Yahoo is "focusing on its most successful products — including its search engine". I don't understand this. Isn't their search engine just Bing?
They had a new buzzword for new strategic products during the earnings call: "Mavens".
Yahoo lays off 1,700 and is up for sale
31–40 of 66 posts
Re: Yahoo lays off 1,700 and is up for sale
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I see this as propaganda to push the concept that Yahoo has negative value How is it propaganda? YHOO has a current Market Cap of 27.7B with assets including a 25B stake in Alibaba, 8B Stake in Yahoo Japan and ~4B cash. If it wasn't for tax implications of selling their investments, Yahoo's core business clearly holds a negative value. Accounting for tax implications puts it around 0-2B. > There is more to a corpor…
> Share Holder value is its primary purpose No, it isn't. Corporations are given a public charter which declares its purpose. Increasing share-holder value is a nice side-effect at most.
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Re: Yahoo lays off 1,700 and is up for sale
#33My thoughts: 1. Activist investment firms use Yakuza tactics. They buy a small share and the company bends over backwards so the 'investors" get an extra percentage point instead of focusing on long term strategies. 2. If Yahoo had expanded on their Pipes and Konfabulator products and capitalized on people's uproar after iGoogle was shut down they could have been great competitors to Google's App Engine, Azure or Ama…
Pipes was really cool. Their email still sought after (at least in latin america) for corporate customers. Perhaps a SaaS spin off with email, pipes, ecommerce search/recommendation and other cool tools they release all these years ?
Re: Yahoo lays off 1,700 and is up for sale
#34Anyone has details regarding the severance package given to those that were let go?
Re: Yahoo lays off 1,700 and is up for sale
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I see this as propaganda to push the concept that Yahoo has negative value How is it propaganda? YHOO has a current Market Cap of 27.7B with assets including a 25B stake in Alibaba, 8B Stake in Yahoo Japan and ~4B cash. If it wasn't for tax implications of selling their investments, Yahoo's core business clearly holds a negative value. Accounting for tax implications puts it around 0-2B. > There is more to a corpor…
Step 1: go find out who makes out those valuation numbers. Step 2: see how people on step 1's answer make money.
Yeah exactly, wish I could vote this up.
Re: Yahoo lays off 1,700 and is up for sale
#36I see this as propaganda to push the concept that Yahoo has negative value, which, I'm guessing would be beneficial for some group of shareholders to promote this view. Personally I don't give a crap what those shareholders want. There is more to a corporation that just shareholder value, and I don't particularly relish thousands of people losing their jobs so some people can make a quick buck.
> I see this as propaganda to push the concept that Yahoo has negative value How is it propaganda? YHOO has a current Market Cap of 27.7B with assets including a 25B stake in Alibaba, 8B Stake in Yahoo Japan and ~4B cash. If it wasn't for tax implications of selling their investments, Yahoo's core business clearly holds a negative value. Accounting for tax implications puts it around 0-2B. > There is more to a corpor…
Maximizing shareholder value is NOT a company's primary purpose. Stop spreading this lie.
And even if it were, there are many ways to do that. And many of them do not involve short-sightedness with respect to the business.
If you're unhappy with how the business is being run, then sell your shares and get out. Quit bitching that they're not sacrificing the long term to give you an additional point.
Re: Yahoo lays off 1,700 and is up for sale
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Share Holder value is its primary purpose No, it isn't. Corporations are given a public charter which declares its purpose. Increasing share-holder value is a nice side-effect at most.
> Increasing share-holder value is a nice side-effect at most. Rubbish, the board works for its shareholders who wants ROI on their investment. Who do you think is forcing their expenses / 15% workforce cut? and putting pressure on Marissa to waste her time/focus on re-structuring Yahoo to maximize their Alibaba investment? Shareholders are the primary benefactors.
> Rubbish, the board works for its shareholders who wants ROI on their investment.
Sure, but honestly most shareholders would prefer not to take a share of the profits. Dividends are so passé.
Today's modern investor wants growth, and the easiest way to get growth, without all the hard work , is to find another investor willing to believe in your portrayal of the value of the stock you hold[1], and to convince them to buy it from you.
Re: Yahoo lays off 1,700 and is up for sale
#38The crazy thing about Yahoo! was that they were actually in a pretty decent position just a few years ago. Alibaba exploded, Yahoo! is still the third most popular website in the world, and their finance and sports centers are still incredibly popular. I think what we've seen is a complete failure to execute on any level. Compare that to someone like AOL who saw their brand tanking noticeably but intelligently divers…
> and sports centers are still incredibly popular I only used their Fantasy Football (US) and only for 2 seasons but it was head and shoulders above all others..including the NFL's own fantasy league.
I agree here. They should have pushed these popular products. In particular, they could have become a financial platform that could have rivaled Bloomberg...
Re: Yahoo lays off 1,700 and is up for sale
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but it's not growing, therefore it is a complete failure and should be wiped off the face of the Earth, according to certain investor logic.
If its not growing, for from many investors, yes, that is a failure. I have $1. I can do many things with it. Why would I give my $1 to someone in exchange for a piece of their business if that business is not growing when I could instead give that $1 to someone who is growing? I want my $1 to become worth more. Yes, yes yes, I know companies that pay dividends or profit sharing, etc. However what's the return on tho…
"If its not growing, for from many investors, yes, that is a failure."
Then those investors should go invest in something else, and quit trying to push a bunch of shortsighted crap on a company.
Re: Yahoo lays off 1,700 and is up for sale
#40It is saddening to see names like Yahoo going through so much trouble, but there seems to be an inevitability here that many knew about for a long time.
Yahoo, after Marissa Mayer took over, also seems to have focused more on revenue from graphical ads compared to getting any revenue directly from users.
* Although mail may be a good product for Yahoo (as this article states), it's not really improved over time and has in fact gotten worse.
* The previous Yahoo Mail Plus, which was $20 a year for an ad-free experience with some extras (like POP email) was replaced with a who-would-even-want-this $50 a year ad-free option. Frankly, I doubt if many people even bothered to get this one, more so because among the people who started email with the likes of Hotmail and Yahoo, multiple email addresses were the norm (they continue to be so). For such users who stuck with Yahoo, there's no way to justify spending more than a hundred dollars a year for email.
* With no sign of IMAP in the paid option while Google has been giving free IMAP for years, Yahoo's offering in email was really substandard.
* Yahoo mail is still quite slow. Not the interface, but the backend. Sending a mail to oneself (by a CC when replying or emailing someone) still takes several minutes to show up in the inbox. In Gmail, this would be in the inbox in a second or two.
* Yahoo mail's spam filtering is many a times as bad as a coin toss. Emails that you mark as Not Spam for specific senders continue to go to the spam folder for subsequent mails from the same sender. Many emails that are true spam and have been marked as such don't seem to put similar mails in the spam folder.
* The vertical graphical ads on the right side, in an attempt to avoid ads from going off screen while scrolling through emails, are really annoying.
* Flickr, providing an astonishing 1TB of storage for "free" (with ads). The next paid option is $50 a year just to remove ads (double of what Flickr Pro used to cost). What???
* Any value assigned to user experience before was completely eliminated through these "more ads" move, where Yahoo was sure that almost nobody would opt for the paid options.
I wonder what would've happened if Yahoo had instead lowered the prices even more for an ad-free option, added some useful features (like IMAP in email) in a tiered pricing structure and made the product better (like handling email delivery quickly). Perhaps it's too late to wonder about these though. If Yahoo isn't bought by one of the top five tech companies, its products will likely disappear within the next decade.