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My thoughts: 1. Activist investment firms use Yakuza tactics. They buy a small share and the company bends over backwards so the 'investors" get an extra perce

My thoughts: 1. Activist investment firms use Yakuza tactics. They buy a small share and the company bends over backwards so the 'investors" get an extra percentage point instead of focusing on long term strategies. 2. If Yahoo had expanded on their Pipes and Konfabulator products and capitalized on people's uproar after iGoogle was shut down they could have been great competitors to Google's App Engine, Azure or Amazon Web services. Instead they focused on making the investors an extra percentage point by throwing the baby (great products) out with the bathwater (smart engineers that worked hard to deliver great products). 3. Investors and venture capitalists really don't know diddly squat (to put it mildly) about technology these days...

vidoc 11y ago
While Pipes was a really cool product, I doubt it would have changed anything. Reminds me google wave, great appeal to engineers but hard to sell to the masses :/ Yahoo has indeed had a product problem for a while, but I think it's more of a consequence of its internal culture of technical mediocrity and IBM-like middle management.
tuna 11y ago
Pipes was really cool. Their email still sought after (at least in latin america) for corporate customers. Perhaps a SaaS spin off with email, pipes, ecommerce search/recommendation and other cool tools they release all these years ?
cylinder 11y ago
"Give me money* or I'll buy your whole company and fire you." * We just call it a dividend, or share buyback, or sell me your real estate in bulk so I can sell each piece individually and take the spread.
- Riod 11y ago
  Investors want management to be efficient capital allocators. Not surprising.
forgetsusername 11y ago
>they buy a small share and the company bends over backwards so the 'investors" get an extra percentage point instead of focusing on long term strategies. They take advantage of the rights afforded to them as owners of the company to push for change, whether you agree with their particular view or not. That's how corporate governance is supposed to work. Though, not surprising that people on this board might prefer the "don't give shareholders any rights" model of Facebook or Google. Why do you put "investors" in scare quotes?
- dragonbonheur 11y ago
  > Why do you put "investors" in scare quotes? Business 101 - the Assets of a company. Machines: anything that enable the production of deliverables and thus, value. Materials: raw materials (obviously), applicable for traditional industries. Solar and wind farms could qualify in the tech sector, tough. Money: can also be shares owned, debts that others owe you, or future revenue. Men: engineers, technicians - everyone that makes the company a business that makes money, and everything they know, including the company's past struggles so they don't repeat the same mistakes over and over again. Being an investor implies that the people doing the investments have an actual knowledge not only of the current revenue sources of a business, but also its past history and its future potential, to be able to extract the maximum value from its operations. Being an investor implies that there is a minimum amount of trust in what employees do, security in their past experiences as employees so that future mistakes can be avoided or mitigated, and faith in their future potential. People who see employees only as expenses or numbers to be deducted from quarterly profits along with benefits, insurance, social security and other normal operational costs of the operation of a company do not deserve to be called investors for they have no plans for the future of a company and no interest either in the work of the employees or their success. If they see a company only as a set of numbers and only focus on their returns, they fail to see the history, the potential and the future impact of that company. Thus they are more like vultures picking a rotten carcass than investors. I'm done.
  - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    Indeed. We really need some new words and some changes to the GAAP to make the distinction between productive investment for the future and aggressive asset sweating for the short term very clear to everyone.

vidoc 11y ago

While Pipes was a really cool product, I doubt it would have changed anything. Reminds me google wave, great appeal to engineers but hard to sell to the masses :/ Yahoo has indeed had a product problem for a while, but I think it's more of a consequence of its internal culture of technical mediocrity and IBM-like middle management.

tuna 11y ago

Pipes was really cool. Their email still sought after (at least in latin america) for corporate customers. Perhaps a SaaS spin off with email, pipes, ecommerce search/recommendation and other cool tools they release all these years ?

cylinder 11y ago

"Give me money* or I'll buy your whole company and fire you." * We just call it a dividend, or share buyback, or sell me your real estate in bulk so I can sell each piece individually and take the spread.

Riod 11y ago
Investors want management to be efficient capital allocators. Not surprising.

forgetsusername 11y ago

>they buy a small share and the company bends over backwards so the 'investors" get an extra percentage point instead of focusing on long term strategies. They take advantage of the rights afforded to them as owners of the company to push for change, whether you agree with their particular view or not. That's how corporate governance is supposed to work. Though, not surprising that people on this board might prefer the "don't give shareholders any rights" model of Facebook or Google. Why do you put "investors" in scare quotes?

dragonbonheur 11y ago
> Why do you put "investors" in scare quotes? Business 101 - the Assets of a company. Machines: anything that enable the production of deliverables and thus, value. Materials: raw materials (obviously), applicable for traditional industries. Solar and wind farms could qualify in the tech sector, tough. Money: can also be shares owned, debts that others owe you, or future revenue. Men: engineers, technicians - everyone that makes the company a business that makes money, and everything they know, including the company's past struggles so they don't repeat the same mistakes over and over again. Being an investor implies that the people doing the investments have an actual knowledge not only of the current revenue sources of a business, but also its past history and its future potential, to be able to extract the maximum value from its operations. Being an investor implies that there is a minimum amount of trust in what employees do, security in their past experiences as employees so that future mistakes can be avoided or mitigated, and faith in their future potential. People who see employees only as expenses or numbers to be deducted from quarterly profits along with benefits, insurance, social security and other normal operational costs of the operation of a company do not deserve to be called investors for they have no plans for the future of a company and no interest either in the work of the employees or their success. If they see a company only as a set of numbers and only focus on their returns, they fail to see the history, the potential and the future impact of that company. Thus they are more like vultures picking a rotten carcass than investors. I'm done.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  Indeed. We really need some new words and some changes to the GAAP to make the distinction between productive investment for the future and aggressive asset sweating for the short term very clear to everyone.