4 ms·

"Arguably, Yahoo was unfixable." I really don't think so. Their product would have succeeded with a more humble and focused approach. A generalist company lik

by kome 9y ago

"Arguably, Yahoo was unfixable." I really don't think so. Their product would have succeeded with a more humble and focused approach. A generalist company like IAC/InterActiveCorp is doing fine: Yahoo too had all the assets to keep a position of relevance on the global internet. Yahoo management was bad. That's all.

kumarvvr 9y ago
Can you tell me what exactly is their product?
- fnord123 9y ago
  Eyeballs.
  - gcb0 9y ago
    which are all moving to whatsapp and wechat. yahoo could have retained some of those eyeballs if they had more than two developers working on IM. To list a single example that a toddler could have came up with. saying that nobody could have done better than MM is a huge stretch of imagination.
    - fnord123 9y ago
      I agree. I'm not one of he people who think that no one could have done better than MM. On the contrary, my cat could have done better. My cat would have also chased a laser pointer around the room instead of pissing a billion dollars away on tumblr. Then he would have insisted that yahoo offset the capex on internal clusters by entering the cloud infrastructure field. This would offer another revenue stream not tied to eyeballs. Newspapers had been consolidating since they didn't know how to make money from the web. So I expect chairman meow to have also bought some papers. Cats love sitting on paper. And getting yahoos ability to make money from the web and the natural draw of journalism it seems like a good fit.
      - gcb0 9y ago
        Well she did buy. but instead of buying newspapers and getting the entire newsroom she bought a couple of high profile bubble heads who millennial don't even know the name. One of which spent all her time making and promoting her political documentaries.
tomhoward 9y ago
IAC's market cap is about $8B. Yahoo's cap is 6x that at $48B. It's hard to imagine Yahoo just transforming itself into the same kind of company as IAC, only 6 times bigger. But it could be said that it is making that kind of transformation, only more suited to its circumstances, by selling off its consumer brands to Verizon and retaining just the more valuable Asian investments in its current entity. The whole problem for Mayer was that its key products had started losing relevance long before she joined, and its brand/reputation was already a joke among the types of people it needed to appeal to - i.e. early adopter consumers and top engineering/design talent - if it was going to make a turnaround. Unlike Apple in 1996, it didn't still have loyal, true-believer devotees ready to enthusiastically embrace it once it started producing good products again. The people still using Yahoo products have mostly been people too indifferent about tech to switch their email platform or their browser's default page - i.e., people at the opposite end of the spectrum to Apple's true believers. So all she could do was carve up the assets and distribute them in a way that is most lucrative, which is precisely what she's done.
- mgkimsal 9y ago
  > all she could do was carve up the assets and distribute them in a way that is most lucrative That doesn't explain the dozens of acquisitions under her leadership.
  - tomhoward 9y ago
    Sure it does: it may have been the only way to attract and retain enough top engineering and design talent to keep the consumer brands valuable enough to sell at a good price. Xobni, in particular, would fit that justification, given how key email has been to Yahoo's user retention. Tumblr on the other hand was more of a product/brand/audience acquisition than an acquihire, but it could well have made the suite of consumer brands more attractive to buyers.
    - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
      So she got paid preposterous amounts of money to ruin other businesses so she could use their workforce to fool investors in to propping up Yahoo when it was noticed Yahoo was no longer useful and was falling in it's goals? Capitalism: 'optimising' markets by giving all the value created to individuals who destroy the means of value creation. It's like some sort of economic terrorism, destroy any hope of economy and flee with the money.

by kome 9y ago

kumarvvr 9y ago

Can you tell me what exactly is their product?

fnord123 9y ago
Eyeballs.
- gcb0 9y ago
  which are all moving to whatsapp and wechat. yahoo could have retained some of those eyeballs if they had more than two developers working on IM. To list a single example that a toddler could have came up with. saying that nobody could have done better than MM is a huge stretch of imagination.
  - fnord123 9y ago
    I agree. I'm not one of he people who think that no one could have done better than MM. On the contrary, my cat could have done better. My cat would have also chased a laser pointer around the room instead of pissing a billion dollars away on tumblr. Then he would have insisted that yahoo offset the capex on internal clusters by entering the cloud infrastructure field. This would offer another revenue stream not tied to eyeballs. Newspapers had been consolidating since they didn't know how to make money from the web. So I expect chairman meow to have also bought some papers. Cats love sitting on paper. And getting yahoos ability to make money from the web and the natural draw of journalism it seems like a good fit.
    - gcb0 9y ago
      Well she did buy. but instead of buying newspapers and getting the entire newsroom she bought a couple of high profile bubble heads who millennial don't even know the name. One of which spent all her time making and promoting her political documentaries.

tomhoward 9y ago

IAC's market cap is about $8B. Yahoo's cap is 6x that at $48B. It's hard to imagine Yahoo just transforming itself into the same kind of company as IAC, only 6 times bigger. But it could be said that it is making that kind of transformation, only more suited to its circumstances, by selling off its consumer brands to Verizon and retaining just the more valuable Asian investments in its current entity. The whole problem for Mayer was that its key products had started losing relevance long before she joined, and its brand/reputation was already a joke among the types of people it needed to appeal to - i.e. early adopter consumers and top engineering/design talent - if it was going to make a turnaround. Unlike Apple in 1996, it didn't still have loyal, true-believer devotees ready to enthusiastically embrace it once it started producing good products again. The people still using Yahoo products have mostly been people too indifferent about tech to switch their email platform or their browser's default page - i.e., people at the opposite end of the spectrum to Apple's true believers. So all she could do was carve up the assets and distribute them in a way that is most lucrative, which is precisely what she's done.

mgkimsal 9y ago
> all she could do was carve up the assets and distribute them in a way that is most lucrative That doesn't explain the dozens of acquisitions under her leadership.
- tomhoward 9y ago
  Sure it does: it may have been the only way to attract and retain enough top engineering and design talent to keep the consumer brands valuable enough to sell at a good price. Xobni, in particular, would fit that justification, given how key email has been to Yahoo's user retention. Tumblr on the other hand was more of a product/brand/audience acquisition than an acquihire, but it could well have made the suite of consumer brands more attractive to buyers.
  - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    So she got paid preposterous amounts of money to ruin other businesses so she could use their workforce to fool investors in to propping up Yahoo when it was noticed Yahoo was no longer useful and was falling in it's goals? Capitalism: 'optimising' markets by giving all the value created to individuals who destroy the means of value creation. It's like some sort of economic terrorism, destroy any hope of economy and flee with the money.