Changing the brand under these circumstances doesn't make sense to me. Brands take years to build, and Yahoo dominates as a brand in Japan. It seems sloppy PR to pick a name like "Altaba" within mere weeks/months of deciding to buy Yahoo.
Yahoo is splitting into two companies: Yahoo Holdings and Altaba Inc. Yahoo Holdings owns the "Yahoo" trademark and is being sold to Verizon. Altaba is an investment company that owns everything that is not being sold to Verizon. Yahoo will still be alive in yahoo.com.
I think there is absolutely no indication that anybody, other than Jesus Christ himself descending from the skies mounted on a Harley Davidson in flames, could have saved Yahoo. So, bashing Marissa here would be really, really pointless and sad.
Why'd she do it then? Got paid a lot, that's for damn sure. $219M over 4 years. http://money.cnn.com/2016/07/25/technology/marissa-mayer-pay...
Would you have refused such pay if you were in her position?
Changing the brand under these circumstances doesn't make sense to me. Brands take years to build, and Yahoo dominates as a brand in Japan. It seems sloppy PR to pick a name like "Altaba" within mere weeks/months of deciding to buy Yahoo.
This is what I'm confused about. Yahoo is a big brand with a lot of companies, is Tumblr now owned by Altaba? Altaba Weather?
No. Nothing changes for the products. Altaba is a new company that just owns stock in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan. Tumblr will be owned by Yahoo Holdings, which will be owned by Verizon. Yahoo Weather will still be Yahoo Weather.
I wish there was a real alternative to search. I use DuckDuckGo, but I believe they run on AWS and purchase index data from Yandex et. al. At this point, is it even feasible for anyone to enter the general search market, or has Google simply set the barrier to entry too high? Are there any niche search engines that focus on things Google has either removed or doesn't index? Are there other alternatives besides DDG, S…
"At this point, is it even feasible for anyone to enter the desktop computer market, or has Microsoft simply set the barrier to entry too high?" -Us, 1999 One thing I've observed in tech over the past 25 years is that change comes from unexpected places and often very quickly.
Uhhh how has the answer to that question changed though? Windows remains the undisputed king of the desktop.
Rather than the inevitable bashing of Marissa that will undoubtedly unfurl on this thread, I'd like to put in a little reminder that we usually celebrate taking on big projects and big risks and that we should commend her for taking on the immense challenge of steadying the Yahoo ship. Yes, she wasn't able to keep the ship from sinking. But I do think she put in a good-faith effort.
I do as well. As outlined in The Halo Effect, people want very tidy, clean, and rational reasons why a company failed. Blame must be specifically laid somewhere. However, there's a pretty good chance no one available could have saved the demise of Yahoo. Variance is a thing.
One reason I heard for the demise of Yahoo, from someone who worked there, was tech was totally anarchic. They didn't build up the vast amounts of shared software infrastructure that Google, Facebook and Amazon did. Apparently, each separate business unit did a lot of reinventing the wheel. That might have been something someone with a background in big company software architecture could have focused on, but that wasn't Marissa.
I wish there was a real alternative to search. I use DuckDuckGo, but I believe they run on AWS and purchase index data from Yandex et. al. At this point, is it even feasible for anyone to enter the general search market, or has Google simply set the barrier to entry too high? Are there any niche search engines that focus on things Google has either removed or doesn't index? Are there other alternatives besides DDG, S…
"At this point, is it even feasible for anyone to enter the desktop computer market, or has Microsoft simply set the barrier to entry too high?" -Us, 1999 One thing I've observed in tech over the past 25 years is that change comes from unexpected places and often very quickly.
Very rarely ever directly though. When Google became the number 1 search engine nobody else actually wanted to be the number 1 search engine - they wanted to be the "home page of the web".