His point about Yahoo being a conglomerate the day BABA started trading I think is really important. One of the biggest issues for the CFO of any public conglo

His point about Yahoo being a conglomerate the day BABA started trading I think is really important. One of the biggest issues for the CFO of any public conglomerate is that it becomes very easy to see which divisions are weak. As he mentions, when the value of BABA grew it actually created a problem for Yahoo in that it made it clearer to analysts what the real value of Yahoo was. Yahoo leadership must have know this and realized this could cut down the time they had for their turnaround. To show the other side of being a conglomerate there are a few other interesting companies that operate like conglomerates in Yahoo's space but do so well... Look at Microsoft....They are essentailly a conglomerate now, most people coud name their revenue stream... OS, Office, Servers and tools, Azure and what ever Bing, Xbox etc are rolled into. Every reporting quarter people can see with a fair bit of clarity how well their search and console efforts are doing, and people did point to the huge losses early on for that division. If Microsoft didn't have such strong leadership the entertainment division may have been shuttered. Google is an example of a conglomerate that went that way for a different purpose. They were in competition with Baidu, Bing, and Facebook for search revenue and they wanted to better hilight just how well they were doing. So they form Alphabet so they can better show just how much they spend on moon shots and at the same time show just how profitable their advertising revenue is.