lot of groupie-ism and, as you note, group stuff that was at least spam-ish. As with other things about flickr, I guess I'm not really sure what the "right" flickr looks like and how you achieve that at profitable scale. And, to be honest, I've never had a lot of interest in community photo meetings and so forth locally either.
        • wlesieutre 11y ago
          True, I doubt it's possible to have much of a community at the scale that Flickr is aiming for. You can do it with a niche little photography site, but anything operating at mass-market sizes will eventually turn into a lot of people spamming groups and internet jokes at each other because that sort of behavior feeds on itself and gets you more active users to generate money from. I hadn't checked it out recently, but it looks like they're still doing fine as far as having a ton of great photos posted. As long as the "community" aspects don't bug you, maybe it's a winning strategy? OTOH I have no idea if they're profitable or not.
• morgante 11y ago
  > 3) If Alibaba buys the holding portion of Yahoo( Alibaba and Yahoo Japan) then look for Alibaba to seek to aquire the rest of Yahoo Japan. Isn't Yahoo Japan being spun off from the Alibaba portion? Ie. all that remains of the current "Yahoo" company will be its Alibaba stake.
  • spikels 11y ago
    You are correct according to the news reports I read. See 6th paragraph of this Reuters article for example: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-yahoo-divestiture-idUSKBN0TS1CO20151209#1xbPTqIPk1kzJJ4l.97 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-yahoo-divestiture-idUSKBN0...
• kaizendad 11y ago
  This is cleverer than people are giving them credit for. It delivers immediate value to shareholders; it delivers opportunities for long term growth to shareholders; it creates one valuable Asian property that can acquire other properties and continue to deliver shareholder value; it creates a US company that is easier to acquire than it used to be, without the Alibaba share, and thus could be bought by a big media company that values all the core assets and will keep the engineers. Everyone wins here. Managers win, of course, but shareholders, who have been patient, get short-term returns and the potential for long-term ones as well. Employees will see their jobs stay, because of this repackaging. Yes, Mayer will be gone in a year, replaced by someone with experience selling a company. But it's been a good run. She turned Yahoo from a place with mediocre engineers into a decent place to work; she resuscitated existing brands and gave them a place in the world; and now she did some reasonably clever financial engineering.
  • charlesdm 11y ago
    Did she? Maybe I'm a bit more sceptical, but what did she actually achieve? 1. She failed at putting Yahoo back on the map. She spent billions on acquiring businesses that bring in close to no revenue. Maybe it's a great place to work, but if there's no money coming in, it won't stay great long. 2. She failed at financial engineering; she couldn't even get a tax free spinoff through. I would've been happy to cut her some slack if she did one of these things right, and messed up the other one. Some people aren't meant to be product people and others just aren't financial engineers. But this is basically throwing in the towel. Don't forget, this idea of a reverse spinoff didn't come from Marissa. It came from an activist investor, who are basically, master financial engineers.
    • mkagenius 11y ago
      > 2. She failed at financial engineering; she couldn't even get a tax free spinoff through. She managed to keep a part of Alibaba stake. This reverse spin off will also be tax free.
      • charlesdm 11y ago
• gohrt 11y ago
  > > Yahoo’s shift in strategy comes as Ms. Mayer and her husband, Zachary Bogue, are expecting the birth of twin daughters this month > I hope she takes a full year off, if not more. The past 4 years couldn't have been easy on her. It will be interesting to see what she does next. Do you think other CEOs don't have children, or don't have hard jobs? Running a profitable growing company is as hard as failing to save a dying company.
• caycep 11y ago
  Maybe it's the opposite. I feel like people seemed to like working at Yahoo while she was there...but no great new products... I do hope they find a good home for Flickr...I will miss it terribly if it is gone.
  • mkagenius 11y ago
    Chairman and CEO have denied any plan for selling Yahoo. Their plan is to get a tax free separation of its core business from Alibaba. This reverse spin off according to them most likely to get the tax benefit. The other way - forward spin off too would have been tax free but that would have taken multiple years while this would only take 1.
• harryh 11y ago
  Why is a wind down and/or sale of Yahoo more likely given a spin out of the core business vs a spin out of Alibaba? Don't you end up with pretty much the same thing in both scenarios? One business that's an internet company and another that is a holding corp for Alibaba stock. I'm not saying your wrong (a lot of people are saying this). I just don't personally understand the reasoning.
• perseusprime1 11y ago
  Agree with your comment on her good product skills and bad people skills.
• pbreit 11y ago
  Seems like this is all being spun from investor perspective but is effectively the same result to us mere mortals?
• gaius 11y ago
  The past 4 years couldn't have been easy on her. Isn't that why CEOs are paid the big bucks? I mean, a Yahoo whose sole purpose is to be a tax-efficient vehicle for holding shares in Alibaba is not the endgame anyone envisioned, and let's be honest, doesn't really need a CEO either... Not that she ever has to work again.
  • shawn-furyan 11y ago
    CEOs get the big bucks because they are better than everyone else at taking credit for business success irrespective of how much control they actually had over the factors contributing most to those successes[1]. They've also been the most effective group at raising the baseline replacement cost of their position. This limits the amount that can be saved by booting a CEO for a cheaper option. So there's a feedback loop at play, when the business succeeds, the CEO gets a raise, and when it falters, market forces prevent the CEO from getting a pay cut (and often still seem to necessitate, or at least "justify", a raise in the face of declining business). [1] I'm not saying that their impact is never high, but CEOs are paid as if it is always high, and that's essentially been demonstrated by economists not to be the case, particularly with large complex organizations.
    • jsprogrammer 11y ago
      A single point of failure can demand pretty much whatever it wants.
• wooger 11y ago
  > It's clear she's great at product design and not so good at people skills. Can you remind me which great products she's designed?
  • TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    Herself? She went in with a lot of good will. I don't see that she still has that. Interesting question: could Yahoo have been grown, and if so, how?
  • munificent 11y ago
    google.com She was in charge of the design of the front page of the search engine, as far as I know. From what I understand, our mental image of the Google brand—bright primary colors on white—came straight from her.
    • apalmer 11y ago
      I dont know, seems kind of skimpy for qualifying someone as a CEO.
• wahsd 11y ago
  Marissa Mayer is basically an ex-CEO walking at this point. As "bad" as it sounds, the only thing that has kept her around recently is her pregnancy. No board would want to step into the mess of letting a woman CEO go during pregnant or immediately following pregnancy and maternity, no matter horrible her performance. You are right, I give it about 6 months before there's an announcement of her departure for whatever reason, probably "spending time with the family". As it has been put by others, Mayer will hold the title in corporate history as the most expensive CEO for a very long time.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
• Redoubts 11y ago
  >Most telling is that Yahoo was up after the markets closed on this news. That spike seems to have been very short lived http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=YHOO+Interactive#{"range":"5d","allowChartStacking":true} http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=YHOO+Interactive#{"range"...
• mahranch 11y ago
  > then look for Alibaba to seek to acquire the rest of Yahoo Japan. Yahoo! Inc doesn't own the majority of Yahoo! Japan (believe it or not), Softbank does. Yahoo! is only a minor shareholder of Yahoo! Japan.
• coolswan 11y ago
  good design skills, not so good people skills. sounds like a few successful ceos we all know and adore. a ceo with less than ideal people skills needs a good operator to help balance him/her.
• sytelus 11y ago
  This is not what article says. Previously they wanted to spin off Alibaba stack but because of tax issues now they will spin off other stuff. Either way, results would have been exactly same: Partition of company in to two. There is zero talks of selling of core business. In fact article clearly says that "activists" investors wanted that but didn't got it. Board says they are 100% behind Mayer and Mayer says she is deeply committed to running Yahoo. In fact she is taking only limited leave for maternity. I highly doubt you actually read article or may be you are just jumping to conclusions but without disclosure that this are your interpretation, not the actual content of the article.