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I've always wondered about these two. Dunwoody is a retired Army general. Decker insofar as I can tell is one of the suits who ran Yahoo into the ground. As a p

I've always wondered about these two. Dunwoody is a retired Army general. Decker insofar as I can tell is one of the suits who ran Yahoo into the ground. As a platform technology company why would you want these people on your board? I could see having the right sort of government suit on it, maybe. I couldn't see "turned Yahoo into an irrelevant hellhole of ads" as relevant experience.

toast0 23d ago
> Decker insofar as I can tell is one of the suits who ran Yahoo into the ground. I don't think that's really right, but it's hard to tell. In my mind, as someone who was there from 2004-2011, things were going ok while she was there. The Microsoft acquisition would have been nice from a $ point of view, and I think they could have been convinced to give all the employeed an Xbox 360, but Microsoft would have smothered the brand and its products... It's possible the acquisition would have been held up in anti-trust for a long time and a large period of uncertainty. IMHO the running into the ground really started under Carol Bartz with the ads and search deal with Microsoft whereby Bing was supposed to take over everything. But performance in terms of latency, quality, and $/search was worse than when Yahoo was doing it and the ads and search teams at Yahoo didn't shrink as expected, because the work didn't shrink as expected. Not surprisingly, when you drop revenue and don't drop costs, financial performance does not improve. Partnering with Google would have made more financial sense, but that wasn't an option because of anti-trust... Probably should have accepted the acquisition and accepted fate... partnering with Microsoft later was a bad choice, maybe they could have backed out once the numbers were clear.
- safety1st 21d ago
  Good information, thank you!
zrn900 23d ago
> As a platform technology company why would you want these people on your board? Investors tell you to put them on the board and you do it. The worst mistake WordPress made was taking investment from private equity and assorted Wall Street types.

toast0 23d ago

> Decker insofar as I can tell is one of the suits who ran Yahoo into the ground. I don't think that's really right, but it's hard to tell. In my mind, as someone who was there from 2004-2011, things were going ok while she was there. The Microsoft acquisition would have been nice from a $ point of view, and I think they could have been convinced to give all the employeed an Xbox 360, but Microsoft would have smothered the brand and its products... It's possible the acquisition would have been held up in anti-trust for a long time and a large period of uncertainty. IMHO the running into the ground really started under Carol Bartz with the ads and search deal with Microsoft whereby Bing was supposed to take over everything. But performance in terms of latency, quality, and $/search was worse than when Yahoo was doing it and the ads and search teams at Yahoo didn't shrink as expected, because the work didn't shrink as expected. Not surprisingly, when you drop revenue and don't drop costs, financial performance does not improve. Partnering with Google would have made more financial sense, but that wasn't an option because of anti-trust... Probably should have accepted the acquisition and accepted fate... partnering with Microsoft later was a bad choice, maybe they could have backed out once the numbers were clear.

safety1st 21d ago
Good information, thank you!

zrn900 23d ago

> As a platform technology company why would you want these people on your board? Investors tell you to put them on the board and you do it. The worst mistake WordPress made was taking investment from private equity and assorted Wall Street types.