
Why Yahoo Keeps Killing Everything It Buys - gozzoo
http://www.wired.com/2014/05/yahoo-blink/
======
bedhead
I cant recall a luckier, more overrated CEO in my career than Marissa Mayer.
She shows up right before Alibaba (and wild valuations) takes off. Dan Loeb
gets involved to turbocharge the stock, which has done well solely because of
Alibaba. She makes a bunch of expensive, terrible acquisitions and insists she
didn't overpay for these odd non-revenue generating assets in the midst of a
minor tech bubble, while providing no evidence. Yahoo itself, meanwhile,
continues to decline and is regarded by most as a structural mess. Management
is overpaid beyond the point of reason, the former COO being exhibit A for all
that's wrong with management comp and corporate governance. I hope this
company goes down in flames.

~~~
pi-err
> I cant recall a luckier, more overrated CEO in my career than Marissa Mayer.

Short memory, short career or just sexist? In less than 2 years at Yahoo,
Mayer brought in unprecedented leadership in a byzantine group left unmanaged
for years.

Doesn't Ballmer beat her wildly in being lucky/overrated 2001 to 2011?
Remember the disastrous yahoo buy out in 2008? Talk of being lucky that it
failed. Or Blackberry?

Mayer turned around Yahoo's perception and fixed key products. She pointed out
a talent and reputation issue and tried to solve that
([http://qz.com/184046/yahoo-says-marissa-mayer-has-fixed-
its-...](http://qz.com/184046/yahoo-says-marissa-mayer-has-fixed-its-biggest-
problem/)) - should Yahoo just have done and bought nothing because of
increasing valuations?

There's no actual point to ad hom like this. Yahoo's strategy is not solely
Mayer's. It may not be working, you can disagree with it, it's plain populist
to single out Mayer.

~~~
ripb
>It may not be working, you can disagree with it, it's plain populist to
single out Mayer.

You bringing sex into the debate, your accusations of sexism and this point
toward you being the sexist, if anyone is. She is CEO. She is almost entirely
responsible and accountable for company strategy and performance.

Mayer has proven herself through the ranks of many prestigious technology
companies throughout her career, but her performance as CEO has been an
embarrassing disaster.

~~~
dbenhur
> Mayer has proven herself through the ranks of many prestigious technology
> companies

You have a funny definition of "many". She's worked at exactly two tech
companies in her career: Google and Yahoo. For such a shrill critic of her
performance, you're remarkably uninformed about what she's accomplished.

------
boyaka
I really hate Yahoo. When they bought Geocities they changed my user name that
had 64 in it to 63 automatically. What a stupid number. Then, because I didn't
log into it within a certain time frame, they up and deleted all my content.
It was the first (and only, really, besides school requirement...) personal
website I ever built, in 6th grade. It had all the cool images, gifs, midis I
had gathered on the internet and I even created custom gifs for it. I even
copy pasted some javascript code to make my gifs animate when moused over.

Even though I only used the email account they automatically set up for me for
junk registrations (my main mail was already @home/attbi/comcast before they
bought geocities, then gmail when that was created), I ended up making a
second yahoo account with a name that wasn't lame (which I still used for junk
registrations, and other random things, but moreso than the one automatically
created). One day the password on that second email account suddenly changed.
I used the same password on both the accounts for years with zero sign of
infiltration. I still continue to use accounts tied to the one with the
mysteriously changed password. I did everything I could to get that one back
with no luck. Maybe I was compromised by some hacker? I do recall during my
efforts being asked by yahoo support something along the lines of "is this
your main account?". There was never anybody that I could talk to, only text
support, and most of my attempts/ticket submissions went ignored. Maybe they
think I'm a hacker.

In the end, nothing but bitter feelings toward Yahoo for me.

~~~
mu_killnine
+1 for middle school website-building nostalgia.

~~~
will_work4tears
Ugh, I feel old. CERN apparently put up the first website when I was in middle
school.

~~~
protomyth
Don't feel bad, I had already graduated college. I was pretty happy about it
given there was no way I was going to use gopher being a Univ of NoDak alumni.
:)

Assembler class on an IBM/370 was kinda fun.

------
tpinto
It's just sad to see Yahoo! in such a bad shape. I was just talking to a
friend about the great Yahoo! in the times of Hack Day! and Brickhouse.

They bought some of the hottest startups back in the days (Flickr, Delicious,
Upcoming...) only to neglect them, shut them or let them die. These were
amongst the first companies that had put the user front and centre, leveraging
the fabled user generated content. This was of huge value for any company and
they let it slip through their fingers.

Also, at Brickhouse they developed Fire Eagle, one of the first services to
work with location, and a great take on it too. A central and independent
place where you could post your location to and then you'd grant access to
other services choosing the level of detail (e.g. you phone was constantly
posting your most accurate location and then Twitter could have access to your
current City, Facebook to the Country you're in and Dark Sky could access
Lat/Lon).

And, of course, they once owned Geocities.

Then they shut some stuff down, closed Brickhouse and I think they stopped
hosting Hack Days. I know correlation does not imply causation but I find it
very difficult to dissociate these two situations. How can a technology
company thrive if they kill their innovation internal cycle?

Yahoo! seems to once have had one of the best innovation cultures in industry
only to see it disappear like this. Everything that has been happening since
then (like death by acquisitions) looks like part of the plan or the lack of
thereof.

~~~
quarterto
At least they sold the Upcoming name back to Andy Baio:
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/waxpancake/the-
return-o...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/waxpancake/the-return-of-
upcomingorg)

~~~
tpinto
Yup. I rejoiced at that and backed Andy right away. It may not end up being
what Upcoming was before but it felt right to back his initiative anyway even
if just to condemn Yahoo!s take on it.

Upcoming is just another example: way ahead of its time. Take the number of
companies in the events space nowadays. Take the millions of dollars invested
or spent in such companies. Lots of meetups happening everyday around the
world...

Yahoo! has just let it die instead. It's even hard to argue that Upcoming was
off because it was ahead. I can't see why the events on Upcoming wouldn't turn
into what meetups are today. All it needed was someone to take care of the
product and the community. Gatherings and events have been happening since
before Upcoming was created and are now being managed on Meetup, Eventbright,
Lanyrd, etc... It isn't the case of these companies creating a new space for
them, they just took it from where Upcoming (and others, probably) left.

------
JonFish85
Isn't it fairly obvious that there are two categories of companies that they
buy: the ones they count on for strategic business (Flickr), and the ones they
acquire just for the people? I have to imagine that the latter is mostly just
to infuse Yahoo with young, energetic people who are willing & able to work
long hours if given a proper vision. Sure you can put out a lot of job reqs,
but this seems like the way Mayer has chosen to try to infuse Yahoo with
talent & energy.

~~~
hibikir
They just forget one very important problem: You can try to buy people by
buying the company they work for, but chances are they will not want to stick
around after the company culture has been trampled over.

Been there a few times over my career: Those acquisitions are, in almost all
cases, a disaster.

------
shawndumas
"In theory you could beat the death spiral by buying good programmers instead
of hiring them. You can get programmers who would never have come to you as
employees by buying their startups. But so far the only companies smart enough
to do this are companies smart enough not to need to."

\--[http://paulgraham.com/yahoo.html#f2n](http://paulgraham.com/yahoo.html#f2n)

------
Tycho
A separate yahoo finance app launched recently. I like it a lot.

I think yahoo.com is a great 'portal' \- there's still a place for that I
think

------
zitterbewegung
Are they arguing over percentage? Whats the percentage of google killing
things that it buys or any company for that matter?

~~~
_navaneethan
They are looking upon success of Google, and failure of Yahoo.

------
dafnap
Yahoo wants the developers not their ideas.

~~~
shubb
Or sometimes their software licences apparently:
[http://www.businessinsider.com/why-marissa-mayer-
bought-a-30...](http://www.businessinsider.com/why-marissa-mayer-
bought-a-30m-startup-2013-4)

------
Duhck
While I too am inclined to hate Yahoo, perhaps out of envy that a shitty,
failed idea I might have come up with wasn't acquihired for tens of millions
of dollars, their stock tells a different story. Not that a successful
business is defined by its stock price, but she is performing in a way that
the board and its investors are likely quite happy. The price has nearly
doubled since she took over.

[https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...](https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1400159934404&chddm=488359&chls=IntervalBasedLine&q=NASDAQ:YHOO&ntsp=0&ei=dL50U7CrFuOksQevxIDQDg)

That is surely worth something?

~~~
speeder
Not really.

When you calculate the stock price minus alibaba valuation increase, Yahoo is
still declining (in fact Alibaba has MORE value than Yahoo itself, resulting
in Yahoo having "negative" value)

------
general_failure
Only time will tell if these decisions make any sense at all. We don't have
much public information to work with about yahoo.

~~~
username42
Mayer seems to view Yahoo primarily as a place where you can find all sorts of
stuff on one giant app. “Once the user’s in that app experience, the easiest
thing to do is stay in that app experience,”.

I think this is a very insightful analysis. I think there are people that like
the "yahoo" way of presenting applications. It may look old fashion to others,
but there is a market. If it was not the case, yahoo would already be dead. If
yahoo changes its mind to do the same as others, they would lose their soul
and die. We have similar experience with RIM that left professional phones
with keyboard to become an Apple follower. RIM is (almost) dead.

~~~
GVIrish
I don't think that's a good analogy, RIM was failing because they stayed the
course for too long. As soon as the iPhone came along Blackberry should've
jumped on the touchscreen bandwagon. Instead they clung to their keyboard
phones for too long and lost many of their regular customers to iOS and
Android.

They still had a sizable lead in enterprise but even there they didn't fix
some of their fundamental usability issues in a timely fashion, so a lot of
enterprise customers started shifting towards Android and iOS.

Blackberry's problem is that it too them far too long to respond to a sea
change in their market. Had their first true flagship touchscreen phone come
in 2009 instead of 2013 they might still be a big player.

~~~
speeder
I think you are missing the point very hard on why RIM failed.

I am one that would own a RIM phone, IF, IF, and only IF they had made it easy
to code applications for it like Apple and Google did for their phones.

RIM noticed now and BB10 is seemly really interesting, but now they are too
late, there are no apps on their phone.

And I say that, because I ABSOLUTELY HATE touchscreen, it NEVER do what I
want, I own a Xperia Play, and many times I prefer to use the Playstation
controls to control the phone, the touchscreen is unstable, finnicky, don't
work when it is raining, or when my hand is wet, or sweaty, and so on...

~~~
username42
RIM should have sticked to keyboard based phones and use their energy on
developping the application market. I do not disagree with you, but I think
they could not develop their application market because all their energy was
devoted to their paradigm change.

------
ajays
The answer, near the end: "Yahoo ... has little to lose by shutting down an
also-ran competitor like Blink"

There you go.

------
Aqueous
I guess I really don't understand her mobile strategy. Yahoo is a
constellation of tons of different services and they all belong in different
apps. Are they going to have one big "Yahoo Mega-App?"

That makes even less sense than Facebook's central app, because at least you
can look at Facebook as offering a cohesive, singular service. But even
Facebook is unbundling because it realizes that it can offer a better
experience if each app just focuses on a single component of their platform.

What is she thinking?

------
Grue3
Do they really? They even kept that stupid Summly app, rebranding it as Yahoo
News Digest. Then there's Aviate, Tumblr... I don't know, what else did they
buy?

~~~
uptown
Here's a list:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Yahoo)!

~~~
sp332
But how many of those have been shuttered?

------
ellysetaylor21
I think they are planning something big, finger crossed and hoping this time
yahoo idea will work for the company :S

------
ommunist
This is what you can call real disruption. Yahoo disrupts innovation. And it
pays.

------
vampirechicken
So Yahoo wants to the the modern equivalent of AOL.

At least they can articulate a strategy.

------
henrikschroder
Not everything.

