Maybe instead of beating up on MM, we could look at Yahoo the way we look at Twitter: Yahoo could be great if the world would let Yahoo be Yahoo.
But Yahoo being Yahoo would be a smaller company, with smaller, focused business, and happy customers. But it would have a smaller market cap, and today’s investors would take a massive haircut. So they keep plowing ahead trying to be a tech giant.
Because they bought tech giant shares, and it’s tech giant, or collapse until it’s sold for scrap. And MM has to parrot the “this is the road back to being a tech giant” line to keep the illusion alive.
I’m not sure that anyone can do any better given the “tech giant or nothing” circumstances.
Yahoo being Yahoo means Yahoo driving revenue via bundling spyware, plus a dying fantasy sports site.
The Sun/Oracle Java JRE, Firefox, etc, Yahoo hasn't made money from anything other than tricking low-sophistication users into making Yahoo their home page by installing toolbars and changing browser settings, and they do this by paying to have installers of unrelated but necessary applications do the dirty work. This is all they have had as a business model for 10 years.
Yahoo should die, it's a scammy company surviving by doing things that would lead us to condemn anyone without the pedigreed name. They had dreams that the scammy stuff was just a way to keep the lights on while they restart their search efforts, or their technology driven products, but that's all just a dream, this company has been dead on the inside for 10 years.
I think that is pretty true, and since most think Yahoo! has negative value relative to their Alibaba stake, it would be interesting if they simply sold their Alibaba stake and used the proceeds to buyout the stock holders and took the remains of Yahoo! private. That would give them the breathing room to re-imagine what they could be, just as Dell has.
I personally think that the other parts of Yahoo have negative value because they're part of Yahoo. If Mayer took a holding company approach, they could each spin out, IPO with 49% of their respective shares and suddenly be valued at something much larger. Overnight Yahoo (the holding company) would increase and raise cash purely through this change in organizational fiction.
I think that's true of the perception of yahoo among techies.
Among common users I don't know, but I suspect it's something like AOL.
re-imagining what yahoo could be would probably be a waste of resources, because I think the name has basically negative connotations as being either old, not useful, or just malignant in relation to its users.
I actually thought MM had the right idea at first re: Yahoo! being a low-brow web entertainment portal. At one time Gweneth Paltrow was going to have her own lifestyle blog/website on Yahoo!. Even though anybody reading this comment or anyone we're close with probably wouldn't be interested in that there's a large number of US consumers who would be.
Either because of a personal bias or something else (we'll probably never know) she pulled a 180 and did things like buying the rights to every season of SNL (which was a favorite of her's growing up) and poached Katie Couric to run their news desk.
Having said all that, I don't know if I would anything different myself: If I'm bringing a tech giant back from the grave, I want to make it "sexy" again. I want the glory that comes with that. I don't want my company to be a mouthpiece for celebrities' personal brands
Nice insight. Seems like there's a pattern here, in which high public visibility creates expectations which push a company out of its optimal mode of operation.
Much has been made about how the financialization of our economy is wrecking the public sector. But it seems like similarly, the credo of "the investor is always right" and "the board is law" is also harming the private sector.
This happens all the time when VCs fund companies that they had better stay away from. That said, Yahoo! had potential at the time and actually was a giant (the #1 website in the world for a very long time).
Agree that beating up on MM serves no purpose. But what are you saying? They should slim down in every business sense of the word and focus on X. What is X?
That’s a great conversation to have. “Given that trying to be massive isn’t going to work no matter who’s in charge, is there something smaller that would actually be a great company? If so, what could it be?”
> Because they bought tech giant shares, and it’s tech giant, or collapse until it’s sold for scrap.
I was under the impression that investors essentially treated Yahoo as a proxy for Alibaba due to their holdings. I'm curious how much investors value Yahoo itself these days.
At one point Yahoo all together was worth less than the combined value of Yahoo Japan and Alibaba. So in those days Yahoo itself was valued as a net liability, I don't know today.
But Yahoo being Yahoo would be a smaller company, with smaller, focused business, and happy customers. But it would have a smaller market cap, and today’s investors would take a massive haircut. So they keep plowing ahead trying to be a tech giant.
Because they bought tech giant shares, and it’s tech giant, or collapse until it’s sold for scrap. And MM has to parrot the “this is the road back to being a tech giant” line to keep the illusion alive.
I’m not sure that anyone can do any better given the “tech giant or nothing” circumstances.