211–220 of 228 posts
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Is 21 months not enough time to execute on a strategy?
At such a large company? Not really. You can certainly start execution of a strategy, and she did, but it takes a long time to turn such a big boat and fully realize a strategic vision.
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I never understood why Yahoo got so wrapped around the axle with the search engine business. I used to use Yahoo a lot to start my web browsing and I liked the fact that it wasn't a search engine. They provided broad categories that you could click on and you could keep drilling down to more specific categories until you found relevant websites. Not always the best way to search the web but it was great when you didn…
Don’t forget Flickr which they pretty much ran into the ground
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Would you say that Uber, Lyft, Spotify, and Tesla are all unsuccessful companies?
Is this really a serious question? The success of a for profit company is defined by “profitability”. Spotify - like Jobs said about DropBox, they are a feature not a product. Most of their revenue goes back to the record labels. Their gross margins are slim Uber - is losing billions and it’s unit economics isn’t good. Lyft - See Uber Tesla - it’s “profits” aren’t from selling cars. https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/31/inv…
I disagree with the notion that the success of a for-profit company is solely defined as "profitability". Factors such as growth or value are also often cited as success criteria. I couldn't find literature supporting your statement that profitability is the only measure of company success.
Intuitively, it also seems wrong to me to claim that a children's lemonade stand netting $10 in profit is a more successful business than Tesla.
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Revisionist history... Firefox and loads of niche browsers (MyIE2/Maxthon which I used in the era where IE was sometimes mandatory for site compatibility) had tabbed browsing.
Somehow it feels like Opera invented most of the features contemporary browsers have. I remember using Opera on an off from the late 90s to late 2000s.
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Is this really a serious question? The success of a for profit company is defined by “profitability”. Spotify - like Jobs said about DropBox, they are a feature not a product. Most of their revenue goes back to the record labels. Their gross margins are slim Uber - is losing billions and it’s unit economics isn’t good. Lyft - See Uber Tesla - it’s “profits” aren’t from selling cars. https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/31/inv…
It was indeed a serious question. Thank you for your answer. I disagree with the notion that the success of a for-profit company is solely defined as "profitability". Factors such as growth or value are also often cited as success criteria. I couldn't find literature supporting your statement that profitability is the only measure of company success. Intuitively, it also seems wrong to me to claim that a children's l…
If I sold a bunch of dollars for 95 cents, my revenue would be astronomical. But does that make it a sound business model?
Which is a better business model? An Indy writer with 3000+ people charging $100 a year for a newsletter (Ben Thompson/Stratechery) or a multi million dollar news organization employing dozens of people with higher revenue losing millions per quarter?
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The answer to the puzzle is that the rule about fiduciary duty really is only relevant to who the beneficiaries are of financial transactions; it pretty much does not have anything to say about regular business decisions. No doubt some shareholders contacted their lawyers and were gently dissuaded by a legal reality check.
Shareholders did sue, and the threat of the lawsuit meant the board had to devote a lot of energy towards the Microsoft acquisition offer, which was unfortunately why the offer was a win-win for Microsoft.
But the settlement had nothing to do with Yahoo failing to reach an agreement with Microsoft; it was to weaken a poison pill Yahoo had put into place that meant employees would get expensive severances in the event of a takeover. This kind of financial measure is bread-and-butter for corporate fiduciary law, and it doesn't contradict what I said.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/yahoo-settles-shareholder-suit...
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a list of shockers - streamed install process (download a shim of 300kB which will stream the rest) - obviously the chromeless ui - the dynamic status bar (ok that was the point above) - downloads shown below (as cute as the status bar, actually I miss that thing) - something about tab closing that was more regular (no need to move your mouse) - option / printing lean and fast
You forgot speed - both when launching the app and general responsiveness. Launching chrome was shockingly fast - clicking the launcher and having the browser chrome show immediately without the crutch of a loading window was downright revolutionary. Once loaded, Chrome was really snappy (e.g. switching between tabs).
Also the update release pace, for better or worse, was also a new kind of fast.
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FF had tabbed browsing for years before Chrome ever showed up.
And also had single process model which failed completely when you had 50 tabs and Youtube etc. implemented in Flash. Main tab use case being unusable around the time Chrome came out was what motivated me to switch. Also, extensions getting broken at each update.
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It was indeed a serious question. Thank you for your answer. I disagree with the notion that the success of a for-profit company is solely defined as "profitability". Factors such as growth or value are also often cited as success criteria. I couldn't find literature supporting your statement that profitability is the only measure of company success. Intuitively, it also seems wrong to me to claim that a children's l…
How can a company be sustainable if it continuously loses more money than it brings in? If I sold a bunch of dollars for 95 cents, my revenue would be astronomical. But does that make it a sound business model? Which is a better business model? An Indy writer with 3000+ people charging $100 a year for a newsletter (Ben Thompson/Stratechery) or a multi million dollar news organization employing dozens of people with h…
What you're saying makes perfect sense to me though.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/net-in...
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Shareholders did sue, and the threat of the lawsuit meant the board had to devote a lot of energy towards the Microsoft acquisition offer, which was unfortunately why the offer was a win-win for Microsoft.
I checked, and not only did they sue but they reached a settlement, in Delaware of all places, the state least friendly to these kinds of claims. But the settlement had nothing to do with Yahoo failing to reach an agreement with Microsoft; it was to weaken a poison pill Yahoo had put into place that meant employees would get expensive severances in the event of a takeover. This kind of financial measure is bread-and-…