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Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

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Re: Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

#131

Post by pc86 »

w1ntermute wrote: post #12
Esau wrote: post #9

Don't worry people; I am sure the CEO will be okay.

Mayer will be walking away with a $158M golden parachute[0], and will undoubtedly have another nice executive position lined up in no time. It's amazing how much respect she's garnered in the tech community. From all the public info on her, she doesn't seem to have much product vision - rather, she's just a manager who's good at making data-driven decisions (the infamous "41 shades of blue"[1]) to incrementally optim…

I don't want to hijack by focusing on your second footnote, but:

> I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that.

Can any designers explain why it's unreasonable to provide data for a decision when you operate at Google's scale, and presumably can come up with that data very quickly?

It's one thing to override design based on data, and that's something that can be argued on its merits. But when the design answer is "one of these three," why not run the experiment and pick the best?

Re: Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

#132

Post by toomuchtodo »

jacquesm wrote: post #105
toomuchtodo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been preparing to try to make an offer for Flickr in the event it goes up for sale (separate from the rest of the web business), organizing it as a benefit corp to be a long term business not to be put up for sale. It shouldn't be an Instagram. Its not a social network. Its a photo site that helps you organize/keep your photos, as well as share them (there's a difference). Just bidding my time, ear to the ground…

Very curious about what you plan on to make it profitable.

I don't plan on making it profitable. I plan on just making it break even. It was previously profitable for Yahoo on Pro accounts alone (disclaimer: I am a pro account holder).

Re: Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

#133

Post by toomuchtodo »

tamana wrote: post #48
toomuchtodo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been preparing to try to make an offer for Flickr in the event it goes up for sale (separate from the rest of the web business), organizing it as a benefit corp to be a long term business not to be put up for sale. It shouldn't be an Instagram. Its not a social network. Its a photo site that helps you organize/keep your photos, as well as share them (there's a difference). Just bidding my time, ear to the ground…

Why? There are many great photography hosting services. Flickr is only special because Yahoo makes it free as a marketing gesture

Can you list one? I've found SmugMug and 500px to be significantly inferior to Flickr, which is why I'm still a Pro Flickr subscriber.

Re: Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

#134

Post by hiram112 »

frik wrote: post #67
w1ntermute wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That being said, if you ARE going to judge her by contemporary CEO standards, the question is, would anyone else have done better? The first mistake the Yahoo board made was to decide that product innovation would save them. In reality, they should've brought in an ex-consultant or ex-banker who could chop off pieces of the business and sell them to the highest bidder (essentially, what's going to happen now). The…

The biggest mistake was to shutdown their own search engine, and pay for Bing search results. And their Ads-deal with MSFT wasn't that long-term successful. Yahoo had the biggest Hadoop cluster back in 2009, the were at the forefront of big data and contributed to many open source projects. Then everything went downhill. Now Yahoo has what? Flickr, Tumblr, Mail, ...? Right, they own a stack of Alibaba (China), and no…

Yahoo has delivered some great tech APIs and products. YUI, Pipes, Grids, a lot of the big data projects now at Apache, etc.

I have such respect for the dev teams that put out these products. Similar to a lot of companies with great engineering, it's such a shame that all their great work wasn't able to be better leveraged due to the short-sighted MBA culture that can't see past next quarter's stock price and bonus.

Re: Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

#135

Post by TheLogothete »

collyw wrote: post #122
TheLogothete wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me ask you a question. When you don't know how to proceed in your job what do you do?

Google / Stack overflow and proceed from there.

I guess Marissa Mayer could ask on Quora what to do.

Or start an "Ask HN" thread. By the comments seems like all the corporate strategy experts hang around here.

Re: Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

#136

Post by staunch »

dagw wrote: post #123
simi_ wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thoughts exactly. IIRC Tim makes around 10 mil per year.

10 mil + ~45 mil in stock grants. Still a pretty good bargain, all things considered.

Steve Jobs took no pay at all for years. If he had played hardball with the board, he could've become the richest man in the world. Tim Cook is not doing it for the money either.

Re: Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

#137

Post by yeukhon »

aylmao wrote: post #82
yeukhon wrote: post #35

Yahoo needs to kill off half of their products and just focus on four things: * news (finance & sports) * Search & Portal (that's where they make $$$) * YMail (because there are still millions of users) * fantasy sports and extend it. Spin off Tumblr and Flickr into a startup focus on content and high-quality photo source (TBH there is very little quality content on Tumblr and the attraction / hype is gone - speaking…

Disagree about Tumblr. A year ago it was still the fastest growing social platform, and it still proves to be (especially in 2015) the big source of viral internet content.

Fastest doesn't mean actually making tons of money. Sure vaulation on # of user, but a business can't live forever with # of users. How many of these users are making original contents? I keep seeing posts from years ago getting liked over and over by the people I follow on Tumblr.

Re: Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

#138

Post by phamilton »

spacecowboy_lon wrote: post #104
sremani wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If no one could have gotten better results, I can think of many capable people who could have gotten similar results for a lot cheap. Yahoo! is almost paying MM $400 million and the $110 million exec who stayed about 11 months she fired. For all the Meritocracy talk about general foot soldiers, the SV execs seem to get a lot of "Participation Trophies".

But would the have take such a high risk job? its noticeable that risky senior jobs have more Women and BME in post - as under represented groups they feel that they have to take more risks to break thorough the glass ceiling.

You may be referring to the glass cliff:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff

Re: Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

#139

Post by vinceguidry »

hkmurakami wrote: post #51
vinceguidry wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, I would think salary would be one of the smaller considerations when choosing a CEO at that level. It's generally going to be a drop in the budget compared to annual revenue. A negotiation point for sure, but more of a side show to other concerns.

Maybe if the company were profitable and minting tens of billions of dollars in revenue a year. But we're talking about $YHOO, which for years has had negative core enterprise value . In such a situation it's not really a drop in a bucket.

Then it's even less important. When you need Superman to save the world, you don't quibble over his price. Okay, maybe a little, but everybody's a professional here.

Re: Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

#140

Post by jevgeni »

notacoward wrote: post #115
jevgeni wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember seeing a 1970s video from the Soviet Union about a piece of software some soviet scientists developed that could automatically retouch and restore photographs. Like at Adobe Photoshop CC level. What impact did it have? Zero. Because some technocrat apparatchik decided it wasn't worth it developing and promoting the thing further. One can have insane ability to create things, but it will be ultimately futil…

One can have the ability to play middleman, but it will be ultimately futile, if there's nothing to play middleman for . Getting things to consumers first requires that there be a thing, which requires a creative act. Investors and executives can certainly help to facilitate those creative acts, but why should that give them first claim to 99% of the proceeds? It's certainly not a risk premium when those people glide…

Well, if the creators are so precious and the "middlemen" - not, why just not stop using the "middlemen"?
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