Yahoo Announces Resignation of Jerry Yang • Hacker News Board

Re: Yahoo Announces Resignation of Jerry Yang

#31

Post by troymc » Wed, Jan 18, 2012, 12:26 AM UTC

fleitz wrote: post #23

teyc wrote: post #13

Yahoo is lost as a brand. My children don't know what Yahoo is. It is one of the million insipid content destinations on the web.

Your children also probably don't know what Petrochina is but like Yahoo that doesn't make them an unprofitable company. The nice thing about no one knowing who you are is that 22 year old college geeks don't get the idea to 'disrupt' your industry and instead focus on 'disrupting' a more well known brand like Facebook. I'd suggest educating your children as to how to make money instead of brand recognition.

Yahoo! is a media company, and media is a business where brand recognition matters. Petrochina is not.

That said, Yahoo! does have some strong brands. Yahoo Finance, omg! and Yahoo Mail come to mind. (Yahoo Mail is second only to Hotmail in web-mail market share; Gmail comes in third.)

Re: Yahoo Announces Resignation of Jerry Yang

#32

Post by teyc » Wed, Jan 18, 2012, 12:27 AM UTC

tlb wrote: post #25

teyc wrote: post #13

Yahoo is lost as a brand. My children don't know what Yahoo is. It is one of the million insipid content destinations on the web.

Yahoo is much more popular among seniors, a valuable advertising demographic.

While I agree with the premise that seniors are a valuable demographic, the problem with Yahoo here is that there is nothing compelling about Yahoo that would make it the default choice for the next generation of seniors.

Yahoo grabbed a lot of users back when the web was young, and this is a cash cow for them, but it has have never figured out how to compete and grow their audience since.

Re: Yahoo Announces Resignation of Jerry Yang

#33

Post by chaz » Wed, Jan 18, 2012, 12:28 AM UTC

teyc wrote: post #13

Yahoo is lost as a brand. My children don't know what Yahoo is. It is one of the million insipid content destinations on the web.

It's still the #3 largest in the US and #4 largest web property in the world according to comScore for monthly unique visitors. It may not be cool as it was in 1997, but it's still a massive force on the web with a huge number of users and advertising inventory.

Re: Yahoo Announces Resignation of Jerry Yang

#34

Post by MattGrommes » Wed, Jan 18, 2012, 12:36 AM UTC

beatle wrote: post #14

bluedevil2k wrote: post #5

I'd be interested to learn about his views and opinions on Yahoo during these past 15+ years. From the various things I've read about him, he seems like he was just a nerd at heart who wasn't interested in the entire business side of Yahoo, and when Yahoo started exploding, he had that "Allen/Woz" mentality of missing the "good old days". I heard about the stories (fair or not) of him spending more time on the golf c…

Here's a good title for his biography The Rise and Fall of Jerry Yang How he built a great company and then orchestrated one of the greatest destruction of value in the history of business

Facts? I've heard more bad things about the Board of Yahoo than I've heard about his decisions personally.

Re: Yahoo Announces Resignation of Jerry Yang

#35

Post by robotresearcher » Wed, Jan 18, 2012, 12:51 AM UTC

3am wrote: post #20

gcb wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when he said "No" to Microsoft's offer for acquisition, a very foolish move looking back. name companies acquired by Microsoft when microsoft already had competing products, which ended up well for both parties. honest question. I have to believe there are a couple. and i'd like to know about.

I think that was said from a shareholder/owner perspective. Microsoft's offer was for more than double Yahoo's current price per share, and that was 4 years ago.

A CEO has fiduciary responsibility for the property of the shareholders. A CEO can have other perspectives if he or she wishes, but the shareholder perspective better be high on the list.

Re: Yahoo Announces Resignation of Jerry Yang

#36

Post by joshu » Wed, Jan 18, 2012, 12:53 AM UTC

startupfounder wrote: post #15

17 years is a really long time at any company. Jerry has done an amazing job building Yahoo! from a startup to dominate player in the tech industry and has created 13,600 jobs. Yahoo! already up 3.24% in after hours trading... so the market liked the decision. Its a choice between shareholder value and wanting to hold onto the core culture of the company. An interesting discussion on the Microsoft offer: http://www.q…

standard disclaimer: afterhours trading is very thin liquidity, so a small amount of trading can move the stock price significantly without meaning much. tomorrow's opening price is the first real indicator of what "the market" thinks.

Re: Yahoo Announces Resignation of Jerry Yang

#37

Post by dodedo » Wed, Jan 18, 2012, 1:04 AM UTC

BrandonMTurner wrote: post #26

xxpor wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>His job was to do what was best for shareholders Says who?

The law mostly. Otherwise ownership of companies would be mostly pointless, similar to that of gambling (in that your fate would be mostly random, more so then it currently is). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_of_directors#Duties

Your statement about the law is for the most part not true. There's a much more in-depth discussion of this at this older HN posting: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3227980

I agree with you that yahoo should have sold to microsoft, by the way. But the legal duty to maximize value bit is just not accurate.

Re: Yahoo Announces Resignation of Jerry Yang

#38

Post by slippytoad » Wed, Jan 18, 2012, 1:05 AM UTC

barredo wrote: post #2

Wonder if Yahoo! will get real shitty. Then, 10 years from now, Yang will come back, save the company and make it the most tech profitable company ever. Better buy some stock. :-)

Nice one :)

Re: Yahoo Announces Resignation of Jerry Yang

#39

Post by matwood » Wed, Jan 18, 2012, 1:05 AM UTC

bluedevil2k wrote: post #19

gcb wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when he said "No" to Microsoft's offer for acquisition, a very foolish move looking back. name companies acquired by Microsoft when microsoft already had competing products, which ended up well for both parties. honest question. I have to believe there are a couple. and i'd like to know about.

His job was to do what was best for shareholders, not his employees and definitely not himself. Tough to argue that turning down $33 for the current $15.50 was best for shareholders.

Tough to argue that turning down $33 for the current $15.50 was best for shareholders.

Well it's not always that simple. Hindsight is of course 20/20, but at that time he may have thought that Yahoo was worth more than $33 and/or had a plan to get them there. Oddly enough, the MS offer could be used to help prove his point. Here is an outside company offering to buy Yahoo for much more than the current price so there is definitely value here that they were not leveraging.

With Yahoo up 3% on the news it'll be interesting to see what the future holds.

Re: Yahoo Announces Resignation of Jerry Yang

#40

Post by teyc » Wed, Jan 18, 2012, 1:07 AM UTC

shingen wrote: post #29

fleitz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your children also probably don't know what Petrochina is but like Yahoo that doesn't make them an unprofitable company. The nice thing about no one knowing who you are is that 22 year old college geeks don't get the idea to 'disrupt' your industry and instead focus on 'disrupting' a more well known brand like Facebook. I'd suggest educating your children as to how to make money instead of brand recognition.

You can't disrupt Yahoo as a random 22 year old geek starting a company. The revenue streams and traffic base of Yahoo is extremely diverse. Unless you plan to simultaneously disrupt web email, search, financial portals, sports, news, generalized all purpose portals, and on and on.

Thanks.