
Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units - uptown
http://www.reuters.com/article/yahoo-redundancies-idUSKCN0VA33R
======
legohead
So I guess she _did_ mean something when she said, "No layoffs...this week"
[1]

Brutal.

[1] [http://nypost.com/2016/01/18/marissa-mayers-job-safety-
joke-...](http://nypost.com/2016/01/18/marissa-mayers-job-safety-joke-doesnt-
sit-well-with-workers/)

~~~
nobleach
It's incredibly sad when something like this happens. And I sure hope anyone
who's found themselves out of a job, success in finding another. Even the
"lower performers" still need to work. What I do hope for Yahoo, is that
they're taking a solid look at who they consider expendable. Are self-
important big shots also losing their jobs? Or are they too important to fire?
When I see any company start to get rid of their engineering workforce, and
keep all their managers, I get very concerned. It's a testament to how
important these people think they are.

As for Marissa, I wonder how easy it'll be for her to find a job. "I bought
Tumblr, I threw lavish parties when we really couldn't afford it... my company
was about to go under until someone purchased it... BUT, I did get people to
stop working from home!". "Hire me?"

Edit - Marissa, not Melissa.

~~~
henrikschroder
Seriously, if you've ever worked at a large company in SV, you should know
that the "lavish parties" thing was a completely envy-driven red herring.

If you do the math you realize that the holiday party cost a few hundred bucks
per attending employee.

Compared to other large SV companies - that are not under fire in the press -
this was a _cheap_ holiday party.

~~~
anotherhacker
Lavish parties send the wrong message to employees. If I were CEO I'd say:

"No more parties. We're going to use the to retrain employees (instead of
firing them) and avoid layoffs."

Mayer is turing out to be a terrible CEO.

This article describes the various multi-million dollar parties.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-
blows...](http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-blows-
millions-on-parties-and-sponsorships-says-eric-jackson-2015-12)

~~~
henrikschroder
That's not how it works. That's a terrible suggestion.

If you cut perks, your best and brightest will leave much quicker, the elves
leave middle earth. And then your company is essentially screwed, because
you'll lose all of your key personnel. And you won't save very much money.
This is the way of the bean-counters who know nothing of human motivation and
morale. $1000 per employee is less than a percentage of their yearly salary.

If you instead decimate the company, many who survive the culling will be
_thankful_ to the company that they are keeping their job, and you'll actually
save ~10% in salary costs and future obligations.

(The clever employees who see this coming will leave way before either
scenario anyway)

~~~
anotherhacker
I don't believe that the "best and brightest" consider lavish parties as a
deciding factor in where they work.

Notice how I phrased it. It's not cost cutting. It's about investing in
employees. That is something the "best and the brightest" love.

~~~
henrikschroder
No, the "best and brightest" at a company are interested in the company
investing in _them_ at the expense of the dead weight.

They are also not very interested in training, because they don't need it.
They want to work on cutting-edge projects.

"Training" is something that the poor performers are going to flock to,
because it benefits them. Which is the polar opposite of what the top
performers want.

~~~
anotherhacker
I believe your distorting my original point, pouring your own prejudices into
what I said, or I didn't explain myself very well. (Probably the last one)

Instead, I'll just point you to Deming's work on management. He transformed
Japan's post war economy into the powerhouse it is today. He's also
responsible for the much of the transformation here in the USA during the
1980'ss & 90's.

Long story short: it's the goal of management to make workers successful. Re-
training is the absolute best way of advancing the company.

[https://www.deming.org/theman/theories/fourteenpoints](https://www.deming.org/theman/theories/fourteenpoints)

~~~
henrikschroder
I think you explained yourself very well, you said that the company should cut
perks and put the money into re-training employees to avoid layoffs.

Cutting perks will gut the company morale.

Re-training on the job is already available at most SV companies of this size.
You want it, you get it.

The original article that called out the lavish party was explicitly doing so
to paint Marissa as a CEO that spends frivolously, and the author wanted her
to move that money from employees to the investors instead.

------
jedberg
I feel bad for the 15%, but this was necessary. They are severely over-hired.
I've gone over there a few times to talk to folks and it's clear that they
have a lot of people that are basically making work for themselves because no
one has any work for them that actually helps the business.

~~~
ChuckMcM
This is one of those things that folks learn over time. I've met masters of
the "busy people" who, with no direction whatsoever from above have full
meeting schedules, generating reports and presentations and white papers and
generally "working hard" but it is all just running on a treadmill as far as I
can tell. They are exercising their "execution" habits while waiting for
something to actually do. It sort of amazed me when I recognized it for what
it was.

Interestingly they seem to hold there jobs while people who just stop doing
anything with no direction often don't hold their jobs. So it is presumably a
suvival trait.

One of the more interesting things my manager at Sun told me was that the
difference between a leader and a worker, was that a leader was a going
somewhere and a worker was helping them get there. So if you want to be a
leader you need to have some place you are trying to go. It gets you into
trouble though, when there is only enough energy to follow one or two paths,
it puts you on the short list for removal if your path isn't one of them.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
>all just running on a treadmill as far as I can tell.

Unfortunately, people lose their minds when some company announces layoffs,
like some purposeful social harm is being done, yet somehow when a company is
having massive hiring no one really questions how much of that is valid or
sustainable. People become like you describe; they master the do nothing job
via office cult cargoism. It must be exhausting to have a 'fake' job like this
and knowing damn well that if you lose this job you may have nowhere to go.

I think 100 years from now our great grandkids will be living in an automation
utopia and look at our daily work lives as something just a harrowing as any
story from Kafka. There's a lot of craziness we let slide because we've
convinced ourselves total employment is one of the main moral goals of a
capitalistic society. Its probably not sustainable in later stages capitalism.

In my lifetime I expect to see GMI deployments in various nations as
automation keeps eating the world. I have yet to be convinced that the status
quo can be maintained and the cracks on the facade are already showing. Later
stages capitalism is a totally different beast than early stages. This is all
new ground.

Not too long ago this sounded like crazy sci-fi talk to me, but now that I'm
in a partial management position I've been involved with hirings/firings and
all sorts of staffing and productivity issues, this has shown me that
employment in general is something of an illusion. I'd say 80% of the
work/value done here is by 30 or 40% of the staff, maybe 20% if we're being
really tough. A lot of hiring, if not most, is vanity hiring by VP's who want
more people under them for status and budget reasons. This isn't some rational
engine at work here. Its its own kind of bubble and as we saw in the 2008
mortgage crisis, it gets deflated pretty easily when money stops coming in.
(5% to 10% unemployment in 12 months 2008-2009).

~~~
throwawayyawa
Hi, throwaway with a "fake" job (with quotations because usually 25% of the
time I am busy).

It is incredibly frustrating to me, because I consider myself a creative and
capable individual, who is just fresh off graduation. However, I have a
micromanaging, closed-minded rude boss (company lingo: "Leader"), who I prefer
to avoid at all costs. At the same time, he seems completely aloof and
uninterested in my career goals, which explains why I have nothing to do most
of the time.

This is further led to absurdity because I'm in a Trainee position, someone
who is paid a better than everyone else at their level of responsibility and
gone through extra training with hopes they will ascend to management. I get
no training either.

I've been looking for another job for over a year and cannot get anything else
because of lack of experience and a nation-wide political+economical crisis.

~~~
eru
If you are smart enough to enjoy reading Hacker News, you might be smart
enough to learn programming.

Decent programmers are still very much in demand, no matter what nation-wide
crisis you are talking about.

~~~
seivan
I hope you're right, I want you to be right. But honestly, I can't see it. A
lot of what we do essentially lives on credit. We're like real estate. We're
in demand as long as there is a buyer. Essentially, buyers will cease.

We're not doctors, cops nor lawyers, the world won't cease without us. Hell,
even civil workers in governments although less salary, have better safety
than we do. I can't shake the feeling that essentially we'll realise that all
these companies we work for don't really "exist" as they're just the
imagination of someones account balance. At some point its gotta run dry.

~~~
eru
My employer has just made `most valuable company'. I am not too concerned.
They make a pretty dime, too.

------
felixrieseberg
Yahoo still has a bunch of really smart people doing important open source
contributions - I wish all of them all the best and I really hope that the
tighter belt will allow them to continue their work.

------
free2rhyme214
In the past 10 years with Yahoo I - deleted Yahoo Weather after they put huge
ads and briefly used Flickr.

In the past 10 years with Google I - use Gmail, Google Drive, Google docs,
Google sheets, Search, Google Maps, Chrome, Waze and YouTube on a daily basis.
I've also bought Chromecast and occasionally use Hangouts & Wallet. I'm
excited about a lot of their Google X projects.

The 15% job cut is because Marissa Mayer failed to suck me and millions of
others into the Yahoo ecosystem.

I think part of that is shifting Yahoo from a media company to something more
like Google.

~~~
dandare
All the mentioned Google services are being paid for by Google Search, a
luxury that Yahoo never had.

~~~
free2rhyme214
Why didn't they innovate more?

------
inthewoods
I really don't understand why she continues to hold the job - I haven't seen
anything that she's done that has worked at either expanding revenue or at
least stemming the bleeding. She also seems does not seem to be an effective
manager given the turn over at the senior level.

------
melted
My only hope wrt Yahoo is that Yahoo Finance gets sold to someone before the
company implodes. It's basically the only top notch, useful site they run.

~~~
exhilaration
Why is that? I haven't visited it in years and use Google Finance instead.

~~~
melted
Because Google Finance is obviously abandonware, and Yahoo Finance has a great
iOS (and I assume Android) mobile app.

------
minimaxir
Article primarily references information from the WSJ article, but WSJ now has
a super-paywall and the "web" trick no longer works.

~~~
jonknee
Maybe it just changed, but there is an article and not a link to the WSJ. You
can also use this to read the WSJ article:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=Yahoo%27s+Marissa+Mayer+to+U...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Yahoo%27s+Marissa+Mayer+to+Unveil+Cost-
Cutting+Plan)

~~~
minimaxir
Nope. They closed that workaround.

The article was indeed changed; edited OP.

~~~
jonknee
Interesting, it still works for me but I have an extension that automatically
sends a Google referrer to all WSJ.com request. Not sure why that would behave
differently, but it does.

------
mythz
At the dawn of the Internet Yahoo held the Internet's home page, there were so
few sites and Search Engines were so primitive that I remember using Yahoo
Directory to find websites and for many years `ping yahoo.com` was my magic
command to tell whether my modem had an Internet connection. My first Internet
account and online alias was at Yahoo, I used mail and their personalized home
page every day...

But then started their decades long decay, whilst the Internet boomed the
Yahoo directory became old and static, I moved to searching on Google pretty
quickly and jumped when gmail was released with it's unprecedented 1GB of free
space. Around the same time my Yahoo mail became my junk account, my
personalized Yahoo home page started bit rotting, my Internet connectivity
command became `ping google.com` and I never went back to searching on Yahoo.
They also jacked up prices of Yahoo domains by 300-400%, violating existing
customers trust and prompted me to go shopping for a new service provider
pretty quickly.

Although I've been disconnected from all things Yahoo, I imagine it's been
operating in its own niche corner of the Internet, I'm told Yahoo mail has
hundreds of million users (my Junk account likely counted), I'd be interested
in the number of active accounts and their demographics, my guess goes to an
aging population. It's now been years since I heard anything positive coming
out of Yahoo, they've hit the news with MS's failed acquisition, switching
search engines and CEO churn - but otherwise I can't recall anything new
coming from Yahoo that wasn't M&A.

They seem like a draconian company holding onto legacy labor-intensive
degrading assets which happens to be sitting on a gold mine with their Alibaba
investment. I don't see how the current structure is capable of re-inventing
itself so stream-lining their existing operations and trimming off dead-weight
and losses seems like the only way forward. If they ever have a chance to
becoming a tech force again they need new blood and talent pretty quickly.
Fortunately they have the resources to make something but I only see it coming
from outside of Yahoo, if I was them I would look at using their resources
funding young, talented and innovative startups that aligns with their growth
and business interests, e.g. they could mandate all ad-supported startups must
use Yahoo Ads. Even with all the Talent Google has, many of their most
valuable assets like Android and YouTube came from acquisitions. With Yahoo's
brain drain I suspect that's going to be the only way we're going to see a
resurgence from them.

~~~
gedy
> `ping yahoo.com`

Haha, I still do this out of habit too.

~~~
crikli
Me too. Literally the only thing I've used Yahoo for in years.

------
manishsharan
What about Tumblr ? Is that thing still on? was it worth the bazillion dollars
they spent on the aquisition.

Also a long time ago, Yahoo made Mark Cuban a billionaire. What happened to
the technology they acquired from his company?

~~~
adventured
Tumblr remains a top 50 US site, so yeah it's still on.

Was it worth it? I don't see any meaningful competitors to them. Nobody has
come along to knock them off. The $1.1 billion price was obviously steep for a
blog service. So long as the traffic remains, they have some shot at turning
it into a sustainable business. It's realistically worth 10% to 20% of what
they paid for it though.

~~~
Crito
Tumblr has a problem of demographics which makes it difficult for Yahoo to
make money off of it. A very large segment of their users are teenagers, and
another large segment do little other than post pornography.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
Teens are great to market to because they can get money out of their parents.

~~~
Crito
Much easier to get money out of people who can get money from themselves.

Ad impressions from adults are worth more than ad impressions from teenagers.

------
dudul
At this point, I feel bad for the other 85% who still work there...

------
yeukhon
> Ms. Mayer is expected to announce greater focus on Project Index, an
> internal project to build a better search engine tailored to mobile phones,
> said a person familiar with the matter. The company has posted listings for
> at least 190 jobs on its website this month, the vast majority of which are
> for engineers.

1\. I am eager to find out why it is tailored to mobile phone and what
capacity the engine would give to a mobile phone. A search engine should work
on both desktop and on the go.

2\. Did job research with Yahoo a couple years ago, so I am not sure how much
it is true today and whether my observation is correct or not from their
hiring standpoint. But I know in the past, half of the Yahoo hiring post dates
were at least 6-12 months ago, which indicated either the company was
struggling to find and acquire talents, or someone simply never bothered to
cancel the request and the team responsible for managing the hiring posts
never bothered to check with the requester regularly. Either way, it was bad
for a job seeker to see a company fail to remove job posting from months ago.

IMO, if you are still hiring the same title for multiple job filling, submit a
new one and put a new date.

~~~
Retric
There are still plenty of sites that are unusable on a mobile phone, so that's
one consideration.

~~~
yeukhon
Did you mean going over to another site? Because major search engines like
google, yahoo and bing have their own app for major mobile OSes. Unless you
want to render other sites within your app, that's a whole different story. I
am under the impression they want to incorporate Yahoo News Digest (pretty
much an update from the expensive Summly acquisition) into the search
experience.

~~~
Tomte
I guess he meant that search results that don't render well/fast on mobile
could be demoted.

------
blisterpeanuts
I guess this proves that banning work-from-home didn't solve their problems.

Yahoo was _the_ internet destination back in the 90s and into the 2000s until
Google started to eat their lunch in search and email.

In my opinion, Yahoo's strength was its diversity; it was a one-stop shop for
everything internet. You could register domain names, set up web pages, sell
items, conduct email, instant messaging, etc. all within the yahoo.com domain.
Gradually, it seems that other, nimbler competitors have gradually chipped
away at Yahoo's lead until it seems they don't do anything particularly well
compared to the competition. Too bad.

They still do have 400 million email users, and email users are loathe to
change, so that business is probably safe for a while. But with nothing new to
offer, and many good offerings sinking or gone, Yahoo is becoming a low price
acquisition target. Sad to watch; at one time it was the iconic Internet
business, in the Fortune 500, that could seemingly do nothing wrong.

~~~
1024core
> I guess this proves that banning work-from-home didn't solve their problems.

I don't know what's the big deal about that. It affected ~200 people max.
Yahoo was just tightening the restrictions, bringing them in line with the
rest of the Valley companies. And yet people still think that it was a big
deal; it wasn't.

(Source: I was there.)

~~~
YZF
Maybe it wasn't a big deal for you but it was perceived negatively overall and
it hurt Yahoo's reputation (or whatever remnants of that remained at that
point in time). If only 200 people were affected then it wasn't worth the
backlash it created and wasn't a smart move. Anyone who was impacted by it,
e.g. wasn't able to go pick up his kids or stay home for a plumber to come fix
his sink, wouldn't be happy and his unhappiness would impact people working
with him. These sort of moves can hurt the "spirit" of a company irrevocably.

~~~
henrikschroder
The reason was to get rid of dead weight that was "working from home", but
effectively just lifting a paycheck for doing nothing.

It did in no way impact productive employees who needed an occasional flexible
schedule.

But that's not something you can tell the press, so it was spun as it was
spun, and that's what people remember.

~~~
skuhn
In actuality it just tightened the existing restrictions on remote workers to
the very upper echelon of ICs. It didn't really impact occasional work-from-
home people much as long as they flew under the radar, but it did impact the
sort of people who lived in the middle of Idaho. Everyone was required to
relocate to within 100 miles of a Yahoo office and commute in most days,
unless they were truly irreplaceable and their VP went to bat. Oh and imagine
relocating to be near an office that was subsequently closed.

It was a stupid policy decision, it damaged the Yahoo's public reputation due
to their incompetent PR (nothing new there) and it has cost Yahoo a
considerable number of excellent (but not truly irreplaceable) employees.

In conjunction with the drive to re-centralize teams back in Sunnyvale (after
other drives to de-centralize to less competitive markets to hire better
people), this cost Yahoo a lot of their network engineering team, among other
groups. LinkedIn, Apple, and other companies have reaped the benefits of
Yahoo's short-sightedness.

Whenever a company has to resort to cleaning house to rid itself of dead
weight -- either by "banning" remote workers, mass layoffs, or whatever else
-- the real story is that they simply don't know who is doing good work and
who is not. If they knew, that, then the non-workers would already have been
separated from the company.

Either the managers are not suited for their roles or not empowered to perform
the duties of their roles or terrified of political nonsense like losing
headcount and reqs and being demoted. Yahoo has consistently failed to
properly measure employee performance, either taking a lackadaisical approach
to performance or using pseudo-scientific nonsense like bell curves. As a
result, there has always been a lot of dead weight -- inside the offices is no
exception. They're currently being sued for their firing practices, and the
suit suggests that the performance measuring system is wielded punitively for
political purposes. I don't find this at all hard to believe.

There is no easy fix to a poor work culture, and I don't think Yahoo really
has ever had the stomach for the hard fixes. The culture is too poisonous and
it has persisted too long. It doesn't matter now though, Yahoo won't be around
in its current form for too much longer.

------
vram22
Maybe they should spin off every area they operate in, into a separate
company? Like Sports, Finance, Mail, etc.?

------
anotherhacker
CEO Training 101

Multiple rounds of layoffs destroy company morale. Better to do one big one,
and then hire back if necessary.

~~~
pcurve
Don't go after workers just because they're highly paid, and force them to
pick between paycut or package.

This is how you lose all the good people.

------
dopkew
There is a movie dialogue where a man from the future tells his friend in the
past:"I want you to remember this word, okay? It's kind of like a code word:
Yahoo. Can you remember that?" It ends up making his friend rich in the
future. The movie is Frequency(2000)

------
ChristianKletzl
If you are one of the 15% who were let go, ping me at christian@smarthires.io
and I'll personally try to help you find a new job. We are working with many
companies from YC and other VCs!

------
Riod
As a post mortem of sorts, could someone with an understanding of yahoo from
the inside explain why they have failed to innovate for 10+ years?

~~~
free2rhyme214
I don't work at Yahoo but I believe the answer is management.

~~~
Riod
How so? As in they just never hired the best people/created processes that
resulted in innovation?

~~~
free2rhyme214
Hiring is part of it but it's also about systematically launching products to
create your own ecosystem.

Yahoo's never really built an ecosystem like Google and when you couple that
with low performing acquisitions you get job cuts.

------
smegel
> Yahoo had about 11,000 employees as of June 30

That's still a pretty big company in tech terms. A bit less than Facebook.

~~~
adventured
A _lot less_ than Facebook at this point. There's no longer a good comparison
to be made there, as Facebook's business is five times larger.

Their Q315 was just about larger than all of Yahoo, and Facebook's sales are
growing at 50%.

Facebook earned $1.56 billion in net income last quarter (and they'll do $5+
billion annually going forward). Yahoo is struggling to stay near $50-$100
million per quarter. And that's net income, skewed by various b.s., Yahoo is
producing lots of red ink on operating income (FB has ~30% operating income
margins).

Facebook is going to hit near $22-$24+ billion in sales over the coming four
quarters. Yahoo is stuck around $4.6 billion.

Facebook is a cash generating machine, while Yahoo is becoming AOL: trying to
extract dwindling amounts of cash from legacy businesses.

It's a really bad contrast these days.

------
bechampion
this is sad , same with IBM last week , i guess we employees should think more
about what kind how loyal can we be to companies that can do this to us i a
blink of an eye. All the best for the ex-yahoo and ex-IBM

------
tamana
What's the cumulative total of layoffs so far?

------
xufi
I feel bad. First Mayer had the no work from home thing just to save money and
now she's doing this. I feel soon Yahoo will be spun off in to a few different
entities if they keep going this way

------
gtirloni
I don't really get what these abbreviations and commas in the titles are all
about.

It saves 3 characters over "Yahoo to cut 15% of jobs and close several units".
Maybe allow for more Twitter hashtags?

~~~
yeukhon
I did a quick search just to see what other media is using.

CNBC> Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units: WSJ

reuters seems to have updated the title.

Even though it said WSJ, WSJ has a different headline.

------
known
Split it and sell it off

------
jahkobi
I wonder how many high level engineers quit during the telecommuting ban?

------
xyzzy4
Doesn't Yahoo go on hiring sprees all the time?

~~~
yeukhon
Almost every major tech company is always hiring. But the process of ACTUALLY
HIRING is a different story. Some company does it quick, even if there's a
layoff. Some company takes forever to complete interview and paper work even
if there is no layoff. And then there are companies doing layoff and new
hiring goes through strict budget reviews. It depends. Furthermore, you can
close a whole useless business project and you decide to invest in another
project so you need to hire people. It's quite interesting that in the latter
case some company prefers to fire everyone and hire back some of them. I have
seen that before.

~~~
random42
> It's quite interesting that in the latter case some company prefers to fire
> everyone and hire back some of them. I have seen that before.

I wonder why they'd do it, instead of an internal transfer. Any idea why?

~~~
accountatwork
When I've seen this happen, it's been pure mismanagement. An order goes out to
do layoffs, so people get laid off. Within days, people realize that they've
laid off critical employees who can't be replaced and they get hired back as
contractors. The employees who got laid off aren't happy about it, so the ones
that do come back demand huge raises and some don't come back.

------
ranci
who is even using yahoo and why?

~~~
acchow
It's the default search engine for Firefox.

But mostly, Yahoo has a bunch of successful properties (finance, sports,
tumblr) that still have users.

------
icedchai
15%? That's all? (Yahoo stockholder here.)

~~~
artursapek
I hope you have puts

------
jahkobi
I wonder how many high level employees she lost during the ban on
telecommuting, and how much of an impact that had on getting product to
market?

~~~
sawthat
Zero. Exceptions were granted for pretty much every "high level" employee.

------
Yhippa
Elop'd. Think Google would buy them for the front page visitors, news, and
sports assets?

------
halis
I mean..it's Yahoo, who cares.

------
guelo
They're going to kill Yahoo because some rich assholes don't want to pay their
taxes.

~~~
tomp
No, they're going to kill Yahoo because it deserves to die; a company not
making money doesn't really have a reason for existence, does it? (Or it
should become a charity instead.)

~~~
jpetso
I think there is some value in providing jobs to 10,000 people (currently
more, soon a little less) even if there's no extra profit for shareholders on
top of that. Maybe these kinds of companies should just be given to employees
for free and run as a co-op instead of getting shut down.

~~~
tomp
> I think there is some value in providing jobs to 10,000 people

Sure there is, but it's not the purpose of companies to provide that, but
should be done by the society (government) if the society decides there's
value in that.

~~~
jpetso
> Sure there is, but it's not the purpose of companies to provide that, but
> should be done by the society (government) if the society decides there's
> value in that.

I like how this contrasts really nicely with a different view, where the ideal
state of society is small government that leaves everything to the market,
often mentioned in the same breath with keeping taxes as low as possible.

I think the whole basic income thing is interesting, but unless/until that's
implemented, a society that mainly relies on companies to power and own the
country should also demand from companies to ensure that people are doing
well.

Anyway that's going off-topic, my initial point was only that the default move
for companies without sizeable profits or losses doesn't have to be to wind
them down. I care less whether you call the result a charity, a non-profit or
something done by the government.

------
tosseraccount
Yahoo is #5 web site:
[http://www.alexa.com/topsites](http://www.alexa.com/topsites)

Yahoo netted $7B :
[http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=YHOO+Income+Statement&annual](http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=YHOO+Income+Statement&annual)

Big, mature companies have to go through layoffs now and then; get rid of the
dead wood.

What's the problem?

~~~
juraj24
My thoughts are similar - they dont have one united vision about who they are,
but they do have several successful internet properties - finance, sport,
tumblr, flickr and more. It seems clear now that marissa is not capable to
completely transform the company, but by doing incremental optimalization they
can do just fine over time.

~~~
jzwinck
Flickr was incredibly successful at one point, but it has been slowly dying
for years. I used to pay for Pro features there but one day they emailed
saying that free accounts were now good enough. So revenue must be reduced
since then. And what replaced it is a bunch of porn collectors. Ten years ago
there was a community of photographers there. Now the only "likes" I get are
on a couple pictures that happen to have nudity or a girl in handcuffs (actual
police handcuffs, now reimagined as kink). Most of the people who try to
follow me there don't even share a single photo themselves...they use Flickr
to catalogue their fetishes.

~~~
thrownaway2424
This thread has hundreds of comments and only two people mentioned Flickr. I
guess that tells you how much currency it has.

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agounaris
The problem is when yahoo does parties that cost some millions when they
announce the layoffs... I'm wondering if yahoo has any earnings since her
majesty became ceo.

~~~
Alupis
> I'm wondering if yahoo has any earnings since her majesty became ceo.

Why wonder when you can find out for yourself?

[https://investor.yahoo.net/results.cfm](https://investor.yahoo.net/results.cfm)

