Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

allthingsd.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 151 posts

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#111

Post by thematt »

diego wrote: post #16

The problem is that Yahoo was born as a product that became obsolete quickly. It has no DNA anymore, it's just a collection of various media services. It's not a computer, or a piece of software, or a social network. It was a directory of web links. A library. It's doubtful that a Steve Jobs could come back to Yahoo and get it back in touch with its roots. IMHO, their best bet is to sell.

I agree, the best bet for current shareholders is to sell. But then what? It's still the acquiring companies problem and what are they supposed to do with it? At some point Yahoo will need to create products or make a market for itself.

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#112

Post by fauigerzigerk »

diego wrote: post #16

The problem is that Yahoo was born as a product that became obsolete quickly. It has no DNA anymore, it's just a collection of various media services. It's not a computer, or a piece of software, or a social network. It was a directory of web links. A library. It's doubtful that a Steve Jobs could come back to Yahoo and get it back in touch with its roots. IMHO, their best bet is to sell.

That's true but given a brand name and an income stream there should be a way of reinventing themselves regardless of any roots.

I think it's really a people problem. Once the wrong people are in charge they keep replicating and it's very difficult to turn it around.

The only way would be for a buyer to come in, fire everyone who has ever made a product decision at Yahoo and replace them with a much smaller group of people who have a track record of creating successful products and who have no previous relation to Yahoo or the media industry.

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#113

Post by gcb »

mynameishere wrote: post #29
gcb wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

implying microsoft acquisition of a big competitor is a good thing.

He screwed the company's owners out of many millions of dollars. Microsoft may well have killed and gutted the fish, but the CEO's responsibility is to the shareholders.

  1. he sells for MS.
  2. shareholders get some above average return in MS shares.
  3. a bunch of companies buy some dismembered yahoo pieces like flickr, babelfish, etc
  4. those companies pays more returns than microsoft in 5yrs.
  6. everyone criticizes him for not being able to see ahead and costing the investors money in the long run.
Oh sorry, it's just you who can see the future?

...only icahn and pension funds wants companies sold to microsoft. I know I don't. Then you can argue that it's yahoo... so what, those people invested in yahoo. bet they feel the same as i feel for companies i'm investing.

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#114

Post by 9999 »

xyahoo wrote: post #53

An ex-Yahoo here, using a throwaway account. Yahoo's biggest problem is the creamy middle layer of managers. They are usually lifers (as in, been at Yahoo for a decade), or fresh MBAs with a Stanford degree who think that just because they sat through Management-101, they know how products should be designed. This middle layer is like a Turkish harem. They're busy backstabbing each other, politicking and fucking thin…

"It's better to be a pirate than join the navy." - Steve Jobs

When I think of that quote, I usually think about it in regards to wanting to escape a big stupid company and form a startup, but that was not at all the context in which Jobs said it. He was telling this to the Mac team, which had become a kind of splinter group with its own identity within Apple. Of course, it's not just better to be a pirate yourself, sometimes the empire needs to hire some pirates. The navy can't be seen robbing Spanish ships after all (or devoting lots of money to zany projects like a graphical user interface on a personal computer).

I wonder if big dumb companies like Yahoo could actually use the pirate mentality/method to their benefit. Why doesn't Yahoo take a few million dollars in seed money and start a bunch of companies under its own umbrella using some of its own people? Give all the power to the engineers and the designers, skip the MBA-wielding drones that you've described above and let people that can actually make stuff set sail. Would it still fail? If any of the ideas did thrive, would the companies just be smothered when incorporated back into Yahoo? Would anyone even notice that a couple of million dollars went to creating several radical new projects?

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#115

Post by zackattack »

xyahoo wrote: post #53

An ex-Yahoo here, using a throwaway account. Yahoo's biggest problem is the creamy middle layer of managers. They are usually lifers (as in, been at Yahoo for a decade), or fresh MBAs with a Stanford degree who think that just because they sat through Management-101, they know how products should be designed. This middle layer is like a Turkish harem. They're busy backstabbing each other, politicking and fucking thin…

I disagree. The c-level people are responsible for Yahoo!'s problems, not the middle managers. The C-level people set the company culture and create the incent-structures for the middle managers to do their work.

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#118

Post by VladRussian »

9999 wrote: post #114
xyahoo wrote: post #53

An ex-Yahoo here, using a throwaway account. Yahoo's biggest problem is the creamy middle layer of managers. They are usually lifers (as in, been at Yahoo for a decade), or fresh MBAs with a Stanford degree who think that just because they sat through Management-101, they know how products should be designed. This middle layer is like a Turkish harem. They're busy backstabbing each other, politicking and fucking thin…

"It's better to be a pirate than join the navy." - Steve Jobs When I think of that quote, I usually think about it in regards to wanting to escape a big stupid company and form a startup, but that was not at all the context in which Jobs said it. He was telling this to the Mac team, which had become a kind of splinter group with its own identity within Apple. Of course, it's not just better to be a pirate yourself, s…

and who would "Give all the power to the engineers and the designers, skip the MBA-wielding drones that you've described above and let people that can actually make stuff set sail."? Only the MBA-wielding drones are in the position to give [away] that power, and they are such drones for precisely the reason that they aren't able to skip themselves. C-22.

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#119

Post by panabee »

First, the board should decide: media company or tech company.

If Yahoo! is a media company -- which is more conservative since its peers would be AOL, Viacom, et al., and not Google, Facebook, et al. -- then merge/acquire Netflix ($11.5B market cap) and anoint Reed Hastings CEO. Let him navigate Nethoo through the transition to new media. Combining distribution and content failed for AOL-TW, but with the media industry in flux and with more content surfacing from the grassroots, perhaps now is the time for vertical integration.

If technology, then Yahoo! needs a new culture and a bold vision to attract the most talented engineers. No ambitious engineer wants to slave under PMs when they could flourish in engineering-oriented companies like Google and Facebook.

Yahoo!'s mission? Help users discover, personalize, and consume content.

Be the service -- mobile or web -- people turn to when they have nothing to do, when they want to find a cool article, deal, song, video, picture, restaurant, conversation, or event.

Today, Google is where you go when you know what you want. Yahoo! could help people upstream of search -- before people know what they want. Which, conveniently, is most of the time.

Lots of companies tackle the problem in different areas: Digg with news, Pandora with music, Yelp with local businesses, Instagram with photos, Groupon with deals.

With content proliferating faster than ever before, there is a need for some service to help people discover and consume content. Users don't want to hunt for content. They want the coolest deals, music, shows, restaurants, and news to come to them.

Analyzing the web for the most relevant content -- no matter the type -- at a personalized level is non-trivial. Because it's a daunting technical problem, it will attract smart engineers.

Despite the naysayers, Yahoo! occupies an enviable position with massive assets: hundreds of millions of users, deep advertiser relationships, and an iconic brand. The question is how to organize these assets into a sustainable and promising company.

Yahoo! has the cash flow to acquire some pieces, perhaps go private, and execute against some vision.

There is an opportunity to once again innovate with compelling technology and recruit talented engineers. There is an opportunity to help users navigate the explosion of online content in a smarter, more natural way. There is an opportunity for Yahoo! to reassert itself as one of the premier companies in Silicon Valley, one led by pioneering technology.

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#120

Post by dagw »

clobber wrote: post #99
diego wrote: post #16

The problem is that Yahoo was born as a product that became obsolete quickly. It has no DNA anymore, it's just a collection of various media services. It's not a computer, or a piece of software, or a social network. It was a directory of web links. A library. It's doubtful that a Steve Jobs could come back to Yahoo and get it back in touch with its roots. IMHO, their best bet is to sell.

Whats Yahoo ever been about, though? Even in the early days their search index was run by a third party (OpenText, then AltaVista, then Inktomi, then Google, now Bing) and most of their major properties like Yahoo Mail and Store were acquisitions like Four11 Rocketmail and Viaweb. Just seems like Yahoo has been a long series of acquisitions.

Yahoo was about organizing web sites in an easy to use hierarchical structure, not about searching. If you wanted to learn about "python" the programming language, you'd click computers->programming languages->Python and get a nice list of vetted sites about python. If you wanted to learn about python snakes, you'd click animals->reptiles->snakes->pythons and get another list of vetted sites about snakes. And back in the days when the web was small and search sucked, this was a great way to find sites. Yahoo has been floundering ever since the web grew too big for this approach to be practical, and Alta Vista worked out how to make search work.
Post reply on HN