
Yahoo Announces Resignation of Jerry Yang   - privacyguru
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120117006946/en/Yahoo%21-Announces-Resignation-Jerry-Yang
======
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.

~~~
microarchitect
_Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I don't think "fixing" Yahoo ought to be
as difficult as people make it seem._

I worked for a semi-dysfunctional semiconductor company and so I think I have
some perspective on what it takes to "fix" a company like Yahoo.

I think the biggest reason a company becomes like Yahoo has less to do with
senior management and more to do with the fact that the company is filled with
low to mediocre quality middle managers and employees. Mediocre managers
aren't very good at their job, so it seems like they make up by playing
politics. Once politics is rampant, what gets done is not what works the best,
but what helps you or your team get ahead in the political game. At this point
you start bleeding talent because good people prefer not to work in an
irrational workplace. You also lose the focus and initiative you need to keep
a successful product successful.

The worst part is that there's nothing you can really do to fix this. You can
try to fire the bottom 10%, but if you only have a problem with the bottom
10%, you're not yahoo. You probably need to fire the bottom 50%, but then you
wouldn't have enough personnel to keep all your assets going AND some of that
50% would also be good employees who lost out in the last edition the
political olympic games.

Any well-intentioned change in process or product focus by top-management will
also inevitable morph into something completely different thanks to your low-
quality middle managers who won't understand what you're trying to do, but
will understand that they need to step up the politics to keep their jobs.

I guess the point of my rant is that a big company is like an emergent system
and you can't really fix a dysfunctional emergent system by changing a small
number of things that are part of that system.

~~~
schraeds
"Swat Teams" of vetted talent to handle the most prized assets and
initiatives. Let the cruft keep up day to day, apply proven talent to the most
important initiatives piece by piece. ie. Apple and the iMac, then iPod,
iBook, iWorks, Final Cut etc etc.

~~~
demallien
I actually work in exactly this type of swat team. We were all hired at well
above standard payrates at my large company to build the next generation
product. The response from the existing teams was immediate - they saw us as a
threat, and started doing everything they could to make our project fail. In
the end they succeeded in gimping the product by simply giving us interfaces
that just couldn't do what a good product needed. The swat team was dragged
into mediocrity. Now many of those rather expensive hires are actively looking
to move elsewhere.

Moral of the story - building a star team in an existing company is a good way
of building resentment about that team and is unlikely to breed success.

~~~
xxpor
Why didn't they give you the power to demand things from other teams, lest
they be fired?

~~~
chime
You can demand a functional API but you cannot demand a reliable service. That
is what they've been unable to provide in the first place.

------
kingofspain
Yahoo is usually talked about as if it's a joke or a failure. According to a
cursory check (ahoy - I'm no finance king so I could be reading this wrong)
it's worth $19 _billion_. If I could fail half as well, I'd be pretty happy.

Honest question: Am I missing something really obvious? Is Yahoo really
falling apart (slowly I guess as the same has been said for the past decade)?
Or is it a case of not fulfilling potential?

~~~
beatle
Yahoo is way under valued. Yahoo was considering selling its stakes in Yahoo
Japan and Alibaba Group for $17 billion. Yahoo's current market cap is $19
billion PLUS $2 billion cash. Does that somehow make the value of its U.S.
assets negative?

~~~
true_religion
What value that Yahoo chooses to assign to its own divisions is kind of
besides the point.

~~~
dodedo
Those are not divisions, they are shares in entirely separate, publicly traded
companies. The valuation is market valuation -- not a number made up by Yahoo.

------
bluedevil2k
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 course than the board room. I also
have to think back a few years to when he said "No" to Microsoft's offer for
acquisition, a very foolish move looking back.

I guess what I'm really saying is I'd like to read his biography when it comes
out.

~~~
gcb
<quote>when he said "No" to Microsoft's offer for acquisition, a very foolish
move looking back.</quote>

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.

~~~
bluedevil2k
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.

~~~
xxpor
>His job was to do what was best for shareholders

Says who?

~~~
BrandonMTurner
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>

~~~
dodedo
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.

------
startupfounder
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.quora.com/Yahoo/Why-did-Jerry-Yang-pass-on-the-
Mi...](http://www.quora.com/Yahoo/Why-did-Jerry-Yang-pass-on-the-Microsoft-
offer)

~~~
joshu
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.

------
teyc
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.

~~~
fleitz
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.

~~~
shingen
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.

~~~
wdewind
Yeah but in this case the diversity is a weakness. You can't replace Yahoo!
because they don't do one thing really well, they do a bunch of things
mediocrely well. What is the Yahoo! brand? What do they do anymore? No one
really knows, even though they do a ton, so how could you even aim to replace
them at all? At best you could aim to replace Yahoo mail, and that seems like
a very reasonable (though still ambitious) startup goal.

------
ilaksh
Apparently this thread is full of people who are better at being CEO of a
multi-billion dollar company than anyone at Yahoo in the last several years.

------
MrFoof
There are also sources reporting that four more board members may be following
him: Roy Bostock, Arthur Kern, Vyomesh Joshi and Gary Wilson.
[http://allthingsd.com/20120117/sources-four-more-board-
membe...](http://allthingsd.com/20120117/sources-four-more-board-members-will-
be-following-yang-out-the-door/?mod=tweet)

Still rumor at this point, but the Wall Street Journal has a pretty good track
record overall.

------
blueplastic
Yahoo!'s new spinoff, HortonWorks, can become a billion dollar Hadoop company
down the line if they carefully navigate around Cloudera and MapR. Not sure
how/if that affects Yahoo shareholders.

------
greut
I don't believe Yang did write that since he never (ever) used any capital
letters in any of his communication.

------
dsimms
Q. When does Microsoft announce the acquisition?

~~~
fpp
A. After HTC has sold enough Android phones

~~~
rbanffy
Because if they had to rely on WP7 sales, the answer would be "never"

------
ww520
Does it mean Yahoo is on the verge of being brought?

------
barredo
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.

:-)

~~~
gcb
not that far fetched. think you being mostly downvoted for language and
emoticon.

this is a /. comment about the case, mentioning jobs "resigned after 9 years.
Sold all his stock. Apple III had failed. Mac was fine, but the board wanted
an "adult" in charge. Steve returned in 12 years"

~~~
barredo
I'm not angry about downvotes. I know jokes have no place in HN :-)

