
Yahoo In More Turmoil: Is CEO Mayer Running Out Of Options? - kapilkaisare
https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140417140542-64875646-yahoo-in-more-turmoil-is-ceo-mayer-running-out-of-options?trk=tod-home-art-list-large_0
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simonsarris
Ugh, articles on topics like this are always so damn opaque.

It's like watching people go in and out of the empire state building. You
could do it all day for a year, watching them go in, assume they're doing
important things, watching them go out. At the end of the year you have no
idea what they've done, though. You're still just people watching.

> Yahoo also confirmed that it paid Henrique De Castro $60m, whom Mayer fired
> for not delivering

Sorry for all my questions in the dark, but _what does that mean?_

It can't _just_ be pegged to metrics. How could expectations possibly be set
up so that you've recorded some stats and hired a COO, then 15 months down the
line the numbers didn't change enough, therefore you think that firing the COO
you brought on board will _help?_ How do you get to that point, where firing
him is a useful thing to do?

Maybe it's as simple as they needed an sacrifice to drown out some earnings
noise. Could it be that simple? What else is in play here?

Reading this I get nothing but the feeling that there's clearly a lot we're
not privy to. Instead we're just people-watching outside of the Yahoo office.

~~~

As a bystander it seems moves like this would make all Yahoo employees more
risk-averse than they might otherwise be. What message does this send if the
COO was ambitious?[1] That trying something and failing is not OK? That's not
conditions developers want to operate under.

Could something _like_ Tumblr (or any new popular service) be invented at
Yahoo today? I imagine they have plenty of bright people, but I suspect there
are unwritten penalties for sticking your head out or attempting a project of
any ambition. And maybe there aren't, but this certainly doesn't help the
impression.

[1] We must assume the COO was not brought on at great expense merely to stay
the course.

~~~
asmithmd1
Actually the article is wrong about De Castro's pay - he was _only_ paid $50m
for his 15 months with the company.

The CEO + CFO pay took away from the owners of the company (the shareholders,
remember them?) a full 10% of the company's earnings. What did they do to earn
this incredibly rich pay? Top line revenue dropped over 6% and operating
earnings were flat.

I understand outsized pay for extraordinary performance - but paying 1%er FU
money for caretaker performance seems like a recipe for a stockholder lawsuit.

------
dmfdmf
It may already be too late but if MM is listening... (she must be on Hacker
News, right?)

Step1: Fix the authenticating and POP/SMTP email servers NOW, their
performance has sucked for close to a year. Read the comments to the article
and every fifth one is complaining about email issues. Fix the security, Yahoo
emails get hacked way too easily. I once opened a new Yahoo account and before
I had even used the account it already had spam waiting for me.

Step2: Drop the zooming cars and flying coke cans on the home page -- have
some respect for your home page, don't whore it out to the advertisers. Yahoo
was my first home page and I miss it but when they started this crap I left
immediately. Revamp the home page as it is too busy and get rid of the endless
scroll of link-bait infotainment articles.

Step3: Your customers have spoken, and continue to be ignored -- they hate the
webmail interface. Fix it or users will continue to move on.

Step4: Stand up to the NSA and the govt and make it a clear Yahoo policy to do
so. We have a constitutional right to stop dragnet surveillance, don't cave in
to the pressure. Given the situation you are now a political leader not just a
CEO, if you can't handle the heat then resign. You can also make it a
competitive issue, and state in your TOS that Yahoo won't read your emails
(unlike Google) nor turn them over to the govt without a warrant.

Step5: (Here is the hard part) Come up with a grand, long term strategy (and
financial plan) that will allow Yahoo to compete with Google, MS, FB, et. al.
Good Luck, I think you can do it.

------
dlbarth
This related Bloomberg article provides some perspective on Yahoo's foreign
stakes.

[http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-04-17/how-can-
yah...](http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-04-17/how-can-yahoo-be-
worth-less-than-zero)

The valuation of their two main foreign assets actually exceeds the market cap
of the whole company. This indicates that not only is the current strategy not
working, even with billions of dollars available a new strategy won't be
found.

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greenyoda
_" In her latest move, Mayer is now culling the board. Yahoo has announced
that John Hayes, EVP and CMO of American Express and Peter Liguori, CEO of
Tribune Company will be leaving the board. This now only leaves five: CEO
Mayer, Chairman Maynard Webb, retired E&Y partner Sue James, former IAC CFO
Thomas IcInerney as well as tech entrepreneur Max Levchin."_

I thought that in a public company, the board of directors is elected by the
shareholders and the CEO reports to the board of directors. So how can the CEO
arbitrarily remove members of the board? (Yahoo board members own a minuscule
percentage of the company's stock; most of it is owned by institutional
investors and mutual funds.[1]) Could someone who understands corporate
governance better than I do please explain how this could happen?

[1]
[http://finance.yahoo.com/q/mh?s=YHOO+Major+Holders](http://finance.yahoo.com/q/mh?s=YHOO+Major+Holders)

------
rubbingalcohol
This seems like an aggregation of snarky Techcrunch articles bashing Yahoo for
x "bad decision" over the last few years. It's based entirely on the flawed
premise that we could draw some sense of Yahoo's bigger picture by looking at
a collection of individual issues that may look bad to an outsider (like not
letting employees work from home) without any new insight into what's going on
internally. Throw in a few numbers and missed performance metrics, and you can
only conclude one thing: Yahoo is doomed to die a slow, unspectacular death,
like a star burning itself into a brown dwarf. Breaking news?

This article brings no new perspective to the table. But since hating on Yahoo
is so fashionable lately, perhaps it will get the author invited to a few more
tech conferences.

------
Afforess
The problem with Yahoo is that it doesn't really serve a purpose. I haven't
been to the website in years, because there is nothing that it offers that
fulfills some need. If I want to search, I use Google (or less likely Bing or
DDG).

I couldn't even tell you what Yahoo offers because they don't seem to offer
anything. Sure they have news, email, weather, etc. But so does Google and
everyone else.

Yahoo should have taken Microsoft's buyout offer. Microsoft needed a landing
page ever since they lost MSN. I guess now they have Bing instead.

~~~
theboss
Yahoo has a lot to offer but they were dethroned as top dog and had nothing to
fall back on.

Look at Google. They become top dog in their subject matter and then they
start trying to compete in everything else. mobile OS, robotics, deep
learning.

Look at MySpace and compare them to Facebook, who has gone out of their way to
purchase up-and-coming Social networks, WhatsApp, Oculus.

My guess is that their problem isn't that they don't have something to offer
it's that they didn't have the NEXT thing to offer. They have constantly been
a step behind in their acquisitions instead of a step ahead.

~~~
prostoalex
Dethroned as top dog in some categories, but still strong in others.

Yahoo! News still dominates Google News, Yahoo! Finance still dominates Google
Finance. Yahoo! Answers is pretty much unrivaled in Q&A category (I know, I
know, the quality is not there, but all we care is traffic figures)

For many of the Google searches a site on *.yahoo.com network is still a top
result.

~~~
theboss
Even if traffic was the most important thing, one news site won't save you
from the big bad wolf.

Those things are all being replaced by newer forms of news sites, QA sites,
finance sites, etc.

------
wavesounds
They should ditch Bing and get back to their core business of building a
search engine. Google isn't perfect, just look at Wolfram Alpha and Duck Duck
Go, there's room for improvement and people like options. Yahoo should be one
of them.

There's got to be a way they could leverage the data in Tumblr and Flickr and
Alibaba to create richer search results than the few lines of text and low res
pictures and weak shopping results that Google currently offers up.

~~~
ethana
Search engine was never Yahoo's core business. Being a portal is and it's
still top dog in that area.

Dropping Bing to make their own might not be a good idea as building a crawler
is a multibillions dollars business and Yahoo might not have the financial nor
technical will to commit to something high risk.

It's true that Microsoft is benefiting more from its contract with Yahoo. Bing
is powering Cortana and Microsoft's other big data services. Having Yahoo's
traffic is indeed beneficial.

If Yahoo continue to see itself as a "media" company, perhaps buying Vimeo
might be a good way to get there. The web can sure use a competitor to
Youtube.

------
Grue3
What an awful article. It doesn't explain how Yahoo is in "more turmoil" at
all, with zero metrics to confirm this statement. It doesn't say anything
interesting, just a bunch of questions with no answers. Hey, Mr. Author,
you're the one who is supposed to be the smart guy who provides answers!

------
qwerta
14 years ago I played online chess on Yahoo. The could expand it by providing
J2ME, Symbian, Android, iOS and HTML5 clients... But no they still only have
original Flash version...

Yahoo is irrelevant now, yet another wanna be internet company.

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whoismua
She never had any real options, no offense meant. her appointment was more of
a Hail Mary of sorts. After Alibaba is public, they'll sell their stake and
buy themselves a few more years...and then linger forever ala AOL.

>> _A recent announcement showed that she received $25m in 2013, compared to
$36m in 2012. The drop is the result of missing the operating income target._

Glad I'm not the only one that has to cut a few expenses, the economy is
tough.

