Live data from Hacker News

Yahoo spends $58 million to fire its chief operating officer

washingtonpost.com

21–30 of 112 posts

Re: Yahoo spends $58 million to fire its chief operating officer

#21
That has to be one of Marissa's most public mistakes yet. She was the one who pushed very hard for Yahoo to hire him. It's interesting that a few articles I read mention that he's really smart but not good with people. I've read that Marissa has the same characteristics, I wonder if that gave her a blind spot on this one?

Re: Yahoo spends $58 million to fire its chief operating officer

#22
post #2

Honest question, could somebody please explain why a big corporation like Yahoo, doesn't have some kind of cliff and progresive compensation? It's the Article accurate?

This happens fairly often with C level execs, and generally with anyone who gets big bonuses that are restricted over time, specifically hedge fund employees is the area I'm familiar with.

If you want to hire them away, its common for you to have to make up the loss they would take from walking away from the restricted portion of their bonus.

I've seen payouts to traders and technologists of up to 3 million, 50+ million is, well, that's a lot of money to make up:)

Re: Yahoo spends $58 million to fire its chief operating officer

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are forgetting: Marissa redesigned the logo! All by herself!!! Seriously though, what do Yahoo actually do? The mail has gone the way of 'compuserve' in that you don't very often get to see a yahoo address in an email these days. Search was something they just gave up on, then there portal style homepage, does anyone actually go there? They should have stuck with search, it was something that they were reasonably…

I have to disagree. I'm currently in Asia and /everyone/ appears to be using a yahoo email. I even created some gmail addresses for them, but it just doesn't appeal to them.

From what I've heard, this is because many Asian countries have a culture of information flashbang. The Yahoo homepage is extremely cluttered and busy, which fits in with what they expect.

The Google homepage, in contrast, is just an empty abyss they can't get anything from. Here in the States we seem to value minimalism, which might be one of the reasons people go to Google (aside from it being a great search engine).

Re: Yahoo spends $58 million to fire its chief operating officer

#24
post #21

That has to be one of Marissa's most public mistakes yet. She was the one who pushed very hard for Yahoo to hire him. It's interesting that a few articles I read mention that he's really smart but not good with people. I've read that Marissa has the same characteristics, I wonder if that gave her a blind spot on this one?

> I've read that Marissa has the same characteristics, I wonder if that gave her a blind spot on this one?

Or assumed the similarity could mean they would work well together and that very much didn't happen?

Or they worked together fine but the rest of the board couldn't stand the combination!

Re: Yahoo spends $58 million to fire its chief operating officer

#25
post #12
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flickr has 1 TB of free storage. Old Flickr Pro accounts have "unlimited" storage space. She bought Tumblr. Will she release some hardware?

Maybe they should do a phone. Yeah that would be good. A phone with their own OS. It's gonna be big I tell ya.

Apple should hire some people secretly to work at Yahoo and goad the executive team into this project.

Re: Yahoo spends $58 million to fire its chief operating officer

#26

I've been wondering: How's Marissa Meyer doing as CEO? I haven't heard much about Yahoo recently except that they acquired some companies in order to get talent in the mobile space. It's been about 1.75 years since she became CEO. Is that enough time for a non-Steve Jobs CEO to change the trajectory of a company?

> for a non-Steve Jobs CEO

What does that even mean?

Re: Yahoo spends $58 million to fire its chief operating officer

#27
post #18
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo mail is very very popular outside the US.

Well... not everywhere outside the US. I saw it popular in Asia as someone other said, but here in EU I see only gmail, hotmail and outlook, nothing else.

"The EU" is not homogenous at all. Looking at a 500k mailing from one of our customers in the UK, I see ~190k Hotmail addresses, 44k Yahoo addresses, 24k BT addresses, which I believe are still handled by Yahoo as part of their BT-Yahoo! thing. 42k Gmail addresses. 11k AOL. This is fairly typical amongst our customers.

Of course this list is biased - demographics matters a lot in this case. But that's also what tends to blind tech people about Gmail - Gmail for many years was massively overrepresented in the tech world. Yahoo still tends to be in the top 3 most places, and there are plenty of countries where they place well ahead of Gmail.

Re: Yahoo spends $58 million to fire its chief operating officer

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are forgetting: Marissa redesigned the logo! All by herself!!! Seriously though, what do Yahoo actually do? The mail has gone the way of 'compuserve' in that you don't very often get to see a yahoo address in an email these days. Search was something they just gave up on, then there portal style homepage, does anyone actually go there? They should have stuck with search, it was something that they were reasonably…

This is just bombastic and ill-informed. To start with, Yahoo has >10% of the US search market[1] – down YoY, but nothing to sneeze at. Their sites also see more unique visitors from the desktop than anybody else – >195m in December[2], and that's the sixth month is a row. There are still loads of email users; finance, sport, shopping, everything that legacy portal sites typically had. Furthermore, Yahoo was never re…

Yahoo is probably one of the safest places after HN to get news junk food. Huff post has too much nsfw and highly controversial content.

Re: Yahoo spends $58 million to fire its chief operating officer

#30

I've been wondering: How's Marissa Meyer doing as CEO? I haven't heard much about Yahoo recently except that they acquired some companies in order to get talent in the mobile space. It's been about 1.75 years since she became CEO. Is that enough time for a non-Steve Jobs CEO to change the trajectory of a company?

I recently talked to a friend, an actual user of Yahoo products, who expressed happiness with the improvements they've made recently. They were referring to both the portal and web mail and they are very happy with the company as is.
Post reply on HN