Good point about "ignore the hurt feelings that our employees will have". Now a bunch of Yahoo(er?)s have this kid sitting in their Soho office with a £17m price tag on his sleeve - that's got to be a little awkward for everyone involved.
The Summly deal makes no sense
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Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#12There's a possibility that this publicity changes younger people's perception of Yahoo's. They'll see the BBC headline and a) will now know what Yahoo! is and b) might get motivated to write/learn code and even want to go work for a tech company (even Yahoo itself). Combined with everything else Marissa Mayer is doing, (b) might actually happen, as altruistic-seeming as it might sound.
I'm 21, probably out of the definition of 'younger person' by a while, but even I don't get it.
$30m is a lot for what I assume is an application of SRI's technology. Still seems to me like Yahoo! is a place where engineers are handed the purse strings, a la 2005 era.
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#13From the article,
Let's ignore the hurt feelings that our employees will have about making a 17 year-old a millionaire.
The price tag for this company aside, am I the only one that detects a hint of jealousy in some of the comments that seem to imply "but he's too young to be a millionaire!"?
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#14Never really understood why Summly got so much press to begin with.
Isn't it just Flipboard with a slightly different UI
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#15What I read in this piece of news (though not really any article in particular) was: "Yahoo spent 30 million to attract the attention of high school kids"...
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#16There's a possibility that this publicity changes younger people's perception of Yahoo's. They'll see the BBC headline and a) will now know what Yahoo! is and b) might get motivated to write/learn code and even want to go work for a tech company (even Yahoo itself). Combined with everything else Marissa Mayer is doing, (b) might actually happen, as altruistic-seeming as it might sound.
I'm 21, probably out of the definition of 'younger person' by a while, but even I don't get it. $30m is a lot for what I assume is an application of SRI's technology. Still seems to me like Yahoo! is a place where engineers are handed the purse strings, a la 2005 era.
I'd say so, Marissa Mayer was an engineer before becoming an executive.
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#17From the article, Let's ignore the hurt feelings that our employees will have about making a 17 year-old a millionaire. The price tag for this company aside, am I the only one that detects a hint of jealousy in some of the comments that seem to imply "but he's too young to be a millionaire!"?
I read the entire thing as someone being jealous and trying to explain that away by picking at the deal.
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#18I feel this would be an appropriate subject for a Dilbert comic. Storyline is that someone accidentally left the dot out of $300000.00 to make it $30000000 and then everyone else went along with it for fear of looking stupid.
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#19Good point about "ignore the hurt feelings that our employees will have". Now a bunch of Yahoo(er?)s have this kid sitting in their Soho office with a £17m price tag on his sleeve - that's got to be a little awkward for everyone involved.
It's only awkward if you are carrying around a big ego. I've joined places just after acquisition and had co-workers who were worth millions as well. It's really not a big deal.
Re: The Summly deal makes no sense
#20From the article, Let's ignore the hurt feelings that our employees will have about making a 17 year-old a millionaire. The price tag for this company aside, am I the only one that detects a hint of jealousy in some of the comments that seem to imply "but he's too young to be a millionaire!"?
I did find that sentence a little strange myself. I didn't think jealousy from the writer, my first thought was "why should the employees be jealous?" Is it the employees of Summify, didn't they all receive a nice payment ($1m each)? And I can't imagine any of the Yahoo employees being jealous, well, perhaps, but I doubt it is the first time Yahoo have made a millionaire teenager. Even if they are, let them use it as motivation to build a valuable product of their own.