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Yahoo Announces Resignation of Jerry Yang

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Re: Yahoo Announces Resignation of Jerry Yang

#41

Post by smacktoward »

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.

I wonder how many people said these same words to Larry Page and Sergey Brin back in 1997.

And that was when Yahoo's brand meant something!

Re: Yahoo Announces Resignation of Jerry Yang

#42

Post by dr_ »

Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I don't think "fixing" Yahoo ought to be as difficult as people make it seem. It's still a well regarded brand, and many millions rely on it for email and as a homepage. It's finance section remains extremely popular. They purchased Sportacular, the app I use to keep track of games. Theyve just been very poorly managed. They acquired companies like delicious and Flickr, one they let wilted and the other they never really integrated into their platform- Flickr just feels like a freestanding entity. They should cut out the garbage that doesnt get many users and should focus on their prized assets. They should push ahead in developing unique content for their viewers. It may be too late to get into the mobile OS game, but TV is still pretty wide open and Yahoo can really do something here, using their existing assets and by further developing or partnering with content providers. I'm hopeful.

Re: Yahoo Announces Resignation of Jerry Yang

#43

Post by steve8918 »

fleitz wrote: post #21
rdl wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo, like a lot of shitty corporations in death spiral, is worth less than the sum of its parts. It's not as if the stock price times shares = market cap is really a great figure, at least over short periods of time, but in the long term, reality tends to converge. Sun was sitting on a cash hoard of billions when Oracle bought it -- plus MySQL, plus some actually valuable technology, plus a lot of great engineers,…

Death spiral? Please don't get your financial information from techcrunch. I'd suggest checking public market data which suggests that in the last few years has massively increased its profitability Net income for YHOO 2010 1,231.66 m 2009 597.99 m 2008 418.92 m 2007 639.15 m

This is the danger of relying on a single financial measure to determine the health of a company. That's like only using a person's weight to determine if they're fat or skinny, when it also depends on how tall they are, their gender, the amount of muscle they have, etc.

Their net income may have increased, but they did it by selling businesses (Hotjobs and Zimbra) and cutting costs (sales and marketing and product development) dramatically. Their revenues have dropped considerably, and they have had a humungous brain drain. The 2011 estimates for annual revenues are $4.4 billion, down from $6.3 billion in 2010 and from $7.2B in 2008. That's a plunge of 30% YoY.

This is what a death spiral is. They achieved profitability by hacking and slashing. At some point, which was likely already passed, you cut to the bone, and you no longer can sustain a viable company, and the pace of decline gets quicker.

Re: Yahoo Announces Resignation of Jerry Yang

#44

Post by bfe »

matwood wrote: post #39
bluedevil2k wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Pretty much any offer to acquire a significant public company is going to be made at a significant premium to the share price at the time of the offer. Saying MS offered to acquire at a significant premium reduces to saying merely that MS made an offer to acquire.

Re: Yahoo Announces Resignation of Jerry Yang

#45

Post by nkassis »

dr_ wrote: post #42

Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I don't think "fixing" Yahoo ought to be as difficult as people make it seem. It's still a well regarded brand, and many millions rely on it for email and as a homepage. It's finance section remains extremely popular. They purchased Sportacular, the app I use to keep track of games. Theyve just been very poorly managed. They acquired companies like delicious and Flickr, one they le…

I agree with you on this. They have some really good things that they squander with bad management. Delicious should have replaced what ever was being developed internally since it was clearly superior but the company is full of politically minded middle managers who are breading in fighting. Maybe they could start there at fixing the thing, fire the majority of managers.

Re: Yahoo Announces Resignation of Jerry Yang

#46

Post by matwood »

bfe wrote: post #44
matwood wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Pretty much any offer to acquire a significant public company is going to be made at a significant premium to the share price at the time of the offer. Saying MS offered to acquire at a significant premium reduces to saying merely that MS made an offer to acquire.

The fact that MS made an offer to acquire at all helps make Yangs argument regardless of price. There is so much talk of fiduciary duty while ignoring that MS has the same duty to its shareholders. MS must have seen value in Yahoo at that time and offered a significant premium rather than wait for Yahoo to continue to fall and possibly get picked up by someone else. Or perhaps before Yahoo turned the corner and became too expensive for MS to buy.

Re: Yahoo Announces Resignation of Jerry Yang

#48

Post by phillmv »

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

That's a little hyperbolic. Also, what about the AOL-TimeWarner people?

Re: Yahoo Announces Resignation of Jerry Yang

#49

Post by freejack »

shingen wrote: post #28
xxpor wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Says the fact that he was on the board of directors of the corporation (emphasis on the fact that it's a public corporation consisting of shareholders). Legally, in his role, his responsibility was to the shareholders first.

Directors solely have a responsibility to the corporation. The corporation has a responsibility to the shareholders.

This gets mucky on boards of publicly traded boards because large shareholders can be directors and may have divided loyalties. There are strong conflict of interest policies, requirements of care and so on that are intended to help manage this, but it can be a tough balancing act.

Wikipedia has a good outline on director's duties. If you plan on leading a successful startup, learn this cold. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_of_directors#Duties

I've served on corporate boards and it can be a tricky place to serve in the interest of the organization, balance all of these requirements and stay true to your own personal sense of purpose. Its also very rewarding work and I recommend it highly to anyone that has the opportunity to participate, even for smaller organizations, non-profits, etc.

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