Altaba? Because a rebrand is certainly going to rescue the company. I can see the meetings now. "we need to do something" "....." "Let's do a rebrand! It will all give us the feeling we are doing something"
Yahoo SEC Filing: Name change to Altaba Inc and director resignations
341–350 of 383 posts
Re: Yahoo SEC Filing: Name change to Altaba Inc and director resignations
#342What's the verdict on Marissa, did she do a bad job, or was yahoo simply unsaveable?
I think it could have been saved. I stopped going there when 90% of the articles was either a sponsored story, or a story so left leaning it was almost unreadable.
Re: Yahoo SEC Filing: Name change to Altaba Inc and director resignations
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't think that is true. In 2012 Yahoo had $5B a year in revenue and was the second most visited property on the web. When Thompson stepped down the board were given two proposals. The first, revive Yahoo as a premium tech firm lead by someone like Mayer, or 2. admit that Yahoo is now a media co and double down on the verticals where Yahoo is winning - especially those where you can sell premium ads (Finance, Spor…
there is a middle ground too. Two of the verticals Yahoo doesnt experience a lot of competition in are Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Fantasy Sports. (edit: rereading your comment, I see you mentioned the exact same thing and I skimmed over it.) And then there is a squandered userbase of Yahoo Messengers that were left to dry.
If I were Yahoo CEO, and the company had chosen the media empire route, I would have explored a Yahoo Finance 2.0 as a social network. Step one, acquire or clone OpenFolio and Robinhood and maybe buy something like SumZero for its social graph slash userbase. Create a Free and Pro tier. Other companies I have mentioned before as a good fit in this idea are Forcerank and Sparkfin. Motif is another company trying to make stock picking more social. Having a unified messaging layer across the bottom of ALL its properties (like Facebook) would have benefited here too.
Yahoo should have made a push to be THE fantasy company, instead of covering its product in daily fantasy ads, trying to squeeze out the last of the value. Sports is a huge vertical other tech giants like Google and Microsoft and Apple dont play much in. Being cash rich, they could have bought one of the major Daily Fantasy empires, which basically print money. I cant think of many better easy ways to return shareholder value. Again, a messenger bar at the bottom of the screen would have really tied the place together.
Now if I want to talk with my group of friends about my fantasy picks or my stock picks (or my fantasy stock picks in the case of Forcerank) my group conversations carry over between properties. The thing about Finance and Fantasy is they both involve an element of competitive "I know more than you and can make better predictive decisions." Stock Picking and Fantasy Drafting slash Lineup Setting are more closely related mental tasks than they are given credit for. Both are pleasurable when you are right.
I think its odd to say Yahoo went the tech route, because outside her acquisitions, it does seem they doubled down on the editorial media vertical side (tv shows, news anchors, major tech journalists) without creating any sort of modern cms, without actually introducing ANY tech innovation in house.
They also scrapped Yahoo Voices, right as Medium and Kinja and Chorus and Wordpress forged a new era of blogging. Ive said before, Atavist would have been a great fit in their tech/media empire niche. After buying the tech, they should have acquired some really popular high quality independent blogs/bloggers.
Re: Yahoo SEC Filing: Name change to Altaba Inc and director resignations
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that is true. In 2012 Yahoo had $5B a year in revenue and was the second most visited property on the web. When Thompson stepped down the board were given two proposals. The first, revive Yahoo as a premium tech firm lead by someone like Mayer, or 2. admit that Yahoo is now a media co and double down on the verticals where Yahoo is winning - especially those where you can sell premium ads (Finance, Spor…
I was surprised to learn at a conference in October that America Online still exists(!), and this (media) is the route that they took. Apparently they own the Huffington Post and Engadget now.
AOL also chased local media with Patch.com and failed miserably.
Re: Yahoo SEC Filing: Name change to Altaba Inc and director resignations
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that is true. In 2012 Yahoo had $5B a year in revenue and was the second most visited property on the web. When Thompson stepped down the board were given two proposals. The first, revive Yahoo as a premium tech firm lead by someone like Mayer, or 2. admit that Yahoo is now a media co and double down on the verticals where Yahoo is winning - especially those where you can sell premium ads (Finance, Spor…
there is a middle ground too. Two of the verticals Yahoo doesnt experience a lot of competition in are Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Fantasy Sports. (edit: rereading your comment, I see you mentioned the exact same thing and I skimmed over it.) And then there is a squandered userbase of Yahoo Messengers that were left to dry. If I were Yahoo CEO, and the company had chosen the media empire route, I would have explored a Ya…
I'm reminded of Second Life, where a vital arts colony turned into a gambling and pornography den. Its kind of like how depressed town centers turn into just antique shops and hair stylists - its the lowest form of life, turned to when everything else is gone.
So yeah, Yahoo could have given up and become a gambling site only.
Re: Yahoo SEC Filing: Name change to Altaba Inc and director resignations
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
there is a middle ground too. Two of the verticals Yahoo doesnt experience a lot of competition in are Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Fantasy Sports. (edit: rereading your comment, I see you mentioned the exact same thing and I skimmed over it.) And then there is a squandered userbase of Yahoo Messengers that were left to dry. If I were Yahoo CEO, and the company had chosen the media empire route, I would have explored a Ya…
I'm reminded of Second Life, where a vital arts colony turned into a gambling and pornography den. Its kind of like how depressed town centers turn into just antique shops and hair stylists - its the lowest form of life, turned to when everything else is gone. So yeah, Yahoo could have given up and become a gambling site only.
>antique shops and hair stylists
click bait and content mills/farms?
Re: Yahoo SEC Filing: Name change to Altaba Inc and director resignations
#347Rather 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.
She was very well compensated for her time sinking Yahoo. I think this kind of tone policing is unhealthy.
Indeed. I recently found out Michael O'Church was banned from HN because he called her the c word because of the anti-worker policies she implemented at Yahoo. (somewhat indirectly, and I'm hesitant to use it myself for fear of being banned).
Re: Yahoo SEC Filing: Name change to Altaba Inc and director resignations
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
She was very well compensated for her time sinking Yahoo. I think this kind of tone policing is unhealthy.
Indeed. I recently found out Michael O'Church was banned from HN because he called her the c word because of the anti-worker policies she implemented at Yahoo. (somewhat indirectly, and I'm hesitant to use it myself for fear of being banned).
You can use the word cunt. What you can't do is call other people cunts.
EDIT:
>somewhat indirectly
No, he directly called her a cunt.
> and I'm hesitant to use it myself for fear of being banned).
Literally no-one on HN has ever been banned for using the word cunt. It's only a problem if you call other people cunts. Here's the relevant mod post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10016665#10019003
Re: Yahoo SEC Filing: Name change to Altaba Inc and director resignations
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that is true. In 2012 Yahoo had $5B a year in revenue and was the second most visited property on the web. When Thompson stepped down the board were given two proposals. The first, revive Yahoo as a premium tech firm lead by someone like Mayer, or 2. admit that Yahoo is now a media co and double down on the verticals where Yahoo is winning - especially those where you can sell premium ads (Finance, Spor…
The problem is that Yahoo was never a media company, either. They never had a lot of success in media, at least not past their early properties like Finance and Autos. They failed to do anything meaningful with video, or mobile, or flickr, or much of anything past their early success. Yahoo tried to be a media company for years. They called themselves "the premier media company". They had two different CEOs pulled fr…
how is Yahoo News not considered successful? Sure its a lot of AP aggregation, but most importantly, people were clicking it.
Re: Yahoo SEC Filing: Name change to Altaba Inc and director resignations
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
"... milked Yahoo for a hundred million dollars she didn't earn." "Marissa Mayer's failure at Yahoo was caused by pure incompetence, negligence, and laziness of all involved. Nothing about it that deserves praise." I just wanted to thank you for this comment, because it is important that we get the facts straight. There was not one thing she brought in the company that showed a hint to financial success. She is overr…
> an almost fraudulent level Fraud isn't a function of magnitude. A $2 fraud and $2 billion fraud are both fraud. What matters is intent, the concealment of material facts and the victim's harm resulting from the foregoing.
Reading some other comments, I think the suggestion is that the overrating was fraudulent. In which case the price is a relevant factor. Mayer was worth some amount of money, a mild overestimate would be human error, but a massive overestimate would be evidence towards a fraud claim (in the sense that the error would demand explanation as unintentional). I don't endorse that on a Mayer-specific level, but I think it's the shape of the argument.
None of which disagrees with you, it's just an interesting note for assessing what a hypothetical fraudulent CEO appointment would look like. Presumably it would factor in price in the sense of "could a reasonable person assess the CEO's worth at this value?"