
Verizon closes $4.5B acquisition of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer resigns - pyprism
https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/13/verizon-closes-4-5b-acquisition-of-yahoo-marissa-mayer-resigns-memo/
======
chollida1
A list of Marissa Mayer's/Yahoo's accomplisments with her at the helm....

[https://marissamayr.tumblr.com/post/161775943139/nostalgia-g...](https://marissamayr.tumblr.com/post/161775943139/nostalgia-
gratitude-optimism)

Even though all of these gains, plus more as core yahoo lost value was from
Alibaba this does look impressive at a first glance.....

> We oversaw the creation $43B in market capitalization and shareholder value.
> Our market cap has gone from $18B to $51B (increasing our valuation by
> $33B), while we returned nearly $10B in cash to shareholders.

Sadly the list of employee gains seems very spartan compared to the
shareholder gains.

For those of you wondering what the Yahoo/Altaba shell contains now...

\- approximately 15 percent equity stake in China’s Alibaba Group Holding
Ltd.,

\- about 36 percent in Yahoo Japan Corp.,

\- cash and marketable debt securities,

\- certain minority investments and Excalibur IP, which owns some patent
assets.

~~~
zeteo
> Our market cap has gone from $18B to $51B

> approximately 15 percent equity stake in China’s Alibaba Group Holding Ltd

15 percent of Alibaba is about $52.5 billion. I'm not sure why we're even
discussing anything else. It's like saying that my contribution to family
finances is:

a) not selling my parents' house, which is now worth half a million.

b) having $1.32 in change in a little ashtray by the door.

~~~
dragonwriter
Well, except that your change in the ashtray _is_ a positive contribution.

~~~
jondubois
Yeah but a negligible one.

As a long time Yahoo mail user, I was very disappointed with Yahoo under
Mayer. Firstly they did a terrible job with the Yahoo mail web client; it
became slow and clunky and inherited the worst parts of Gmail and none of the
good parts. Secondly my account was hacked and to this day my old contacts
still receive spoof emails from "me" (though not actually my email address)
about weight loss supplements.

I am ashamed to tell people my email address. I started moving to Gmail.

~~~
rhizome
_[Yahoo Mail] became slow and clunky and inherited the worst parts of Gmail
and none of the good parts._

Yahoo and LinkedIn are basically right next door to each other and employees
from one routinely hop to the other, so it makes sense that they share
production values.

~~~
hueving
That's stupid. Google is also walking distance from LinkedIn and had buildings
by the yahoo campus as well (tech corners).

~~~
rhizome
You're right, the poorly implemented copies of Gmail features could just as
easily been written by Xooglers, but it's a funnier and longer-standing joke
that the entirety of LinkedIn is as a hodge-podge of other peoples' ideas.

------
khazhou
Her mega-salary, like that of other comparable executives, is decided by other
mega-rich people. It's no hardship for them to hand her (one of their own)
enough cash to buy a small town.

Let's ponder that $260M compared to every time an outgoing job offer was
dialed down from $145K to $135K. Or when the yearly bonus for a rank and file
is a healthy $25K (1/1000th her accumulated comp).

Sour grapes? Yes, and why not? We're all giving our lives to these same
companies.

~~~
usmeteora
It seems alot of the critcism is focused on Marissa Meyer but I'm more
interested in understanding how Yahoo got to such a bad state where they had
to ask Marissa Meyer to come rescue the company, why it was in such dissarray
when she got there and what led to her inability to save the company, from a
logistical and business standpoint as opposed to just the constant banter
about her being a horrible person and her salary being more than everyone
elses (I never heard this criticism about the previous Yahoo CEO who let the
company fall to pieces before she got there despite having similiar income)

Also, on a separate note, I've noticed multiple multibillion dollar companies
who fall into disarray, have CEOs sit quietly in the background, hire a woman
to come in and try to save it when to me the finances, business portfolio but
most importantly jaded work culture and workforce of thousands of people seems
hard to face, and then I see these women get relentless criticism, one
particularly being related to their salary, which is comparable to the men
previous to them in their position as well as men all over the world who earn
a disgusting amount more than they should for their contributions as leaders
of their organizations, but I only ever see woman CEOs in the spotlight for
making too much money. Is there a slight bias here or is it just me?

Edit: I'd also like to add that I'm not rephrasing your comments as Marissa
Meyer hate, just the thousands of non stop comments and general immediate
focus on her income and failures as opposed to the failures of yahoo as a
company that led to there being a new CEO (male or female) in the first place
and what was faced during that time.

From what I know, Marissa Meyer worked many late nights for months going
through every line item cost trying to understand what noone was hired under a
man to summarize in the line item costs while she was pregnant, but the only
news headlines I saw was how unfair it was to her employees that she was going
to have a nursery in her office while asking her employees to not work
remotely, when I'm pretty sure that decision was made purely based on her line
item evaluation and the evaluation that the culture was lacking the
accountability other software companies who had remote workers adhered to.

Nonetheless, everything she does or attempts to do seems to be immediately
commented/overshadowed by how much money she makes or how its unfair she can
afford childcare when noone else can. This is really quite bizarre to me being
a woman because I never see overwhelming responses about a man making too much
money or their negligence to employees about their ability to take care of
their children (or criticism for having or not having nurserys in their
offices because obviously why would I man need that when there is a presumed
woman at home taking care of them?). Is there a relevance to this and why does
it seem to overshadow and be constantly associated with everything she does
despite not being the case for every other CEO who has been at the helm of a
failed company?

~~~
robbiep
There are countless articles on male CEOs being overpaid.

Recently there was even an article on how Apple's new headquarters doesn't
have childcare facilities despite having a gym, orchid, cafes galore etc; a
reflection of the male 'visionary' who created a company to reflect a vision
of a world where childnren don't exist (too messy!).

I suggest that rather than the world being unduely harsh on Yahoo!'s former
CEO, it is an unfortunate instance of selection and (un-)survivorship bias.
There are simply less female CEOs. The fact that Yahoo blew itself up and the
CEO is leaving with a quarter of a billion in incentives is noteworthy, and it
doesn't really matter who was at the helm. It would be hard to imagine many
people relishing the idea of converting a declining Yahoo back into a google
competitor back when they were hiring

~~~
tertius
> a reflection of the male 'visionary' who created a company to reflect a
> vision of a world where childnren don't exist (too messy!).

I'd love for a quote somewhere from this visionary to reflect this statement.
If it doesn't exist then this is misandrous propaganda.

~~~
robbiep
because it's binary, and you're either male and hate children, or female and
love them?

------
brookside
I have disliked her ever since being influenced by this gawker screed some
years back:

[http://gawker.com/5162532/marissa-mayer-googles-biggest-
fail...](http://gawker.com/5162532/marissa-mayer-googles-biggest-failure).

Subsequent reporting has hardend my opinion:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-
wh...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-when-marissa-
mayer-tried-to-be-steve-jobs.html?_r=0)

I have tried to examine what role gender plays in my visceral dislike for
Marissa Mayer. I hope it is a small one. I give myself some consolation that I
recoil almost equally when reading any news coverage of Travis Kalanick.

~~~
chongli
Small consolation, then. The activities which took place under Kalanick's
watch -- sexual harassment, _greyballing_ , the Waymo trade secret case -- are
much more reprehensible than what Mayer has done. I think gender plays a big
factor for many people's opinions of her.

The comparison with Steve Jobs is particularly telling. Steve was notoriously
cruel and difficult to please, yet he is much-loved as a visionary. Women are
given a very hard time for being unlikable, no matter how talented they are.
Granted, she was no Steve Jobs. Despite being in a glass cliff [0] situation,
she was far more successful than any of the Apple CEOs prior to Jobs' return.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff)

~~~
mathattack
The difference is that Jobs succeeded.

Meyer didn't do anything bad, she just didn't turn around Yahoo. She landed
the plane though.

~~~
chongli
Jobs succeeded, but plenty of male _rescue_ CEOs failed without drawing the
sort of ire that Mayer has.

~~~
086421357909764
She was also a _celebrity_ CEO, basking in the exposure of being touted as
Yahoo!'s great new hope. She didn't push back on any of the publicity or press
then, so it's only right she maintains exposure regardless.

------
chibg10
I find it interesting that the comments section of the WSJ (a pretty
capitalist-friendly corner of the internet) is filled with complaints about
Mayer's "overpay" as CEO and outrage over her "golden parachute," while HN (a
much less capitalist-friendly corner of the internet) has gone through 40
comments and I've only seen a couple questioning her pay as CEO, and several
comments praising her job in the role.

Take away Marissa Mayer from this story, and replace her with a generic CEO,
and I'm not sure we'd see the same mood in either comment section.

Why is this? Is this because she's from Google? Because she's a former
engineer? Because she's a female CEO? Is she just a politically polarizing
topic ala Elon Musk?

Genuinely curious. Anyone have any ideas?

~~~
mrspeaker
One other thing I noticed is that every time there is a post about her here,
everyone calls her Marissa, or Marissa Mayer, or Ms. Mayer (seriously!)...
never Mayer. I might be "attributing to malice" but dudes never get called
"first name", only "last name".

It might just be the way it is in the US, but I can't help read it as a way to
depower someone. I dunno if "depower" is the right term, but it feels
something like that.

Again, that might just be a cultural thing that I'm not aware of.

~~~
ClassyJacket
I noticed the same thing with the US presidential election. He's Trump, but
for some reason she's just Hillary.

~~~
sib
Well, there is the difference between

this (Trump):

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/Trump_20...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/Trump_2016.png)

and

this ("Hillary"):

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/Hillary_...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/Hillary_for_America_2016_Logo.png)

------
invincibles
Coming soon: All Verizon phones will contain tons of Yahoo crap and use Yahoo
by default.

~~~
panzer_wyrm
People that don't buy unlocked phones but on contract seems so be ok with
carriers treating them poorly.

~~~
erik-g
Well some people don't have a few hundred dollars to drop on a new phone when
they need one. At that point you're at the whim of the carrier anyways.

~~~
parthdesai
I would rather buy a phone like moto g than get a super phone that is locked
to a career and bloated with all the shit. But then if you are on hacker news,
you most probably are not an average joe when it comes to tech.

~~~
JBReefer
I have a Moto G, outright. It cost as much as a night out, and it works
perfectly. It's got nearly stock Android, and the battery is good.

The camera is HORRIBLE, but the difference is not worth >$650 to me

~~~
parthdesai
Yeah Moto G was my phone for an year as well till i got a proper job and could
afford Nexus 6P.

If you don't care about camera, it really is a great phone for 250 CAD.

------
pram
I really wonder what the ultimate fate of Flickr and Tumblr will be,
especially the latter since the acquisition was deemed "essentially worthless"
lol

~~~
simonsarris
For some context to pram's comment, by essentially worthless he's referring to
how Yahoo recently completely wrote off Tumblr's goodwill value from when they
acquired it, which was most of the purchase price. In other words, Yahoo paid
a premium because they thought Tumblr had a lot of potential, then... wrote it
off.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_(accounting)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_\(accounting\))

For more context see:

2013 talk of 75% value being goodwill:
[http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/09/technology/yahoo-tumblr-
good...](http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/09/technology/yahoo-tumblr-
goodwill/index.html)

Then 2016 writedown: [http://gizmodo.com/yahoos-latest-earnings-report-
basically-c...](http://gizmodo.com/yahoos-latest-earnings-report-basically-
confirms-that-t-1783873667)

~~~
notfromhere
im sure david karp isn't complaining

------
rb808
Congratulations to Marissa on a job well done. That boat was a sinking ship
that no one wanted to captain, and she kept it alive long enough to a
satisfactory outcome.

~~~
johansch
Yeah, that wasn't really how her appointment was sold:

[http://www.reuters.com/article/us-yahoo-ceo-
idUSBRE86F13T201...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-yahoo-ceo-
idUSBRE86F13T20120717)

"Yahoo turns to Google's Mayer for revival"

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/dorieclark/2012/07/16/3-reasons...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/dorieclark/2012/07/16/3-reasons-
why-marissa-mayers-hiring-is-a-huge-win-for-yahoo/)

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-07-18/yahoo-
hel...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-07-18/yahoo-help-us-
marissa-mayer-dot-youre-our-only-hope)

~~~
dgfgfdagasdfgfa
Who are reuters, forbes, and bloomberg to say? They don't know the market;
it's not like rescuing yahoo was actually in any way possible. The site was a
finance site, a sports site, and a shitty email server stuck to a link farm.

Not to mention flickr, tumblr, etc that had little to no role in the revenue
generation of the company. RIP del.icio.us.

If the company had been saved it would not have been Yahoo! anymore.

------
drzaiusapelord
Kind of a sad day for me. Yahoo was so instrumental in the early web where I
cut my teeth. Seeing it now sold to some telecom giant at around what a
handful of unprofitable mobile apps go for is a bit depressing. For
Millenials, imagine if Google was sold to AT&T 5-10 years from now after
beaten by hungrier competitors. I guess all these companies fold eventually
but Yahoo had quite the terminal illness and it lasted far longer than I
assumed and often with bouncebacks that made you think things were getting
better.

Perhaps Verizon can do something useful with the brand, but the Yahoo I knew
is dead and probably has been since Mayer took over. She was brought in as a
hatchet-woman to get an acquisition and got the job done.

~~~
bognition
>Perhaps Verizon can do something useful with the brand

They are abandoning the brand completely. After the merger goes through VZ
will combined AOL and Yahoo! into a single new brand Oath.
[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/03/technology/verizon-
oath-y...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/03/technology/verizon-oath-yahoo-
aol.html)

~~~
empath75
They are 100% not abandoning the brand-either yahoo or aol. Oath is just the
umbrella organization.

------
jellicle
When she took over, there were numerous articles about how Yahoo's core
business had negative value (the business plus the Alibaba investment was
worth less than the Alibaba investment).

Since then she's given a lot of cash to shareholders, raised the stock price,
and is selling the "negative value" core business for $4.5 billion.

That's an astounding success.

------
signal11
If anyone knows what impact Verizon's ownership will have on Flickr, please
could you share?

I've been on Flickr for a _long_ time now and it works well for me, should I
be worried?

~~~
epmaybe
I jumped ship from it after the Verizon ownership. I only used Flickr for
storage, not for the social aspect, so I just moved everything to Google
Photos. I don't personally notice a huge decrease in quality in their
compressed pictures, but your mileage may vary.

------
justboxing
> As expected, Marissa Mayer, who had been the CEO of Yahoo and recently
> received a $23 million ‘golden parachute’ for her work there.

Nice!

I dream of a day when the Engineers who make the Tech Company what it is, are
also offered 'Golden Parachutes' as part of a Job Offer.

------
Simulacra
I give it about 3 years until Verizon unloads it onto someone else for half
the price.

~~~
debacle
You have to consider things like:

\- Defaulting search for Android. \- Owning the search engine behind their DNS
hijacking. \- Setting Yahoo as the default search when you install their ISP
software. \- Being able to eliminate Verizon mail (and integrate with Yahoo's
mail platform). \- Having less reliance on Google for mobile.

------
ianamartin
I've said it before, and I'll say it again.

Marissa Mayer took on a shit job to pull a losing company out of a hole. She
knew what she was getting into, and she knew what was going to happen.

She deserves every penny for the reputation hit that she's taking over this.
This entire thread is why she deserves the money. Most people in tech hate her
for some reason. (Let's guess what that could be . . .)

Good for her for bargaining well and pulling a dream deal out of an assclown.

Yahoo was a joke when she took over, and now when she leaves it's a much more
valuable joke. On paper, at least. But still a joke.

If you're going to leave google to run the laughing stock of the internet, you
damn well better get paid the big bucks to get it sold for more than it has
any right to be worth.

Good for her.

<shameless pandering> (Also, if you're reading, Marissa, hit me up. I know
you're going to start something up soon. No way you are just going to sit
still.) </shameless pandering>

~~~
Bakary
With sums of this magnitude the notion of just deserts quickly becomes a fuzzy
concept, if it really made sense to begin with. Nobody really deserves
anything.

~~~
ianamartin
If I were going to take a very high-profile job as the head of a failing
company with the mandate that I fix it, a high probability of failure,
constant criticism from the press, the issues around being a woman leader in a
major silicon valley company, and low expectation of another similar gig
after, you bet your sweet ass I would negotiate a golden parachute.

Did she make some mistakes? Yeah. The weekend redesign of the logo was
probably insulting to a lot of people at the company, and it seemed kind of
ridiculous to people outside the company.

But the bottom line is that for the rest of her career she's going to be
branded as the woman who failed to save Yahoo!. A much more likable Carly
Fiorina. Likable, but still a failure.

That's a shit thing to have to live with, but it's a risk she took. Who is
going to hire her next? She's way over qualified for most positions in the
tech industry, and she will always be perceived as under qualified as a CEO.

You take a risk like that, you deserve the reward she got. Her career is toast
for a while unless she starts something up on her own, which she has the money
to do.

What kind of package would you trade in exchange for likely never being able
to work in your capacity anymore and having your name very publicly and widely
shit all over?

I'd take everything I could get if I thought that was going to happen. The
board made a deal with her, and she took it. I don't see a problem. Good for
her.

Also, considering so many of the comments in this thread about how this has
nothing to do with her being a woman--what do you think the HN threads are
going to look like when Kalanick gets kicked out of Uber and makes millions?

Guarantee you there won't be any criticism. The narrative will be that he was
a smart guy who made a savvy deal.

~~~
Bakary
I didn't mean this as a personal attack on Mayer. I actually quite like her.
It's the whole system that has evolved into something bizarre. In general
terms, how can a person deserve a salary equivalent to the lifetime earnings
of thousands of people when it is not even clear if their performance actually
helped or hindered a company and to what extent? Mayer and Kalanick are just a
few examples in a long list, but an illustrative one since she actually did
explicitly fail (even if the job itself was indeed very difficult from the
get-go).

Sexism certainly has an influence on coverage, but it's also a red herring.
The real question is the absurd pay packages in general, and the disturbing
belief that these are somehow justified. It's not only a recent phenomenon but
also a localized one, and CEOs with less gargantuan salaries seem to be
incentivized just fine. In Mayer's case, it's hard to frame her decision as
some kind of huge sacrifice, in a world where most people have to scrounge for
a meager living. I doubt she'll lose much sleep over negative press and
feelings that will be forgotten after the next controversy.

------
CodeSheikh
I am still waiting for Silicon Valley TV show to pick up this vast subject of
Myer's tenure at Yahoo into one of its episodes.

~~~
2017throw
You think they are brave enough to touch the "inspirational female leader"
topic? Theranos and HP would be enough alone...

~~~
johan_larson
It doesn't have to be about a female leader. It can be about a grand old
company that has fallen on hard times and whose board ponies up big bux to
attract a promising young CEO. Unfortunately the promising young CEO can't
deliver a return to the glory days, so the second best is a carefully
negotiated sale.

------
troxwalt
They should probably just end all fantasy baseball leagues for this year too.
I'd hate to have this year count.

In all seriousness, Yahoo! has done an amazing job with their fantasy sports.

------
dopamean
I thought the job of a CEO was to increase shareholder value. Yahoo stock is
up roughly 230% since she was officially signed on as CEO. Sounds like she did
her job to me.

~~~
opo
All of that increase is due to the increase in value of the Alibaba stock -
which was pushed through by Yang long before she got there. If she hadn't sold
half of their Alibaba holdings when she got there, the value of the company
would have been about double.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/09/30/how-
jerry...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/09/30/how-jerry-yang-
made-the-most-lucrative-bet-in-tech-history/)

~~~
skinnymuch
Mayer didn't sell the 40% stake. The deal was begun and going through before
she was CEO. It was only finalized and completed with her as CEO. Not like she
was going to be allowed to stop the deal. The bad board and activist investors
are the ones to blame.

~~~
opo
>...Not like she was going to be allowed to stop the deal.

I am not sure how you can be so sure about that. I wasn’t privy to the
discussions with her and the board, were you? If she recognized how bad of an
idea that was she could have made it a condition of taking the job. My guess
is that she saw the 7 billion from selling their position as free money that
would take the pressure off of her for a while.

~~~
skinnymuch
No of course I'm not privy to everything. It was known the board wanted to get
rid of some of the Alibaba stake for cash. So they just wouldn't hire Mayer if
she wouldn't allow the deal as part of her being CEO. You can of course say we
don't know for sure but if we know the board really wants some cash from
Alibaba and has kicked out Jerry Yang already, then it isn't hard to think
that Mayer hasn't no leverage here.

Also just for basic timeline sake - in 2012, the deal was announced in the
media in May, Mayer is CEO in July, and the deal completes in Sept.

------
zw123456
Verizon is combining the AOL and Yahoo operations and calling the new
organization "Oath"

~~~
jhou2
My initial thought was, "How did they misspell OAuth like that?"

~~~
floatboth
Also isn't "OATH" like the group that standardized TOTP?

------
redm
I for one hope this works out well, more diversity is good for consumers.
IMHO, anything that chips away at the dominance of Google and Facebook are
positive too.

~~~
kingbirdy
how is two major corporations merging an anti-monopoly move?

~~~
skinnymuch
The point OP was making is that this gives the internet ad industry a 3rd
major player. Still far short of FB and Google but a lot closer than anyone
else.

------
PayForPeenus
Marissa Mayer was already on the sinking ship - but I admire her ambition on
trying to make that thing work. God speed on her future en-devours for sure.

------
redm
I can't help but think about the Microsoft buyout offer back in 2008. From a
$44 billion dollar offer to an offer 1/10th the value 9 years later.

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2008/02/01/wow-microsoft-
offers-446-b...](https://techcrunch.com/2008/02/01/wow-microsoft-
offers-446-billion-to-acquire-yahoo/)

~~~
skinnymuch
Jerry Yang, the most competent higher up at Yahoo for the past decade and a
half, is the one who said no to the buy out. And rightfully so. The Alibaba
and Yahoo Japan stakes would be worth over $80B today. Unfortunately the board
and some activist investors first kicked Jerry out and then continued on with
selling almost half of the Alibaba stake.

------
shawnee_
> _Those who are keeping jobs in the media division in the newly merged
> operation include Jared Grusd leading the News vertical (including
> yahoo.com, aol.com, HuffPost, and Yahoo News); Geoff Reiss leading the
> Sports vertical; David Karp leading the People and Community vertical
> (including Tumblr, Polyvore, Cabana, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo View, and Kanvas);
> Andy Serwer leading Finance media (including Yahoo Finance and Autoblog);
> Michael LaGuardia leading Finance product and utilities; Ned Desmond leading
> TechCrunch and Engadget; Alex Wallace leading OTT video production &
> distribution as well as lifestyle & entertainment (that includes BUILD,
> RYOT, Yahoo Celebrity, Yahoo Style, Yahoo BeuYahoo TV, Yahoo Movies, Yahoo
> Music, and Yahoo Entertainment); Dave Bottoms heading up distribution
> products (Newsroom and video OTT products) as well as growth, monetization,
> and syndication; Tim Tully leading all of engineering; Dave McDowell leading
> subscriptions, commerce, and customer care (including Yahoo Shopping and AOL
> Shopping); and Mary Bui-Pham leading our operations (including design, UXRA,
> analytics, and program management)._

The problem with consolidations like this into bigger and bigger conglomerates
is that it reduces editorial independence in favor of a false sense of
corporate unification among all the "verticals". The heavy and overweight
company has a "great" vision which involves being everything to everybody. But
that never works. End result will likely end up providing a lukewarm
mediocrity in them all.

What Yahoo probably should have done was divest; instead it allowed itself to
be swallowed whole by an ISP whose sole goal (as evidenced with its
malfeasance to destroy Net Neutrality) is be able to selectively prioritize
traffic in the ways that are most profitable to them... Ergo, the objective of
this kind of empire is not to track down the truth and inform people about
what is really going on, but to entertain and distract.

~~~
hengheng
I dunno, did you really look at Yahoo for content that profits from editorial
independence?

------
smoyer
What if Mayer's actual role was determined by Google? could it have simply
been "keep them alive so we're not viewed as a monopoly"? Or maybe "put them
out of business but make it look good"?

I don't think that anything quite so evil went on but you have to wonder,
given Mayer's investment in Google, whether there weren't sub-conscious
components to her decision making. One advantage to hiring a successful CEO
from another industry is the lack of this background (of course, one of the
disadvantages is Scully).

------
adamonkey
She should become COO of Uber. Perfect!

~~~
sgs1370
Not quite related but I always thought Sheryl Sandberg would be a great CEO of
Uber. Of course, I don't think she would want the job.

------
rayalez
What do you think is going to happen to Tumblr?

Tumblr has a massive audience, but some of the worst tech among the social
media, and now it seems like it might get abandoned completely. So people will
eventually migrate to something else, right?

What can other platforms, like Medium, do about this? If you had a platofrm
that might be valuable for a similar usecase(though, hopefully, much better),
what would you be doing right now? Any ideas or advice?

~~~
skinnymuch
Does it still have a massive audience? I would think it has lost a lot since
Yahoo wrote of 2/3 of its value already.

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ddebernardy
Didn't Microsoft extend a $40+B (however hostile) bid a decade ago or so? I'm
still at a loss as to why Jang et al didn't sell then...

~~~
skinnymuch
Just going to mostly reiterate a previous comment - Jerry Yang, the most
competent higher up at Yahoo for the past decade and a half, is the one who
said no to the buy out. And rightfully so. The Alibaba and Yahoo Japan stakes
would be worth around $80B today if I'm not mistaken. Unfortunately the board
and some activist investors first kicked Jerry out and then continued on with
selling almost half of the Alibaba stake.

------
nadim
1996-2017. Rip. [https://goo.gl/images/WYRMqj](https://goo.gl/images/WYRMqj)

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parantap2001
Question - Can someone explain the $4.5B valuation of Yahoo-Verizon deal
versus the $49.46B Market cap of Yahoo! Inc. ticker on Nasdaq. Thanks.

~~~
syntheticnature
Yahoo owns 15% of Alibaba, due to an investment done a long time ago. Alibaba
is considered to be quite valuable -- so they are spinning off the core of the
company in order to be able to behave more as the investment company they
became, since they couldn't extract the Alibaba shares without paying a
massive amount of capital gains tax on the increase in value.

~~~
csomar
So if someone is doing market cap of Alibaba + Yahoo based on Nasdaq
calculations, he is counting Alibaba twice? (or 15% twice for this one). How
do you calculate the global market cap without falling into this duplication.

~~~
skinnymuch
Oh right. Either I'm not thinking right or I'm also confused now with what
you're saying. I hope someone can respond.

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EternalData
Yahoo thought the media they provided users was important, Google thought user
data was important -- it's possible Mayer tried to bring some of Google to
Yahoo. But I don't think it was enough to bring Yahoo anywhere close to
competing.

------
joering2
For 2 weeks now I'm fighting an enormous amount of spam that start popping up
from nowhere and I did trail-back in my memory to not find a single instance
in last 3 months where I would give out my email address to anyone new.

Its insane how much of it goes to my direct mailbox right in front of my eyes!
Some even have "viagra" word in subjects, they come from weird addresses like
hJGabtmDwbaiaJUsgUNiepwwUzDUUdanBHFpiMEghzLKNsotQTbrhZdpDzCHFWatqQB@perico.hunmooth.com
and open up with images and everything ready for my click.

I suspect Verizon is already working hard on break the remaining thing that
worked fine until now - yahoo mailbox.

But I'm fine with that. I had it in my pipeline to move out of them for so
long now another incentive to actually do so :)

------
fred256
I noticed the YHOO stock ticker is still active. Is that now the empty shell
that still has the Alibaba stake, or something else entirely?

~~~
detaro
Mostly Alibaba stake, and they also still own Yahoo Japan. I guess they might
change their ticker symbol, since they announced a name change to "Altaba"?

------
faragon
Does anyone know any significative achievement made by Mayer in Yahoo?

~~~
darkstar999
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14545456](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14545456)

------
timdellinger
The whole Net Neutrality situation just got more interesting.

------
pvsukale3
"Ye to hona hi tha "

English : this was going to happen anyway

------
michaelfeng
Another empire fall down. Bless!

------
Markoff
does this mean i should stop using Flickr as backup?

------
59bcc3ad677
Wow

------
joeblubaugh
Savvy PR move doing this on the same day the Uber report drops and Jeff
Sessions testifies in the Senate

~~~
mbaha
Why ?

~~~
patrickg_zill
It's a way of hiding/burying information. The info is legally required to be
disclosed, but with so much else going on the news is unlikely to be widely
covered.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
This wouldn't have been widely covered regardless.

Nobody cares about Yahoo! anymore except in niche tech circles. That's why
you're reading this on techcrunch.

------
aerovistae
Whoa! The beginning of the end of the end.

~~~
samstave
When will the end of the beginning begin or end?

------
myrandomcomment
I love how everyone here thinks they can do better. Yahoo was a deadman
walking before she took over. Overall she did what she was suppose to do as a
CEO of any company, return value to the shareholders. Now you can disagree
with that being the goal, but it is the way it works today. By that measure it
worked. Is it the right thing long term, most likely not. We have lost focus
on long term planing in favor of quarterly reporting. It is the world we live
in. Please go can change it, but don't sit here and say you could do better as
I do not see any of you saying you have the job as a CEO of a multi-billion
dollar company.

Oh, I expect this to get down voted to oblivion. Prove me wrong.

~~~
castis
Once more, from the guidelines!

    
    
        Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
    
        Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downvote you or proclaim that you expect to get downvoted.

