41–50 of 155 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Terry Semel
I mostly know that him through reading about his daughter on TMZ
Terry Semel is where the "Yahoo is a media company" thing began.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/can-terry-semel-yahoo/ http://www.wired.com/2007/02/yahoo-3/
I'm still puzzled by Yahoo's hiring Semel, more than any other executive mentioned in this thread. (e.g. hiring Fiorina for HP made sense at the time).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Has there ever been a successful turnaround of a software company of Yahoo's scale? Intel and IBM come to mind.
Neither of which are software companies. That is to say they offer hardware and services.
Microsoft is simply alone in its class as a large, pure-play, shrinkwrap software company. Adobe might come close.
IBM, Oracle, SAS, PWC, Deloitte, McKinsey, PeopleSoft, and many other firms bundled software with at the very least consulting services. IBM, along with Sun, HP, Digital, and other vendors sold (or leased) both hardware and software, along with consulting services.
Smaller software companies have existed, but have been notoriously fickle.
Novell existed as a network services company, doing well for a while, but ultimately faltering.
EDS is probably the closest thing to a precursor to today's SaaS / XaaS companies, and was ultimately in the services business and bought by HP IIRC.
I've been looking at this question for nearly two decades, and the most substantive conclusion I've come to was that Microsoft was a unicorn, a lone star, a singleton. And yet everyone's tried to emulated them. Or at least did until Google came along and cracked a different market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The bubble and valuation? Thats not the real discussion here. The meltdown of a company that has no consumer product would never have drawn clicks. Fidelity could have marked it down 50 times and never made the news. There are tons of biotech startups with lofty valuations.
There was a consumer product. They performed thousands of blood tests, which were available in Palo Alto and Arizona. But it's false that companies that don't have a consumer product don't draw intense interest. Ask Enron. Or WorldCom. Or Blackwater. Or Lehman Brothers. Or the folks behind the AOL and Time Warner merger
I would like to think the blood test product scandal was interesting on its own merits, amongst all of the other frauds going on in this country, but I don't think it really was elevated to the collective conscious because of that.
Holmes represents something inspirational to a marginalized demographic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 2) Exercise at $100 [1], spending $1 to buy. Tax on $99 short term capital gains owed, or ~$35. This makes no sense. Simply exercising an option is not a taxable event--you're just trading a contract for shares of a stock. There's no money going into your bank account. Furthermore, you aren't taxed short-term capital gains when you haven't realized a profit. You'd need to exercise AND sell at $100 / share for those…
It may make no sense, but the IRS disagrees with you. Exercising is a taxable event.
Has there ever been a successful turnaround of a software company of Yahoo's scale? Mayer has been tech news' pinata for over a year now, but the company was sliding before she was even hired. Looking through a list of dead Yahoo services, it reads as an obituary of region specific social networking sites and forgettable web services[1]. Social sites are notoriously fickle, and boosting one to popularity is somewhat…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is the primary factor behind Theranos's bubble the fact that its founder was a woman? That is a notable aspect but Elizabeth Holmes also leveraged powerful connections and a TED-friendly dream to get that hype. There are plenty of female-led startups that did not reach any notable status despite having a woman at the helm.
I'd like to see a woman hired as CEO for whom the principle talking point isn't that she's female. I don't fucking care. Be competent. Be a decent person. Meg Whitman is a horrible person from everything I've seen. She's managed not to kill what's left with HP after Carly Fiorina drove it into the ground. I meant to search for "most notable (female|woman) tech ceo", but left out the gender qualification. A top 10 lis…
Has there ever been a successful turnaround of a software company of Yahoo's scale? Mayer has been tech news' pinata for over a year now, but the company was sliding before she was even hired. Looking through a list of dead Yahoo services, it reads as an obituary of region specific social networking sites and forgettable web services[1]. Social sites are notoriously fickle, and boosting one to popularity is somewhat…
> Has there ever been a successful turnaround of a software company of Yahoo's scale? Intel and IBM come to mind.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neither of which are software companies. That is to say they offer hardware and services.
There are very few pure-play software companies. Microsoft is simply alone in its class as a large, pure-play, shrinkwrap software company. Adobe might come close. IBM, Oracle, SAS, PWC, Deloitte, McKinsey, PeopleSoft, and many other firms bundled software with at the very least consulting services. IBM, along with Sun, HP, Digital, and other vendors sold (or leased) both hardware and software, along with consulting…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Generally this occurs when you exercise an option to purchase stock, then hold the stock while it significantly depreciates in value. Fairly common scenario during the dot-com bubble. 1) Option at $1 2) Exercise at $100, spending $1 to buy. Tax on $99 short term capital gains owed, or ~$35. 3) Stock falls to $10 and sold for a $9 profit. You still owe $35 capital gains and spent $1. Net loss of $25 per share.
Wouldn't the prudent thing to do be to sell at least enough stock to pay the tax? If not allowed to sell at that point- just short stock to have the equivalent effect (minus fees)? Something else I've never understood to be rational - If you wouldn't buy $10 in yahoo stock- why would you hold it because you have it? My uninformed but seems logical answer would be sell the stock you got, pay the tax and buy and index…
Good Technologies is a good example -- any employee who purchased NSOs while they were still private got shafted: http://www.businessinsider.com/long-weird-history-of-good-te...