121–130 of 138 posts
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Slightly related, I learned today that the 4-color theorem Appel is Compiler Appel's father. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem#Proof_by_co... https://twitter.com/agumonkey/status/708681730278989824 (all this after reading that prolog primer http://www.cpp.edu/~jrfisher/www/prolog_tutorial/pt_framer.h... )
Fascinating!
found it pretty funny.
Maybe instead of beating up on MM, we could look at Yahoo the way we look at Twitter: Yahoo could be great if the world would let Yahoo be Yahoo. But Yahoo being Yahoo would be a smaller company, with smaller, focused business, and happy customers. But it would have a smaller market cap, and today’s investors would take a massive haircut. So they keep plowing ahead trying to be a tech giant. Because they bought tech…
Yahoo being Yahoo means Yahoo driving revenue via bundling spyware, plus a dying fantasy sports site. The Sun/Oracle Java JRE, Firefox, etc, Yahoo hasn't made money from anything other than tricking low-sophistication users into making Yahoo their home page by installing toolbars and changing browser settings, and they do this by paying to have installers of unrelated but necessary applications do the dirty work. Thi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yahoo being Yahoo means Yahoo driving revenue via bundling spyware, plus a dying fantasy sports site. The Sun/Oracle Java JRE, Firefox, etc, Yahoo hasn't made money from anything other than tricking low-sophistication users into making Yahoo their home page by installing toolbars and changing browser settings, and they do this by paying to have installers of unrelated but necessary applications do the dirty work. Thi…
The toolbars are dead I think though.
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I think you put it very elegantly in the first paragraph but I disagree with the rest. The problem is much worse. The owners of Yahoo don't even want a tech giant. They don't even want a company, they want to sell it as scrap. That's a tough environment to work in when you are hired to run a company.
I think that is pretty true, and since most think Yahoo! has negative value relative to their Alibaba stake, it would be interesting if they simply sold their Alibaba stake and used the proceeds to buyout the stock holders and took the remains of Yahoo! private. That would give them the breathing room to re-imagine what they could be, just as Dell has.
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I had no faith at all in Mayer. Not because she isn't a good product manager. Mainly because for a turnaround situation I would hire someone who was there before with a successful turnaround under h-- belt. Not someone without any turnaround knowledge (what to cut, high investor pressure, ...)
I think "their belt" is now accepted as the gender neutral way of saying this (I for one wish we just invented another word rather than make grammar more confusing and less logical, but I guess the people who can influence languages don't think the I do).
Is she willing to take $1 pay and get rest of her compensation in stock options that expire 5 years from now? How much is she willing to invest in Yahoo stock or stock futures by herself? If I were in the Yahoo board, those would be my first questions. Best way to test her commitment and trust for her own strategy is to see how much she is willing to bet her own money on it.
It's funny how people pretend that it's a sure thing that Yahoo can be saved. Saving Yahoo has always been more like a moonshot than a long shot and this was true way before they even hired Mayer. Sure, she has failed to do so (expected) but let's not pretend that there was much that she or anyone else could've done to save the company at this juncture. Her pivot to content failed but in many situations you don't kno…