Ugh, articles on topics like this are always so damn opaque. It's like watching people go in and out of the empire state building. You could do it all day for

Ugh, articles on topics like this are always so damn opaque. It's like watching people go in and out of the empire state building. You could do it all day for a year, watching them go in, assume they're doing important things, watching them go out. At the end of the year you have no idea what they've done, though. You're still just people watching. > Yahoo also confirmed that it paid Henrique De Castro $60m, whom Mayer fired for not delivering Sorry for all my questions in the dark, but what does that mean? It can't just be pegged to metrics. How could expectations possibly be set up so that you've recorded some stats and hired a COO, then 15 months down the line the numbers didn't change enough, therefore you think that firing the COO you brought on board will help? How do you get to that point, where firing him is a useful thing to do? Maybe it's as simple as they needed an sacrifice to drown out some earnings noise. Could it be that simple? What else is in play here? Reading this I get nothing but the feeling that there's clearly a lot we're not privy to. Instead we're just people-watching outside of the Yahoo office. ~~~ As a bystander it seems moves like this would make all Yahoo employees more risk-averse than they might otherwise be. What message does this send if the COO was ambitious?[1] That trying something and failing is not OK? That's not conditions developers want to operate under. Could something like Tumblr (or any new popular service) be invented at Yahoo today? I imagine they have plenty of bright people, but I suspect there are unwritten penalties for sticking your head out or attempting a project of any ambition. And maybe there aren't, but this certainly doesn't help the impression. [1] We must assume the COO was not brought on at great expense merely to stay the course.