Yahoo SEC Filing: Name change to Altaba Inc and director resignations • Hacker News Board

Re: Yahoo SEC Filing: Name change to Altaba Inc and director resignations

#291

Post by thisnotmyacc » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 5:23 AM UTC

cloakandswagger wrote: post #189

speaktruth wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly do you want to accomplish with this comment? Are you really suggesting that we shouldn't analyze and criticize Marissa for failing? Why is it important to you to create a safe space for this CEO? This CEO had a very self-confident attitude but in the end got nothing right. There were no signs progress and development with her and the company. She showed no intrinsic focus and absolutely no creativity. An…

I can answer that: because she's a woman. That's the ugly truth behind the rabid defense of Marissa. Because she joins a long line of failed female CEOs and the mere recognition of this fact sends certain people into a frenzy, so just deny, deny, deny. I fully expect to be repudiated as a misogynist by a tidal wave of people drunk off this cognitive dissonance, but I simply speak the truth. Marissa was an abysmal CEO…

> Because she joins a long line of failed female CEOs

I wonder: how many appointed CEOs, as opposed to founders, succeed? And how many of them them are appointed to floundering companies, versus say the transition that happened at Microsoft and/or Google? Heck, even Ballmer was a disaster.

How much of the history of failed female CEOs is likely because they get much, much less of the Bezos/Brin/Page/Gates initial growth, I am unsure, but I'd be interested to know.

Re: Yahoo SEC Filing: Name change to Altaba Inc and director resignations

#292

Post by nommm-nommm » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 5:33 AM UTC

cloakandswagger wrote: post #189

speaktruth wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly do you want to accomplish with this comment? Are you really suggesting that we shouldn't analyze and criticize Marissa for failing? Why is it important to you to create a safe space for this CEO? This CEO had a very self-confident attitude but in the end got nothing right. There were no signs progress and development with her and the company. She showed no intrinsic focus and absolutely no creativity. An…

I can answer that: because she's a woman. That's the ugly truth behind the rabid defense of Marissa. Because she joins a long line of failed female CEOs and the mere recognition of this fact sends certain people into a frenzy, so just deny, deny, deny. I fully expect to be repudiated as a misogynist by a tidal wave of people drunk off this cognitive dissonance, but I simply speak the truth. Marissa was an abysmal CEO…

Rabid defense of Marissa? You and I must have different Internets.

Re: Yahoo SEC Filing: Name change to Altaba Inc and director resignations

#293

Post by normaljoe » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 5:37 AM UTC

shitgoose wrote: post #214

narrator wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wa…

if only they had a chance to rewrite their web site in angular 2, things would have been so much different. jokes aside, they rewrote their yahoo finance site in some JavaScript framework, so it became plain unusable. they moved ticker box to the right side (congratulation, Marissa, deeply strategic decision! how many millions did you get for this one?) and hooked it up to shitload of JS, so entering ticker and press…

Jokes aside.

I'm not 100% sure but I am guessing based on few thing I see in the current code browser side. Finance probably copied a lot of what sports was doing. Sports was ahead of the game a little because it was not as old as Finance.

I know that Angular 1 was not allowed back when it first started to catch on. I am not sure if it was because of the CLA or the license, but I do think there was something legal around patents. Yahoo still has a ton of patents.

Sports was already working on a new framework that I believe predates Angular. Some of that crazy JS was there to support precog, a preloading interface and some other things. Some of it was based on the horrid work of an architect that did not last long after MM started. Still I can't say he did that or she did this. There was a period of trying to get modern that failed before MM showed up. I do know of several folks that did what they could do and made that framework the best they could.

Now to get back to finance. When I was leaving, finance was still in many languages. In 2015 some parts of finance pages where still rendered in C. Yes think sprintf and friends. When you have something like 5 languages rendering a page doing the whole, "we are going to rending in Angular" isn't really an option.

This is the very definition of technical debt. Does it suck? Yes. Is this something a CEO can fix? No. Can we blame one little framework on the demise? That would just be stupid. Technology does not work in a bubble. It works on the shoulders of it's creators and has to overcome the faults of those creators. This is much as is life, we evolve when need be, but until then we live on.

Re: Yahoo SEC Filing: Name change to Altaba Inc and director resignations

#294

Post by tomhoward » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 5:37 AM UTC

Cyph0n wrote: post #158

tomhoward wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mac has a much more significant market share than it did then, there are several viable alternatives to MS Office, and iOS and Android have kept Windows from having any significant market share in mobile. That last point is the most significant here: sure, you might not be able to beat Google at Google-like search, but you can try to start building the thing that will become more important than Google-like search in…

Mac has increased in market share yes, but it's still not even close to a threat. MS Office is, like Windows, still the king of office productivity application suites. Yes, there are competitors, but they are not a threat to MS as far as I know. I'm not entirely sure that mobile will be replacing desktop in the near future. People have been shouting "fire!" for years now when it comes to tablets vs. desktop. Regardle…

> Regardless, the original comment was talking specifically about desktop.

Yes but that's the point. Microsoft may still be the most dominant player on the desktop, but they're no longer the most important company in tech, because the desktop is no longer the only important platform.

Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple are all now as important or more important than Microsoft, because they all run platforms that are as important or more important than Windows.

It was hard to imagine that ever happening in 1999, yet it had started happening, and it became clearly apparent that it was happening within just a few years.

Similarly, whilst Google might seem hopelessly dominant now due to their dominance in search, their dominance over tech will subside when the next important new platform emerges.

Re: Yahoo SEC Filing: Name change to Altaba Inc and director resignations

#295

Post by username223 » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 5:38 AM UTC

gozur88 wrote: post #248

icebraining wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that where there is a great paycheck there is great responsibility, to paraphrase Churchill.

Only if there's a performance clause in the contract.

Where can I sign up for a job making 7 figures with no "performance clause?" Even better, she probably had something like a "no downside performance clause," but would still receive lavish bonuses for any upside.

Whatever. Yahoo was already going down, and she just looted it for an order of magnitude more than "f-you money" on its way down, without much steepening its decline. Things end as they always would have, and Mayer retires to the island she just bought.

Re: Yahoo SEC Filing: Name change to Altaba Inc and director resignations

#296

Post by saalweachter » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 5:47 AM UTC

sremani wrote: post #121

jonny_eh wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's enough to bash someone. She gave it a good shot, I don't think anyone could've done better.

This is not a convincing argument. The odds are certainly against Yahoo, and the promise of MM was it will turn Yahoo into a Engineering powerhouse, which never happened. On top of that the Yahoo hack handling was not leadership. She tried, well but her Participation Trophy was worth $300 million including Golden Parachute. That is a grave sign!

You're looking at this backwards.

Yahoo was dying. They were dying no matter who was at the head. And whoever was holding the reins when Yahoo went down would get to be known as the person who killed Yahoo with the appropriate reputation hit. They might never work again, almost certainly never be the CEO of any significant company.

Meanwhile the board needs a big name at the helm. Someone to goose the stock price at the end, someone to guide the company on a smooth glide back down. Someone to take the blame. If the board doesn't get someone big and credible, they lose money, they take the blame.

Marissa Mayer didn't get paid $300 million despite presiding over a sinking ship. She got $300 million to preside over a sinking ship. That was the price of her reputation as a CEO.

Re: Yahoo SEC Filing: Name change to Altaba Inc and director resignations

#297

Post by rocky1138 » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 5:49 AM UTC

gigatexal wrote: post #30

end of an era -- I wonder what Jerry Yang is thinking right now?

Honestly, he should start a new simple web directory with David Filo called "Jerry and David's new guide to the World Wide Web" and run it completely manually in a curated fashion, just like the old days.

Re: Yahoo SEC Filing: Name change to Altaba Inc and director resignations

#298

Post by henrikschroder » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 5:51 AM UTC

normaljoe wrote: post #288

henrikschroder wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yahoo invented web at scale This is true, and what Yahoo did in its early days was definitely impressive, but the talent that did it moved on, and was never replaced. When I joined in 2013, I encountered a lot of systems/processes/whatever that would have been impressive in 2003, but hadn't been updated or replaced in 10 years, and the culture inside Yahoo was still stuck in a weird not-invented-here bubble where a…

I believe we fought many of the same battles then. I think every Yahoo engineer at that time can curse ylock. If you where good though you looked at it with the WTH ylock did and thought hell it wasn't that bad for 20th century or early 21st, unfortunately there we where in early twenty tens constained and just trying to get a 64-bit kernel. It's worth note that Facebook also had some similar challenges. They had so…

Facebook also has one single product, whereas Yahoo has I don't know how many products, and they're all completely different, on sort of different stacks, in different silos and budget orgs, and all slightly different such that unifying them is an enormous task.

If they had had the engineering talent and budgets to build the kind of shared infrastructure and fundamentals that for example Google did, they would have been in a very different spot.

Re: Yahoo SEC Filing: Name change to Altaba Inc and director resignations

#299

Post by blacksmythe » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 5:52 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #289

ceejayoz wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd want to be well compensated for taking on a job where I was fairly certain I was doomed to fail because the company is being eaten alive by its competitors.

Wouldn't it be unethical to take on a job you were certain you'd fail at? (If you disclosed that, and they hired you anyway, then there's no ethical problem.)

>> because the company is being eaten alive by its competitors

What if you were the best qualified candidate?

Would it be unethical then?

Re: Yahoo SEC Filing: Name change to Altaba Inc and director resignations

#300

Post by baybal2 » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 5:55 AM UTC

stanleydrew wrote: post #22

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.

you criticize people screwing up. it is right thing to do