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Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units

reuters.com

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Re: Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units

#261

Post by nitrogen »

henrikschroder wrote: post #224
cballard wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enough with the free snacks and parties. You know what I want as a perk? The company turns off at 5pm. That's it, no more work, go home, no exceptions. Company email shuts down, no access on your smartphone until 9am. Now that's a perk. I'll buy my own junk food[0], and I'll go to parties with my friends, not my coworkers. [0] or, well, I won't - another problem with the perks, I want to snack on carrots and skim gre…

> You know what I want as a perk? The company turns off at 5pm. That's not in the interest of most companies, so you'll have to start your own if that is what you want. > I'll go to parties with my friends The holiday party is completely optional. Most employees didn't go. > I want to snack on carrots and skim greek yogurt Our snack fridges are full of that, there's more healthy snacks than unhealthy around.

* > You know what I want as a perk? The company turns off at 5pm.*

That's not in the interest of most companies, so you'll have to start your own if that is what you want.

Nor is it in the interest of anyone with delayed sleep phase. Maybe a more universal form of that perk is "the employee turns off when they leave the office, but can choose their own hours".

Re: Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units

#262

Post by nikdaheratik »

WalterBright wrote: post #257
nikdaheratik wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I don't remember them being "90 days from bankruptcy". They had a cash hoard the envy of many U.S. states, a small but loyal group of paying customers, and a number of sources of actual non-hardware revenue from key inventions and licenses. And they didn't have a bunch of employees from legacy business deals to find homes for. What Apple lacked was a clear focus on what their business needed to be, which was selli…

"Apple Was 90 Days From Going Bankrupt" -- http://thenextweb.com/apple/2010/06/02/steve-jobs-90-days/#gref "At an executive Session of the board in June, with Amelio out of the room, Woolard described to current directors how he calculated their odds. "If we stay with Gil as CEO, think there's only 10% chance we will avoid bankruptcy," he said. "If we fire him and convince Steve to come take over, we have 60% chance…

He was being a little hyperbolic there. Which is one of Steve Jobs' tendencies. They had "90 days of working capital" left, but it was still $1.2B and they had annual revenues of $7B in 1997 and pretty much no debt. They had to replace the CEO to restore investor confidence, and Jobs was clearly the best choice, but they could have found a different CEO and muddled through.

It was the worst state the company had been in, but the losses had stopped even before Jobs took over. Not to understate Jobs accomplishments. Just saying a competent CEO could turn Apple from a doghouse company to a profitable company. It took a genius CEO takes a company from the the doghouse to the most valuable in the world.

Re: Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units

#263

Post by gnaritas »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #178
adevine wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wut? There are charities, and there are businesses. If you expect Yahoo to be run as a charity, why should Yahoo's owners be the ones who must provide this? Put it another way. Let's say you had 100k that you were able to invest in your own startup. After a number of years, you found that you could support 5 employees at your startup, but you weren't, and had no hope of, being profitable - there was no "extra profit"…

I agree a business is not a charity, but if there is no hope of a return on your investment, what value is there in doing literally anything else with it? There's is definitely value in making it possible for thousands of people to keep food on the table for their families and pay the mortgage and continue providing services to existing users.

Opportunity cost. Better to extract the capital and chase another investment. Liquidate the pig.

Re: Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units

#264

Post by eplanit »

discardorama wrote: post #255
anotherhacker wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lavish parties send the wrong message to employees. If I were CEO I'd say: "No more parties. We're going to use the to retrain employees (instead of firing them) and avoid layoffs." Mayer is turing out to be a terrible CEO. This article describes the various multi-million dollar parties. http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-blows...

I was at Yahoo when Carol Bartz came in and did exactly that. And guess what? Morale plummeted. "The beatings will continue until the morale improves" .... ever heard of that?

She had the same effect at Autodesk by applying the same philosophy.

Re: Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units

#265

Post by zipwitch »

tptacek wrote: post #186
Someone1234 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article is really damning. Makes it seem like she is going to cash out as Yahoo! goes down in flames around her. All she needs to do right now is keep it alive long enough to cash out all of her stock... Someone remind me again why corporations pay their CEOs over 100m/year? And tell me about value, that's a huge chunk of change for someone in Yahoo!'s position, they could use that money to keep employees workin…

First, I don't think Mayer makes over 100MM per year, or anything close to that. Second, CEOs get paid lots of money because the market punishes firms that aren't growing and have no-name CEOs, and the cost of a name-brand CEO is probably more than cancelled out by avoiding that penalty. By the time Mayer was recruited, the market consensus was that Yahoo needed a turnaround CEO. There are no cheap turnaround CEOs fo…

There is an inverse correlation between CEO pay and performance.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/06/17/3449737/ceo-pay-...

Re: Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units

#266

Post by crikli »

gedy wrote: post #168
mythz wrote: post #127

At the dawn of the Internet Yahoo held the Internet's home page, there were so few sites and Search Engines were so primitive that I remember using Yahoo Directory to find websites and for many years `ping yahoo.com` was my magic command to tell whether my modem had an Internet connection. My first Internet account and online alias was at Yahoo, I used mail and their personalized home page every day... But then start…

> `ping yahoo.com` Haha, I still do this out of habit too.

Me too. Literally the only thing I've used Yahoo for in years.

Re: Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units

#267

Post by skuhn »

spikels wrote: post #179
meat_fist wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source for this? I can only find posts from several years ago saying Tumblr will soon be profitable.

About a year ago Yahoo said they expected Tumblr to generate $100 million in revenue (not profit) in 2015. I'm not saying Tumblr is profitable (don't think they ever said) or it was a great investment (cost $1.1B in 2013) but at least it generates significant revenue and uniques have around doubled since they bought it. That was a RELATIVELY good purchase.

That $100mm target was not achieved last year. I don't know what sort of revenue Tumblr actually generated in 2015 for Yahoo, but it seemingly wasn't $100mm and it definitely is nowhere near profitable. A few points:

- Tumblr was reorganized and lost its independence [1]. Not a sign of happiness with their progress.

- Tumblr has an enormous third-party CDN bill, to the extent that even $100mm of yearly revenue wouldn't come close to covering the expanse. Their traffic levels are greater than those of some entire CDN providers, and the rates they negotiated were not particularly rock bottom. Yahoo has to get out from under that situation to ever make Tumblr a profitable enterprise.

- Tumblr has very little monetizable content. Yahoo ads on Tumblr sites have still not come to fruition after several years of management claims that it's around the corner. They will presumably face a user revolt if and when it does roll out. Display ads only appear in the admin dashboard, which has far lower hit rates than the public facing sites themselves. The vast majority of sites are permanently non-monetizable because they are one of: porn, illegal content, branded corporate sites like yahooeng.tumblr.com. Yet to discard sites like those is to severely damage Tumblr's traffic rankings, which is the only thing they have to sell ads against (if they sold ads).

I see a lot of similarities between Tumblr and a Yahoo acquisition from a previous era: GeoCities. They're both instances of Yahoo spending too much to buy what they think is the latest hot thing that will build their userbase, and instead getting nothing in return but a giant bill and a no way to gain money or prestige off of the product.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/tumblr-is-getting-sucked-into...

Re: Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units

#268

Post by paulcole »

cballard wrote: post #233
vacri wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One night a year is onerous? For an event that it seems your coworkers enjoy?

We spent, I'd say, over $1500 for our party at a company of 15. Yes, I would prefer a $100 bonus. The amount might decrease to the point that it's useless at larger companies due to economies of scale...

I think a more interesting question is: Would you rather get $100 or allow the other members of your team to attend a party they'd enjoy?

Re: Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units

#269

Post by rokhayakebe »

sixQuarks wrote: post #42
pgz wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, IMHO, is the crucial point: what exactly is Yahoo's business? As an outside watcher I have no clue (I am also stupid). Hopefully people working there have better insight than myself.

They don't have a business, at least not one that can support the number of employees they have. Their business is actually worth negative dollars. The only thing that was keeping their value high was their Alibaba investment.

If this was true you would be able to purchase Yahoo without AliBaba stocks for $1Billion. However if you walked in with a Billion dollar check and that offer, you will not get a meeting.

Re: Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units

#270

Post by rokhayakebe »

Crito wrote: post #125
adventured wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tumblr remains a top 50 US site, so yeah it's still on. Was it worth it? I don't see any meaningful competitors to them. Nobody has come along to knock them off. The $1.1 billion price was obviously steep for a blog service. So long as the traffic remains, they have some shot at turning it into a sustainable business. It's realistically worth 10% to 20% of what they paid for it though.

Tumblr has a problem of demographics which makes it difficult for Yahoo to make money off of it. A very large segment of their users are teenagers, and another large segment do little other than post pornography.

Teenagers do spend money. Loads of it.
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