How does Marissa Mayer still have a job at this point?
She looked and sounded pretty rough in the CNBC video... beleaguered even. She gave birth to twins just over a month ago though. Between the sleepless nights looking after two newborn babies, having your body put through hell delivering them and having to run a major company like Yahoo, it must be tough to cope with.
A company's problems are not necessarily the fault of the CEO, if the CEO has proven themselves to be competent then firing them when the market acts against the company wouldn't be the right thing to do.
Yahoo is a company like a few others that depend on the uncertain revenue stream of advertising. Apple's revenue streams are often described as being uncertain but they make products that people highly respect. Nobody respects advertising. To base your entire business on a product that most of the world detests and would rather didn't exist at all is risky. On the other hand, it can also be quite a stable income stream if you provide heavily relied-on services and can tie the advertising into them.
Yahoo makes over 80% of their revenue from advertising and they've been trying to make inroads into mobile. Marissa Mayer pointed out that Yahoo didn't have a mobile strategy at all when she started in 2012. The tumblr acquisition was a move to help boost the number of users they could target and she is now able to say they have 600 million monthly active mobile users as a result.
This huge loss that they've recorded this quarter of over $4b is a goodwill impairment so it's not a loss in revenue, their revenue is actually up but they've written down the value of some of their assets that they overvalued before. They still have a $31b stake in Alibaba (it says $39b in their filings but news reports say $31b).
This is an odd situation in that their assets are valued higher than the company. The value of Alibaba and all the other assets comes to $61.7b and liabilities are $22.9b and their market cap is $27.5b. Another company could actually buy them, sell off the Alibaba stake and they'd make a profit on the purchase.
Given that they are heavily invested in advertising, their plan to focus on search, mail and tumblr makes sense. They'll struggle with search because they rely on Bing for the results, they're just acting as a middle-man to Bing. To be better than this, they'd have to take a more curated approach to the web and filter out poor content. Where Google and Bing fall down is in returning meaningful results to complex questions. Yahoo bought that Summly app to extract meaningful parts of news and search engines need to be better at understanding the meaning in a search query. Google does ok but it could be a lot better.
Search engines still have much the same layout they have had for years with the title and text snippet. This just leads to the same tedium of clicking back and forth trying to find the right one. Computers are fast now, there should for example be a way to have a search pull up an exposé-like or multi-tasking layout where you don't just see lists of links but actual cached pages and you can review which ones look good before opening them. The search engine can downrank the ones people move past and allow people to flag spam ones easily.
They don't use unified search boxes either. You shouldn't have to click on maps, images, news, shopping to get these results. Once you type in a query, there can just be a filter dropdown that keeps you in the same page and there's no reason you can't do multiple searches. If you are looking at a location on a map, you should be able to narrow things down like all the restaurants in the map, all the highly rated restaurants, all the hotels, photos of the locations, prices, menus all in the same space without hopping around, which is especially frustrating on mobile devices. Search right now is linear and it could do with being non-linear the way software is.
Tumblr is a good resource for them to use in image searching. Google has a good feature where they find similar images. They can use tumblr as base for this. Search by image is such a useful thing to have but search engines fall down in royalty-free images as well as high quality images. Perhaps Yahoo can find a way to monetize tumblr images where people can mark uploads for sale and people can pay a small amount and uploaders can earn money with Yahoo taking a cut.
I think there's an easy way to do a better job with mail and that is to sell domains. Instead of having people trying to get some generic name that is never available, they'd suggest that people spend a small amount on a domain and let them map names to an internal Yahoo mail account. They can already do this but the free email providers don't push that as the default and it's not easy to setup.
I also think email is underused. Such a big deal is made of things like WhatsApp and iMessage and over the years, people get excited about new features like something being cross-platform, getting image support, video support, emojis. Email has done pretty much all of this before and it's been around for a while now. The biggest problem it has is being hard to setup. Mobile data was an issue but not so much now. Email setup should be a case of downloading an app, signing up a domain name for a unique non-ridiculous id and you get everything from email to instant messaging to media and file sharing to video chat and they can have some integration with social media to let you add messages from the same app.
Until Yahoo delivers something new in their services, they are mostly just an Alibaba shareholder and a middle-man to other services. They are far from being in a bad situation financially but they need to keep Yahoo recognised as a major player in online services and the brand just keeps getting more irrelevant as time goes on.
If any company was to buy them, the best fit would probably be Microsoft but most of the value in Yahoo right now is their Alibaba stake, which they have been trying to spin off without a huge tax bill. If they manage to spin it off, the purchase price for what remains should be a lot more appealing to another company. Microsoft would merge Yahoo search into Bing, Yahoo Mail users into their Outlook service and probably just keep tumblr running, hosted on their own data centers and the Yahoo brand would be dissolved eventually.
How does Marissa Mayer still have a job at this point?
...Until Yahoo delivers something new in their services, they are mostly just an Alibaba shareholder and a middle-man to other services...
This is precisely why they'd be wise to immediately seek a buyer for anything and everything non-Alibaba holdings related. Everything else in their portfolio is a drain on their value.
How about making Yahoo a search engine that rivals Google, you know, like they originally were?
Yahoo is nothing more than a front end for Google search like Bing used to be.
I prefer to use Bing now. It's grown to be a pretty competent search engine. Duck Duck Go ironically got worse when they stopped being a front end for Google search.
Someone NEEDS to build a better search engine because Google's boolean search sucks balls.
How about making Yahoo a search engine that rivals Google, you know, like they originally were?
Yahoo is nothing more than a front end for Google search like Bing used to be.
I prefer to use Bing now. It's grown to be a pretty competent search engine. Duck Duck Go ironically got worse when they stopped being a front end for Google search.
Someone NEEDS to build a better search engine because Google's boolean search sucks balls.
It won't be Yahoo. If Apple continues on the path they're on, there will be less and less need for a search engine anyway.
Ms Mayer did well for the Yahoo stock upon her appointment in 2012, yet to date no substantial new services or businesses have been successful. Alibabab was a mere once in a lifetime stroke of good luck, yet Yahoo has not made any inroraods against Ms Mayer's former company Google. I do not think she was the right person for the job, in fact, Yahoo's fate may have been consigned well before 2012 and no one took notice the company was technically dead. The Yahoo web site is not dynamic or exciting either.
She was the Cat's Meow when she took over in 2012, all look and little substance despite her impressive credentials over at Google, which to no one's surprise, seems to have gotten along quite well without Mayer's proported software genius talents. She did not better than Carley Fiorina did at HP.
True- I remeber those 2008- 2012 Yahoo Blues as well. Yahoo should have given Marissa Mayer a shorter lease on time to do a turn-around and to tie her overly rich compensation package to Yahoo's performance. Funny how CEOs fire their line talent when they are the ones's to blame for sub-par performance.
...Until Yahoo delivers something new in their services, they are mostly just an Alibaba shareholder and a middle-man to other services...
This is precisely why they'd be wise to immediately seek a buyer for anything and everything non-Alibaba holdings related. Everything else in their portfolio is a drain on their value.
It looks like this is what they are considering with their reverse spin-off:
If they move the Alibaba asset, the tax on it could be high but if they move all of Yahoo except the Alibaba stake then it would be a lot lower. Then maybe they switch brands around. That article says it could take up to a year to complete the spinoff.
That move would have to put the overall value up because right now Yahoo itself is valued below zero. With Yahoo assets being a few billion separate from Alibaba, they wouldn't likely value it lower than their assets.
The fact that we don't use Yahoo isn't exactly a failure of Yahoo's, it's just that their "directory" is an anachronism from the time before search engines. How many things have to go wrong in the world for us to go back to that?
It isn't that they were a "directory"; people could ignore that if they wanted to, and it was actually useful to people who wanted it. And as someone said earlier, it had nothing to do with "the mind police" (as the NSA was involved with Yahoo too) or government lobbying. Instead, what happened is that Google created a much better search algorithm than Yahoo, and also designed a much more visually appealing and useful way of presenting the information. The beginning of the end for Yahoo was like over 15 years ago, when you would do a Yahoo search and then "results powered by Google" popped up on the screen; they started paying Google for search results. Except that Google was only giving them raw search data; Google did not provide the contextual information and other tools to process the data to rank the results. So even though Google was powering the search, searching for the exact same thing on Google performed better results than for Yahoo. And again - Google's search page result construction was far superior, making it easier to read and analyze. Then Yahoo bought the remains of Alta Vista and several other failed search engines, used their tools to come up with a way of powering their own results so they could stop paying - and providing free advertising to - Google, but it was too late. And when Microsoft entered the search engine game, even though Microsoft never actually turned a profit with Bing, the increased competition - especially since Microsoft also created their own directory/portal MSN.com in addition to the search engine - they were unable to compete with the third major player.
And that is just desktop. Not only did Yahoo fail to join Google and Microsoft in creating their own mobile OS, but they were very late creating a mobile presence. When they finally did deliver mobile apps, they were very terrible and limited. To this day, Yahoo's mobile offerings are far behind that of Microsoft and Google. Yahoo should have been in the perfect position to benefit from mobile. Where Google and Microsoft were competing with each other - and Apple - with their own mobile OS and devices. They should have been in the best position to be able to work out deals to get their apps and services featured on other operating systems because they were the only one without a system of their own to create conflict of interest. They didn't. Also, becoming a cloud company? Trying to offer enterprise products? They didn't even try.
Yahoo's main problem is that they tried to transition from being a tech company into being a media company. Remember: they bought Time Warner. Their big thing was providing news and entertainment content because that was what most people searched for. Their goal was essentially to replace network and cable television and also replace the newspaper and the magazine. There were problems with that. First, they got into and tried to redefine media right when the value of media began to decline. Buying Time Warner was the equivalent of buying a horse buggy company right before the invention of the automobile. Second, the technology wasn't there yet. This was before actual broadband Internet, and it was even before video sharing/search sites like YouTube. And no, Yahoo didn't do squat to develop the tech that they needed. Third: they were REALLY BAD at being a media company anyway, so even if media were still a valuable growing area and the tech was there, they would have still failed.
Contrast Yahoo with the companies that survived: Google and Amazon. Instead of trying to transition from being a tech company to being a media company, Google and Amazon increased their tech expertise. They started offering cloud products, enterprise solutions, operating systems (well Google anyway) ... they even started selling hardware. Google and Amazon survived - and got stronger - by becoming more like Microsoft and Oracle instead of trying to be the Disney of the Internet.
As for Marissa Meyer: she made it worse. Sorry, but a lot of people always did say that she was just a photogenic personality to market Facebook, and based on her leadership of Yahoo, they were right. And no, her being a woman does not make saying this sexist. Meyer came on board and just did everything that Yahoo was failing at before, except did it worse. Instead of hiring a bunch of developers to create mobile apps - or even an OS to compete with Android and Chrome OS - she brings in a bunch of journalists and writers to create content. Instead of creating a presence in the cloud for their own products and to sell to consumers and enterprises, she hires Katie Couric to be a "global news anchor" to upload video newscasts. She buys Tumblr because she wanted to get Yahoo into social networking, but there is no real way to turn Tumblr into a major revenue source. She had none of the tech knowledge required to transform Yahoo into a company that could actually compete with Google, Facebook and Microsoft. Her business skills were terrible and she also had no real expertise in the content and media directions that she had Yahoo invest so much in. Paying the NFL to live stream games over the Internet? Verizon was doing that already, and with much better tech. Trying to compete with Netflix and Amazon by running the last season of the very low rated "Community", a show only liked by TV critics?
Yahoo could have been saved. It is just that Meyer was the wrong one to save it. Do any of you doubt that Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Hugo Barra etc. - people who actually know something about tech and have management ability - would have been able to save Yahoo?
bulldogs said: Yahoo's main problem is that they tried to transition from being a tech company into being a media company. Remember: they bought Time Warner.
I think you are confused. AOL merged with TW, it was not Yahoo.
What ticks me off is that Mayer is the one that screwed up Flickr, and now they've announced that they're going to reduce their investment in it. Just spin it off and let someone who knows what they're doing fix it.
Apple.
Aren't most of Flickr users posting pics from iPhone? iPhone was the most popular Flickr camera last I checked.
I think Apple can use a social pic site and they'd have a head start with Flickr. Hell just make the entire site an Apple commercial so the few photographers left using non-iPhones will be pressured to buy one.
Have a "Shot on iPhone" section that updates to the latest iPhone after release with hand picked photos. Give it more of an Apple aesthetic, integrate into iOS/tvOS/OS X and allow Facebook/Twitter integration since it doesn't compete directly. Give iCloud users an extra 2GB of photo storage if they sign up.
Sadly thanks to the resolving CEO door at Yahoo (from Hollywood types to engineers) they lost focus and soul - allowing the Mind Police beginning with G to clean up and create a unmatched monopoly (with a little governmental lobbying help). When Mayer's went UPPER case and used a crappy optima style font, the game was up and the last dying murmurs of a great brand where exhaled.
Comments
A company's problems are not necessarily the fault of the CEO, if the CEO has proven themselves to be competent then firing them when the market acts against the company wouldn't be the right thing to do.
Yahoo is a company like a few others that depend on the uncertain revenue stream of advertising. Apple's revenue streams are often described as being uncertain but they make products that people highly respect. Nobody respects advertising. To base your entire business on a product that most of the world detests and would rather didn't exist at all is risky. On the other hand, it can also be quite a stable income stream if you provide heavily relied-on services and can tie the advertising into them.
Yahoo makes over 80% of their revenue from advertising and they've been trying to make inroads into mobile. Marissa Mayer pointed out that Yahoo didn't have a mobile strategy at all when she started in 2012. The tumblr acquisition was a move to help boost the number of users they could target and she is now able to say they have 600 million monthly active mobile users as a result.
This huge loss that they've recorded this quarter of over $4b is a goodwill impairment so it's not a loss in revenue, their revenue is actually up but they've written down the value of some of their assets that they overvalued before. They still have a $31b stake in Alibaba (it says $39b in their filings but news reports say $31b).
This is an odd situation in that their assets are valued higher than the company. The value of Alibaba and all the other assets comes to $61.7b and liabilities are $22.9b and their market cap is $27.5b. Another company could actually buy them, sell off the Alibaba stake and they'd make a profit on the purchase.
Given that they are heavily invested in advertising, their plan to focus on search, mail and tumblr makes sense. They'll struggle with search because they rely on Bing for the results, they're just acting as a middle-man to Bing. To be better than this, they'd have to take a more curated approach to the web and filter out poor content. Where Google and Bing fall down is in returning meaningful results to complex questions. Yahoo bought that Summly app to extract meaningful parts of news and search engines need to be better at understanding the meaning in a search query. Google does ok but it could be a lot better.
Search engines still have much the same layout they have had for years with the title and text snippet. This just leads to the same tedium of clicking back and forth trying to find the right one. Computers are fast now, there should for example be a way to have a search pull up an exposé-like or multi-tasking layout where you don't just see lists of links but actual cached pages and you can review which ones look good before opening them. The search engine can downrank the ones people move past and allow people to flag spam ones easily.
They don't use unified search boxes either. You shouldn't have to click on maps, images, news, shopping to get these results. Once you type in a query, there can just be a filter dropdown that keeps you in the same page and there's no reason you can't do multiple searches. If you are looking at a location on a map, you should be able to narrow things down like all the restaurants in the map, all the highly rated restaurants, all the hotels, photos of the locations, prices, menus all in the same space without hopping around, which is especially frustrating on mobile devices. Search right now is linear and it could do with being non-linear the way software is.
Tumblr is a good resource for them to use in image searching. Google has a good feature where they find similar images. They can use tumblr as base for this. Search by image is such a useful thing to have but search engines fall down in royalty-free images as well as high quality images. Perhaps Yahoo can find a way to monetize tumblr images where people can mark uploads for sale and people can pay a small amount and uploaders can earn money with Yahoo taking a cut.
I think there's an easy way to do a better job with mail and that is to sell domains. Instead of having people trying to get some generic name that is never available, they'd suggest that people spend a small amount on a domain and let them map names to an internal Yahoo mail account. They can already do this but the free email providers don't push that as the default and it's not easy to setup.
I also think email is underused. Such a big deal is made of things like WhatsApp and iMessage and over the years, people get excited about new features like something being cross-platform, getting image support, video support, emojis. Email has done pretty much all of this before and it's been around for a while now. The biggest problem it has is being hard to setup. Mobile data was an issue but not so much now. Email setup should be a case of downloading an app, signing up a domain name for a unique non-ridiculous id and you get everything from email to instant messaging to media and file sharing to video chat and they can have some integration with social media to let you add messages from the same app.
Until Yahoo delivers something new in their services, they are mostly just an Alibaba shareholder and a middle-man to other services. They are far from being in a bad situation financially but they need to keep Yahoo recognised as a major player in online services and the brand just keeps getting more irrelevant as time goes on.
If any company was to buy them, the best fit would probably be Microsoft but most of the value in Yahoo right now is their Alibaba stake, which they have been trying to spin off without a huge tax bill. If they manage to spin it off, the purchase price for what remains should be a lot more appealing to another company. Microsoft would merge Yahoo search into Bing, Yahoo Mail users into their Outlook service and probably just keep tumblr running, hosted on their own data centers and the Yahoo brand would be dissolved eventually.
http://recode.net/2015/12/09/reverse-reverse-yahoo-will-spin-off-yahoo-not-its-alibaba-stake/
If they move the Alibaba asset, the tax on it could be high but if they move all of Yahoo except the Alibaba stake then it would be a lot lower. Then maybe they switch brands around. That article says it could take up to a year to complete the spinoff.
That move would have to put the overall value up because right now Yahoo itself is valued below zero. With Yahoo assets being a few billion separate from Alibaba, they wouldn't likely value it lower than their assets.
And that is just desktop. Not only did Yahoo fail to join Google and Microsoft in creating their own mobile OS, but they were very late creating a mobile presence. When they finally did deliver mobile apps, they were very terrible and limited. To this day, Yahoo's mobile offerings are far behind that of Microsoft and Google. Yahoo should have been in the perfect position to benefit from mobile. Where Google and Microsoft were competing with each other - and Apple - with their own mobile OS and devices. They should have been in the best position to be able to work out deals to get their apps and services featured on other operating systems because they were the only one without a system of their own to create conflict of interest. They didn't. Also, becoming a cloud company? Trying to offer enterprise products? They didn't even try.
Yahoo's main problem is that they tried to transition from being a tech company into being a media company. Remember: they bought Time Warner. Their big thing was providing news and entertainment content because that was what most people searched for. Their goal was essentially to replace network and cable television and also replace the newspaper and the magazine. There were problems with that. First, they got into and tried to redefine media right when the value of media began to decline. Buying Time Warner was the equivalent of buying a horse buggy company right before the invention of the automobile. Second, the technology wasn't there yet. This was before actual broadband Internet, and it was even before video sharing/search sites like YouTube. And no, Yahoo didn't do squat to develop the tech that they needed. Third: they were REALLY BAD at being a media company anyway, so even if media were still a valuable growing area and the tech was there, they would have still failed.
Contrast Yahoo with the companies that survived: Google and Amazon. Instead of trying to transition from being a tech company to being a media company, Google and Amazon increased their tech expertise. They started offering cloud products, enterprise solutions, operating systems (well Google anyway) ... they even started selling hardware. Google and Amazon survived - and got stronger - by becoming more like Microsoft and Oracle instead of trying to be the Disney of the Internet.
As for Marissa Meyer: she made it worse. Sorry, but a lot of people always did say that she was just a photogenic personality to market Facebook, and based on her leadership of Yahoo, they were right. And no, her being a woman does not make saying this sexist. Meyer came on board and just did everything that Yahoo was failing at before, except did it worse. Instead of hiring a bunch of developers to create mobile apps - or even an OS to compete with Android and Chrome OS - she brings in a bunch of journalists and writers to create content. Instead of creating a presence in the cloud for their own products and to sell to consumers and enterprises, she hires Katie Couric to be a "global news anchor" to upload video newscasts. She buys Tumblr because she wanted to get Yahoo into social networking, but there is no real way to turn Tumblr into a major revenue source. She had none of the tech knowledge required to transform Yahoo into a company that could actually compete with Google, Facebook and Microsoft. Her business skills were terrible and she also had no real expertise in the content and media directions that she had Yahoo invest so much in. Paying the NFL to live stream games over the Internet? Verizon was doing that already, and with much better tech. Trying to compete with Netflix and Amazon by running the last season of the very low rated "Community", a show only liked by TV critics?
Yahoo could have been saved. It is just that Meyer was the wrong one to save it. Do any of you doubt that Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Hugo Barra etc. - people who actually know something about tech and have management ability - would have been able to save Yahoo?
Next up, Senate run.
Aren't most of Flickr users posting pics from iPhone? iPhone was the most popular Flickr camera last I checked.
I think Apple can use a social pic site and they'd have a head start with Flickr. Hell just make the entire site an Apple commercial so the few photographers left using non-iPhones will be pressured to buy one.
Have a "Shot on iPhone" section that updates to the latest iPhone after release with hand picked photos. Give it more of an Apple aesthetic, integrate into iOS/tvOS/OS X and allow Facebook/Twitter integration since it doesn't compete directly. Give iCloud users an extra 2GB of photo storage if they sign up.