11 ms·

Yahoo employees: Get out now before the vultures descend

104 points by jfruh 15y ago

wavephorm 15y ago
I remember this type of Schadenfreude during the tech collapse in 2000. People seemed to just love hearing about other people losing their jobs. This editorial certainly has undertones of wanting to accelerate the collapse of Yahoo. Be careful what you wish for.
- cosmicman 15y ago
  Completely agree. If Yahoo does manage to turn it around I wouldn't be surprised to find it disapointed people who were secretly wishing for collapse.
jpdoctor 15y ago
Anyone have a mirror or cache link?
brador 15y ago
With a fresh top level CEO, could Yahoo survive?
- parfe 15y ago
  What would Yahoo have to do for you for it to get your business? http://everything.yahoo.com/ http://everything.yahoo.com/ Take a look at all the services yahoo offers. Has anyone ever sent you a "Yahoo Video" link? I didn't even know it existed until just now. And the prominent video on the main page is "Jazz for Cows" which I can't get a direct link for to paste here. Yahoo only offers me the option to embed it. It's fun enough I want to send it to my friend who plays in a local orchestra, but Yahoo is not concerned with the organic spread of links. http://video.yahoo.com/ http://video.yahoo.com/ It isn't just youtube Yahoo competes poorly with. Craigslist, Gmail, ESPN, every news site on the internet. Just take a look at their "security" offering http://security.yahoo.com/ http://security.yahoo.com/ Paragraphs of copywriting but no product to download or install. Click "Protect your PC" it's just more words. Lots of words. Someone at Yahoo took the time to create this page for what purpose? There is no direction whatsoever. Their primary search function is powered by Bing now too. About the only near-market leader Yahoo controls is Flickr and that's only because pros like it over Facebook. Yahoo! became the bitbucket to store second rate implementations of every idea the internet has ever had, and they aren't cutting the cruft loose, or differentiating on the products that are quality. In fact, take a look at their mobile offering. http://m.yahoo.com/w/sports/ncaaf/teams/ncaaf.i-a.2?.ts=1316199330&.intl=us&.lang=en http://m.yahoo.com/w/sports/ncaaf/teams/ncaaf.i-a.2?.ts=1316... That's the Big East Team list for College Football. It's not standings. It doesn't show records. Some project manager at Yahoo accessed the mobile sports site and either didn't care enough to say "Why can't I see the standings?" or didn't know enough about sports to care about standings. Why does Yahoo! have someone like that in charge of the mobile sports division (If they even have someone in a leadership position anywhere close to such a segment). Someone thought displaying 8 teams in alphabetical order was good usability.
  - parfe 15y ago
    I'm thinking about Yahoo and getting angry. Why can't I get a Yahoo! Games platform app on my Android phone? They have an online community full of Chess, Go, and Scrabble players which means even the first person to pay $15 for the Yahoo! Games app has people to play with. Full integration between the web and phone means I can always find someone to play chess against. But no, they decided to spend time offering up Yahoo! Weather for free. Some exec must have sent out an internal memo mandating that no Project Manager develop anything that will make money.
  - brador 15y ago
    I love the colors on Yahoo video! I too had never heard of their video offering. I think they have some good products, they have eyeballs, it's just a very poorly run company lacking direction. I'd take that CEO position in a flash and I think I could turn it round.
    - 0x12 15y ago
      What makes you think you are qualified?
  - simonbrown 15y ago
    > Yahoo only offers me the option to embed it. Clicking the up arrow icon provides me a URL along with an embed link. Or you could just copy it from your browser's URL bar.
    - parfe 15y ago
      It appears that the promoted/lead video displayed at http://video.yahoo.com http://video.yahoo.com does NOT have a link field in the up arrow menu. Once you find a video's specific page the same video has a link available. At least on ubuntu with flash 11,0,1,129 installed.
  - drgath 15y ago
    > About the only near-market leader Yahoo controls is Flickr #1 US properties - Y! News - Y! Sports - Y! Finance - OMG - Y! Mail - Homepage (for portals) And probably some others I don't know of.
vbtemp 15y ago
I don't understand why Yahoo still exists (or at least why it still gets so much coverage). At this point it's just a cheap knockoff of everything google does. Has anyone ever used Yahoo mail? It's a POS, it's bloated, slow, prone to failure - and it doesn't even work on linux. Same thing for yahoo maps, news, search, etc. I just don't get it.
- pork 15y ago
  A sinking ship still has momentum.
  - frou_dh 15y ago
    I'd have gone with derailing train.
    - cpeterso 15y ago
      And that's a lot of momentum!
- Hisoka 15y ago
  I don't get why investment banks exists. I don't get why casinos exist. I don't get why cigarette companies exist. I don't get why Fannie Mae exists.
  - cellis 15y ago
    Yeah! Like seriously, why do humans exist? We're slow, bloated, prone to failure, and to top it all off we don't even work on Linux!
- jfarmer 15y ago
  In terms of usage, Hotmail is #1, Yahoo! Mail is #2, and Gmail is #3.
- arcanebook 15y ago
  It can take a long time for large companies to die.
Hisoka 15y ago
Wouldn't it be wiser to wait until you see if you get fired, so you get the severance package? And if you don't, then get out?
- spydum 15y ago
  By then the market may be saturated with your former co-workers..
  - deathmatch 15y ago
    Kind of a damned if you do damned if you don't situation.
guestaccount09 15y ago
Commenting from a throw away account: I recently got an offer from Yahoo! I am pretty much new to this industry, stories like this makes me nervous :-(
bryanlarsen 15y ago
If vultures are descending, I would think it would be better to wait. The bidding war will temporarily bump up your stock price & options, giving you a better time to sell them. Then the vultures will offer buy-outs to encourage employees to leave. I doubt the vultures will be overly generous in their buy-outs but it can still amount to a substantial amount of cash if you've been there a while.
- yangtheman 15y ago
  Why buy-outs? If I were looking for cutting costs, I would just lay them off.
  - chollida1 15y ago
    I'm not the parent you responded to, but I'm assuming when they said buy-outs, they were including severance for layoffs. In North America 1 month is pretty common if you've been with a company for more than a year with 2 months not being uncommon. I've heard of people being given 1 month of notice of a layoff and then being asked to work that month only once:)
    - tomkarlo 15y ago
      1 month is common because companies care about their public image when it comes to hiring new people, and they know that the remaining employees will watch how those being cut are treated. If you've got new folks in charge who don't care about it, or need to cut cash outlay _very_ fast because they levered up the company to buy it, you may not get that severance. There's certainly no legal obligation to give a month of severance when it comes to an "at will" employee. I've been around at a few companies before where cuts happened. The first round of layoffs always got good severance, because the company wanted to make sure that the remaining employees didn't bail... but after 2 or 3 rounds, the jig was up, so the severance shrank from 2-3 months to 2-3 weeks.
      - chollida1 15y ago
        > There's certainly no legal obligation to give a month of severance when it comes to an "at will" employee. I see, this is news to me. I'm Canadian so I guess the laws can certainly be different, but I was under the impression that 2 weeks was a minimum severance required by law. I've never seen less than a month, I guess this could be enforced by employment contracts. I know it's been in every one I've signed:)
byrneseyeview 15y ago
This article is based on a false premise. The effect of LBOs on job creation is ambiguous: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1034178 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1034178 Silver Lake, in particular, is more of a growth equity firm that happens to use debt. (I work at, but by no means speak for, Yahoo.
- barry-cotter 15y ago
  What happened to DDD?
uncertain 15y ago
I was given a very good job offer from Yahoo around the same time Carol Bartz was fired. I have yet to sign anything yet because of what I've been reading about Yahoo's condition. I get the feeling that most of the news about Yahoo's demise are just being sensational, yet at the same time I can't ignore the fact that Yahoo employees have been leaving the company every other week (according to my friends who have worked there). My worst fear is relocating and then being totally screwed over. I don't know what to do.
- pavel_lishin 15y ago
  Where would you relocate to? I'm assuming that if Yahoo gave you a good job offer, you'd be able to find other employment in the area without too much problem.
  - uncertain 15y ago
    Santa Clara, CA. I'm just worried that if I move out there I'll be left hanging while I have expenses to keep up with.
    - wh-uws 15y ago
      Are you interviewing anywhere else? You could probably use the off as leverage. Yahoo's engineering core is still well respected in the industry. Everybody just knows that none of the people in charge have a clue as to what to do with all of that talent.
      - uncertain 15y ago
        I am planning to interview with several other companies. But by then I will need to decide whether I want to stick with Yahoo or not. I've heard great things about working at Yahoo (and the downsides) and the offer is fantastic, but my gut instinct is telling me to reconsider..
        Florin_Andrei 15y ago
czhiddy 15y ago
I'm curious - can someone explain to me how Yahoo still has a higher P/E ratio than say, Apple? For that matter, why is EBay's P/E higher than Google's?
- tdurden 15y ago
  Asian assets are a very large part of the 'P'
  - w1ntermute 15y ago
    Yahoo! is only a minority shareholder in Yahoo! Japan, with SoftBank owning 40+% of the shares.
    - tdurden 15y ago
      Yahoo! owns over 40% of Alibaba which is a multibillion dollar company. I have seen valuations over 30B, but these are rough estimates since it is not public.
- loganfrederick 15y ago
  It's always a case by case basis and I'm not a professional analyst, but I could come up with a few (flimsy) reasons. Basically boils down to odds and the change in growth rate. Just because a company is consistently, wildly profitable does not mean they should have a high P/E ratio. P/E is often much more influenced by the growth rate for earnings. With Yahoo and eBay, investors are saying that these companies are more likely to grow very quickly than Apple and Google, which makes perfect sense since those two giants will most likely grow between some range. Investors must believe Yahoo is either be a huge hit or miss and eBay must have some reasons for people to believe they can juice their growth rate higher quickly, perhaps based on their acquisitions, room to expand their fees, acquiring new customers etc. *Edit: Added note on Yahoo, its assets (as the Asian comment below reminded me to add) could very well be worth more than its current valuation. This article explains how: http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/24/yahoo-shareholder-bartz/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/24/yahoo-shareholder-bartz/
- 15y ago
brackin 15y ago
I don't like the idea of a writer telling people to quit their jobs with little first hand knowledge. If they like working for Yahoo they should stay till they can get the severance package or continue working there. Afterwards you probably have some savvy friends you could convince to join you on making your own future, in the form of a startup.
cHalgan 15y ago
If Yahoo! is acquired by AOL, then I think there might be some bright future for Yahoo! and for AOL. For example, they could focus on Yahoo! Finance to be the place for investment, stocks info on internet. In order words, it is too early to predict whether Yahoo! will be sold to PE firms. EDIT: Stupid comment: AOL is way smaller than Yahoo!
- namityadav 15y ago
  If Yahoo! is acquired by AOL Yahoo's market cap: $18.91B AOL's market cap: $1.5B
  - cHalgan 15y ago
    Stupid me. I was honestly thinking that AOL's market cap is about 20B. Wow...
shoham 15y ago
Really sad article -- I'd love to see Yahoo turn it around. It's an amazing company, in many ways.
sriramk 15y ago
Honestly, I find this article ridiculous and borderline offensive. I would love if the author would come talk to a few of us and maybe take a tour of the place and see what makes this place work. I work at Yahoo, joined a few months ago, run engineering management for a couple of teams working on high-performance cloud stuff very core to the way Yahoo works. I find the engineers sharp and smart, the technology problems fascinating (insane scale/perf requirements) and in general, look forward to getting up and driving to Sunnyvale every morning. None of that is going to change unless something really dramatic happens. P.S We're hiring. :) If any of you want to work on a platform serving a ridiculous (and I do mean ridiculous) number of requests and users, hacking on cutting-edge distributed programming work, send me email (address on my profile).
- lpgauth 15y ago
  Do you guys use erlang anywhere in that stack?
  - sriramk 15y ago
    Nope. But we have our own constructs for a lot of the semantics Erlang provides written from the ground up in C/C++. Sorry, can't talk about it more except in broad strokes :)
    - Luyt 15y ago
      Apache Traffic Server?
      - sriramk 15y ago
        Nope, this is not public. Traffic server ( and the stuff it lead to) is built by a peer group under the same VP I report to.
        Luyt 15y ago
        I see. I asked because I recently listened to FLOSS Weekly's "Apache Traffic Server" episode featuring some Yahoos who were involved with it from its beginnings, and which is apparently used heavily within the Yahoo infrastructure. http://twit.cachefly.net/floss0179.mp3 http://twit.cachefly.net/floss0179.mp3 "We talk about the Apache Traffic Server, a proxy server that you probably don't realize you are already using. Guests: Leif Hedstrom and Bryan Call"
ww520 15y ago
Anyone still owns YHOO stocks? Got some at around 13 after the collapse of Microsoft buyout. The book value was/is good. Was hoping there's another acquisition.
socratic 15y ago
It's weird to see Y! get a lot of hate on HN, because it seems like working there would be a lot like working at a startup. You're trading off risk (will this company exist in n years) for reward (higher salary, greater control over job responsibilities). The best Y! employees also probably have a ton of visibility, working on projects like Hadoop, YUI, YQL, and so on. What's wrong with this analogy?
- thurn 15y ago
  Well, working at a startup is rewarding because you have a small team of peers, very little bureaucracy or management overhead, no legacy to deal with, etc. I don't think the analogy addresses the core reasons why you'd pick a startup.
  - gildedsuit 15y ago
    Yeah the size differences alone would make them worlds apart.
0x12 15y ago
Funny, this article seems to be written by one of those vultures. People that don't work at Yahoo! telling people that work there to quit remind me of the pope telling other people to abstain from sex. If you're not playing the game don't tell others how to play it or to stop playing it. Yahoo! has had a rough time but it still has plenty of life in it, let's wait to see what they intend to do once they've found their new bearings. Carol Bartz was a disaster, she did the worst thing any CEO could ever do, which is to wreck the culture that pervaded Yahoo!. Now it is up to new people to try to restore that culture or at least a semblance of it and then possibly the oil tanker can be turned around. It isn't over until the fat lady sings. Yahoo! is huge, has a pile of interesting tech, lacks polish and needs focus. If Apple could be turned around then so can Yahoo.
- dpark 15y ago
  >Carol Bartz was a disaster, she did the worst thing any CEO could ever do, which is to wreck the culture that pervaded Yahoo!. Sorry, but what culture do you believe Bartz destroyed? I was at Yahoo before Bartz, and left only about a month before she was fired. I don't believe that Bartz destroyed anything. Yahoo has never had a great culture. They've always had an identity crisis. You can go read PG's older essays and see that. Bartz was fired because she couldn't work a miracle. Yahoo needs some truly amazing changes in order to avoid Sun's fate, and I'm not sure anyone out there can/will deliver what's needed quickly enough. You mentioned Apple as a turnaround example. Exactly where do you think Yahoo is going to get a Steve Jobs?
  - 0x12 15y ago
    When did you join? I believe Yahoo! definitely had 'culture' in the early days, they were pretty much synonymous with end-user content on the net and the Y! employees and their users were the ones that showed us cool offices, a different kind of company and neat things to do with the web. I think they went downhill since the .com crash and never managed to recover. The final remnants of that were buried in the last two years, now Yahoo! reminds me of an oiltanker with the captain and the rest of the crew below decks. Time will tell if they can turn it around or not but with giants this size even dying will take a long long time.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
horseracer999 15y ago
I always find articles about Yahoo to be so sad sometimes.
sylax 15y ago
I hope Yahoo can fix its problems, it's sad to see it go this way.
whiteduck 15y ago
I hate to say it but I think this article may be right.
keyboarder 15y ago
I wonder how one would even go about fixing Yahoo.
redrising1 15y ago
Poor Yahoo. It's disapointing to see it go this way.
ghostshield11 15y ago
It would be interesting to see someone lay out the complete endgame for Yahoo.

104 points by jfruh 15y ago

I remember this type of Schadenfreude during the tech collapse in 2000. People seemed to just love hearing about other people losing their jobs. This editorial certainly has undertones of wanting to accelerate the collapse of Yahoo. Be careful what you wish for.

cosmicman 15y ago
Completely agree. If Yahoo does manage to turn it around I wouldn't be surprised to find it disapointed people who were secretly wishing for collapse.

jpdoctor 15y ago

Anyone have a mirror or cache link?

brador 15y ago

With a fresh top level CEO, could Yahoo survive?

parfe 15y ago
What would Yahoo have to do for you for it to get your business? http://everything.yahoo.com/ http://everything.yahoo.com/ Take a look at all the services yahoo offers. Has anyone ever sent you a "Yahoo Video" link? I didn't even know it existed until just now. And the prominent video on the main page is "Jazz for Cows" which I can't get a direct link for to paste here. Yahoo only offers me the option to embed it. It's fun enough I want to send it to my friend who plays in a local orchestra, but Yahoo is not concerned with the organic spread of links. http://video.yahoo.com/ http://video.yahoo.com/ It isn't just youtube Yahoo competes poorly with. Craigslist, Gmail, ESPN, every news site on the internet. Just take a look at their "security" offering http://security.yahoo.com/ http://security.yahoo.com/ Paragraphs of copywriting but no product to download or install. Click "Protect your PC" it's just more words. Lots of words. Someone at Yahoo took the time to create this page for what purpose? There is no direction whatsoever. Their primary search function is powered by Bing now too. About the only near-market leader Yahoo controls is Flickr and that's only because pros like it over Facebook. Yahoo! became the bitbucket to store second rate implementations of every idea the internet has ever had, and they aren't cutting the cruft loose, or differentiating on the products that are quality. In fact, take a look at their mobile offering. http://m.yahoo.com/w/sports/ncaaf/teams/ncaaf.i-a.2?.ts=1316199330&.intl=us&.lang=en http://m.yahoo.com/w/sports/ncaaf/teams/ncaaf.i-a.2?.ts=1316... That's the Big East Team list for College Football. It's not standings. It doesn't show records. Some project manager at Yahoo accessed the mobile sports site and either didn't care enough to say "Why can't I see the standings?" or didn't know enough about sports to care about standings. Why does Yahoo! have someone like that in charge of the mobile sports division (If they even have someone in a leadership position anywhere close to such a segment). Someone thought displaying 8 teams in alphabetical order was good usability.
- parfe 15y ago
  I'm thinking about Yahoo and getting angry. Why can't I get a Yahoo! Games platform app on my Android phone? They have an online community full of Chess, Go, and Scrabble players which means even the first person to pay $15 for the Yahoo! Games app has people to play with. Full integration between the web and phone means I can always find someone to play chess against. But no, they decided to spend time offering up Yahoo! Weather for free. Some exec must have sent out an internal memo mandating that no Project Manager develop anything that will make money.
- brador 15y ago
  I love the colors on Yahoo video! I too had never heard of their video offering. I think they have some good products, they have eyeballs, it's just a very poorly run company lacking direction. I'd take that CEO position in a flash and I think I could turn it round.
  - 0x12 15y ago
    What makes you think you are qualified?
- simonbrown 15y ago
  > Yahoo only offers me the option to embed it. Clicking the up arrow icon provides me a URL along with an embed link. Or you could just copy it from your browser's URL bar.
  - parfe 15y ago
    It appears that the promoted/lead video displayed at http://video.yahoo.com http://video.yahoo.com does NOT have a link field in the up arrow menu. Once you find a video's specific page the same video has a link available. At least on ubuntu with flash 11,0,1,129 installed.
- drgath 15y ago
  > About the only near-market leader Yahoo controls is Flickr #1 US properties - Y! News - Y! Sports - Y! Finance - OMG - Y! Mail - Homepage (for portals) And probably some others I don't know of.

vbtemp 15y ago

I don't understand why Yahoo still exists (or at least why it still gets so much coverage). At this point it's just a cheap knockoff of everything google does. Has anyone ever used Yahoo mail? It's a POS, it's bloated, slow, prone to failure - and it doesn't even work on linux. Same thing for yahoo maps, news, search, etc. I just don't get it.

pork 15y ago
A sinking ship still has momentum.
- frou_dh 15y ago
  I'd have gone with derailing train.
  - cpeterso 15y ago
    And that's a lot of momentum!
Hisoka 15y ago
I don't get why investment banks exists. I don't get why casinos exist. I don't get why cigarette companies exist. I don't get why Fannie Mae exists.
- cellis 15y ago
  Yeah! Like seriously, why do humans exist? We're slow, bloated, prone to failure, and to top it all off we don't even work on Linux!
jfarmer 15y ago
In terms of usage, Hotmail is #1, Yahoo! Mail is #2, and Gmail is #3.
arcanebook 15y ago
It can take a long time for large companies to die.

Hisoka 15y ago

Wouldn't it be wiser to wait until you see if you get fired, so you get the severance package? And if you don't, then get out?

spydum 15y ago
By then the market may be saturated with your former co-workers..
- deathmatch 15y ago
  Kind of a damned if you do damned if you don't situation.

guestaccount09 15y ago

Commenting from a throw away account: I recently got an offer from Yahoo! I am pretty much new to this industry, stories like this makes me nervous :-(

bryanlarsen 15y ago

If vultures are descending, I would think it would be better to wait. The bidding war will temporarily bump up your stock price & options, giving you a better time to sell them. Then the vultures will offer buy-outs to encourage employees to leave. I doubt the vultures will be overly generous in their buy-outs but it can still amount to a substantial amount of cash if you've been there a while.

yangtheman 15y ago
Why buy-outs? If I were looking for cutting costs, I would just lay them off.
- chollida1 15y ago
  I'm not the parent you responded to, but I'm assuming when they said buy-outs, they were including severance for layoffs. In North America 1 month is pretty common if you've been with a company for more than a year with 2 months not being uncommon. I've heard of people being given 1 month of notice of a layoff and then being asked to work that month only once:)
  - tomkarlo 15y ago
    1 month is common because companies care about their public image when it comes to hiring new people, and they know that the remaining employees will watch how those being cut are treated. If you've got new folks in charge who don't care about it, or need to cut cash outlay _very_ fast because they levered up the company to buy it, you may not get that severance. There's certainly no legal obligation to give a month of severance when it comes to an "at will" employee. I've been around at a few companies before where cuts happened. The first round of layoffs always got good severance, because the company wanted to make sure that the remaining employees didn't bail... but after 2 or 3 rounds, the jig was up, so the severance shrank from 2-3 months to 2-3 weeks.
    - chollida1 15y ago
      > There's certainly no legal obligation to give a month of severance when it comes to an "at will" employee. I see, this is news to me. I'm Canadian so I guess the laws can certainly be different, but I was under the impression that 2 weeks was a minimum severance required by law. I've never seen less than a month, I guess this could be enforced by employment contracts. I know it's been in every one I've signed:)

byrneseyeview 15y ago

This article is based on a false premise. The effect of LBOs on job creation is ambiguous: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1034178 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1034178 Silver Lake, in particular, is more of a growth equity firm that happens to use debt. (I work at, but by no means speak for, Yahoo.

barry-cotter 15y ago
What happened to DDD?

uncertain 15y ago

I was given a very good job offer from Yahoo around the same time Carol Bartz was fired. I have yet to sign anything yet because of what I've been reading about Yahoo's condition. I get the feeling that most of the news about Yahoo's demise are just being sensational, yet at the same time I can't ignore the fact that Yahoo employees have been leaving the company every other week (according to my friends who have worked there). My worst fear is relocating and then being totally screwed over. I don't know what to do.

pavel_lishin 15y ago
Where would you relocate to? I'm assuming that if Yahoo gave you a good job offer, you'd be able to find other employment in the area without too much problem.
- uncertain 15y ago
  Santa Clara, CA. I'm just worried that if I move out there I'll be left hanging while I have expenses to keep up with.
  - wh-uws 15y ago
    Are you interviewing anywhere else? You could probably use the off as leverage. Yahoo's engineering core is still well respected in the industry. Everybody just knows that none of the people in charge have a clue as to what to do with all of that talent.
    - uncertain 15y ago
      I am planning to interview with several other companies. But by then I will need to decide whether I want to stick with Yahoo or not. I've heard great things about working at Yahoo (and the downsides) and the offer is fantastic, but my gut instinct is telling me to reconsider..
      - Florin_Andrei 15y ago

czhiddy 15y ago

I'm curious - can someone explain to me how Yahoo still has a higher P/E ratio than say, Apple? For that matter, why is EBay's P/E higher than Google's?

tdurden 15y ago
Asian assets are a very large part of the 'P'
- w1ntermute 15y ago
  Yahoo! is only a minority shareholder in Yahoo! Japan, with SoftBank owning 40+% of the shares.
  - tdurden 15y ago
    Yahoo! owns over 40% of Alibaba which is a multibillion dollar company. I have seen valuations over 30B, but these are rough estimates since it is not public.
loganfrederick 15y ago
It's always a case by case basis and I'm not a professional analyst, but I could come up with a few (flimsy) reasons. Basically boils down to odds and the change in growth rate. Just because a company is consistently, wildly profitable does not mean they should have a high P/E ratio. P/E is often much more influenced by the growth rate for earnings. With Yahoo and eBay, investors are saying that these companies are more likely to grow very quickly than Apple and Google, which makes perfect sense since those two giants will most likely grow between some range. Investors must believe Yahoo is either be a huge hit or miss and eBay must have some reasons for people to believe they can juice their growth rate higher quickly, perhaps based on their acquisitions, room to expand their fees, acquiring new customers etc. *Edit: Added note on Yahoo, its assets (as the Asian comment below reminded me to add) could very well be worth more than its current valuation. This article explains how: http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/24/yahoo-shareholder-bartz/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/24/yahoo-shareholder-bartz/
15y ago

brackin 15y ago

I don't like the idea of a writer telling people to quit their jobs with little first hand knowledge. If they like working for Yahoo they should stay till they can get the severance package or continue working there. Afterwards you probably have some savvy friends you could convince to join you on making your own future, in the form of a startup.

cHalgan 15y ago

If Yahoo! is acquired by AOL, then I think there might be some bright future for Yahoo! and for AOL. For example, they could focus on Yahoo! Finance to be the place for investment, stocks info on internet. In order words, it is too early to predict whether Yahoo! will be sold to PE firms. EDIT: Stupid comment: AOL is way smaller than Yahoo!

namityadav 15y ago
If Yahoo! is acquired by AOL Yahoo's market cap: $18.91B AOL's market cap: $1.5B
- cHalgan 15y ago
  Stupid me. I was honestly thinking that AOL's market cap is about 20B. Wow...

shoham 15y ago

Really sad article -- I'd love to see Yahoo turn it around. It's an amazing company, in many ways.

sriramk 15y ago

Honestly, I find this article ridiculous and borderline offensive. I would love if the author would come talk to a few of us and maybe take a tour of the place and see what makes this place work. I work at Yahoo, joined a few months ago, run engineering management for a couple of teams working on high-performance cloud stuff very core to the way Yahoo works. I find the engineers sharp and smart, the technology problems fascinating (insane scale/perf requirements) and in general, look forward to getting up and driving to Sunnyvale every morning. None of that is going to change unless something really dramatic happens. P.S We're hiring. :) If any of you want to work on a platform serving a ridiculous (and I do mean ridiculous) number of requests and users, hacking on cutting-edge distributed programming work, send me email (address on my profile).

lpgauth 15y ago
Do you guys use erlang anywhere in that stack?
- sriramk 15y ago
  Nope. But we have our own constructs for a lot of the semantics Erlang provides written from the ground up in C/C++. Sorry, can't talk about it more except in broad strokes :)
  - Luyt 15y ago
    Apache Traffic Server?
    - sriramk 15y ago
      Nope, this is not public. Traffic server ( and the stuff it lead to) is built by a peer group under the same VP I report to.
      - Luyt 15y ago
        I see. I asked because I recently listened to FLOSS Weekly's "Apache Traffic Server" episode featuring some Yahoos who were involved with it from its beginnings, and which is apparently used heavily within the Yahoo infrastructure. http://twit.cachefly.net/floss0179.mp3 http://twit.cachefly.net/floss0179.mp3 "We talk about the Apache Traffic Server, a proxy server that you probably don't realize you are already using. Guests: Leif Hedstrom and Bryan Call"

ww520 15y ago

Anyone still owns YHOO stocks? Got some at around 13 after the collapse of Microsoft buyout. The book value was/is good. Was hoping there's another acquisition.

socratic 15y ago

It's weird to see Y! get a lot of hate on HN, because it seems like working there would be a lot like working at a startup. You're trading off risk (will this company exist in n years) for reward (higher salary, greater control over job responsibilities). The best Y! employees also probably have a ton of visibility, working on projects like Hadoop, YUI, YQL, and so on. What's wrong with this analogy?

thurn 15y ago
Well, working at a startup is rewarding because you have a small team of peers, very little bureaucracy or management overhead, no legacy to deal with, etc. I don't think the analogy addresses the core reasons why you'd pick a startup.
- gildedsuit 15y ago
  Yeah the size differences alone would make them worlds apart.

0x12 15y ago

Funny, this article seems to be written by one of those vultures. People that don't work at Yahoo! telling people that work there to quit remind me of the pope telling other people to abstain from sex. If you're not playing the game don't tell others how to play it or to stop playing it. Yahoo! has had a rough time but it still has plenty of life in it, let's wait to see what they intend to do once they've found their new bearings. Carol Bartz was a disaster, she did the worst thing any CEO could ever do, which is to wreck the culture that pervaded Yahoo!. Now it is up to new people to try to restore that culture or at least a semblance of it and then possibly the oil tanker can be turned around. It isn't over until the fat lady sings. Yahoo! is huge, has a pile of interesting tech, lacks polish and needs focus. If Apple could be turned around then so can Yahoo.

dpark 15y ago
>Carol Bartz was a disaster, she did the worst thing any CEO could ever do, which is to wreck the culture that pervaded Yahoo!. Sorry, but what culture do you believe Bartz destroyed? I was at Yahoo before Bartz, and left only about a month before she was fired. I don't believe that Bartz destroyed anything. Yahoo has never had a great culture. They've always had an identity crisis. You can go read PG's older essays and see that. Bartz was fired because she couldn't work a miracle. Yahoo needs some truly amazing changes in order to avoid Sun's fate, and I'm not sure anyone out there can/will deliver what's needed quickly enough. You mentioned Apple as a turnaround example. Exactly where do you think Yahoo is going to get a Steve Jobs?
- 0x12 15y ago
  When did you join? I believe Yahoo! definitely had 'culture' in the early days, they were pretty much synonymous with end-user content on the net and the Y! employees and their users were the ones that showed us cool offices, a different kind of company and neat things to do with the web. I think they went downhill since the .com crash and never managed to recover. The final remnants of that were buried in the last two years, now Yahoo! reminds me of an oiltanker with the captain and the rest of the crew below decks. Time will tell if they can turn it around or not but with giants this size even dying will take a long long time.

deleted 15y ago

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horseracer999 15y ago

I always find articles about Yahoo to be so sad sometimes.

sylax 15y ago

I hope Yahoo can fix its problems, it's sad to see it go this way.

whiteduck 15y ago

I hate to say it but I think this article may be right.

keyboarder 15y ago

I wonder how one would even go about fixing Yahoo.

redrising1 15y ago

Poor Yahoo. It's disapointing to see it go this way.

ghostshield11 15y ago

It would be interesting to see someone lay out the complete endgame for Yahoo.