Daily fantasy has very annoying pop up on Yahoo! Sports. Also, I guess daily fantasy product resulted in killing of NCAAF and NFL picks against Yahoo! Experts and Yahoo! Users. The Picks link goes to message "something went wrong, we are working on it" page now for several weeks. Instead it Should be 404 and Picks link removed.
don't know why this is broken, but I'll file a bug. thank you! One of these days, I'm going to run a bot that crawls all pages on yahoo.com and reports non-200 responses...
Or let users help you identify such pages. Instead of showing a vague message that indicates temporary failure due to time out, show the 404 with option to report the broken link.
I miss picks because that's how I kept track performance of results from my own algos and compare with supposedly experts and crowds.
I'd run it across the entire site. Sure, we do have logs, but it's not easy to access them for all *.yahoo.com. Logs from each property are ingested into different places. The infrastructure is way more complex than it should be making bare-minimum monitoring like alerts on non-200 responses on all properties difficult to maintain.
Each property has their logs ingested, indexed, and archived differently. I only have access to my little arm of the company infrastructure. Logs should be monitored properly by the responsible owners of each property (or in a more sensible way), but unfortunately this is not the case... :)
I see a lot of parallels between Marissa Mayer's tenure at Yahoo and Dick Costolo's tenure at Twitter. Dick left two quarters ago and Twitter is still struggling to meet investor expectations.
I have a feeling that there are structural problems at Yahoo, like Twitter, that even a unicorn CEO would have difficulty fixing. A lot of analysts and investors seem very leadership oriented in their blame anyway.
There's a strong cult of personality around our industry, in general. The belief that a special CEO can make a billion dollar company. It ignores the role of luck, the other employees (sometimes there are thousands of employees, as in the case of Yahoo!, and every single one of them can make or break the company in small ways every day), changes in the market, etc.
Steve Jobs is the epitome of the Magic CEO archetype, in this school of thought, and yet, he founded expensive failures, too, and almost rode Apple into the ground, to boot.
There are so many variables that it seems harmful to the industry and the world as a whole to place so much value and so much blame on CEOs when things go right or wrong.
All that said, I'd like to see an experiment where a CEO steps in, cuts C-level salaries dramatically (taking the hit from people leaving who care more about the million dollar bonus than the company itself), including their own, and re-directing that money to higher wages for employees and deeper, further ranging, research and development. Kinda replicate the history of HP, in reverse: Start with high executive salaries, awful outdated products, and defeated company morale, and start building a culture that looks toward the future, takes care of everyone in the company (before C-levels get bonuses) and treats them all with respect from top to bottom, and build products that define the market not follow it.
But, I've never built or run a billion dollar company. I might be an idiot that no one should ever listen to.
I wouldn't call NeXT an expensive failure, especially seeing how it laid the framework for Apple's current success. It is hard to say what would have happened if Steve Jobs stayed at Apple in the 80s....he was never actually CEO before 1997 (see http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/08/25/a-look-at-apples-ceos...).
Still too complicated of a story and too much tied up with time and place and team for it to be "Steve Jobs did this". And, there were many points during his story where he was catching more flack than Marissa Mayer has ever had directed her way, and probably ever will get. Kinda reinforces my point that CEOs get too much credit and too much blame.
But, you're right, I guess. Steve Jobs' life is a long story arc that ends in massive success, with many smaller successes and failures along the path. In all cases, the credit and blame should (in a just world) be distributed a bit more widely than it is. Apple without Wozniak (or any of the several dozen other superstar engineers that Apple attracted in the early years) would not have become Apple.
But NeXT was a big failure commercially. And the software light at the end of the tunnel in 1996 was WebObjects, not OpenStep. If Apple hadn't bought them, they'd have eventually been reduced to WebObjects, Inc, in all but name.
Steve would have destroyed Apple completely had he been CEO prior to his experiences running NeXT and Pixar. He almost did anyway -- read up on the stories about how he treated the Apple II division -- the only part of the company that made money up until after the point Steve had left.
Jack was just named CEO on October 5th, it will still be a little bit before we see how the Street reacts. The next quarterly earnings should be telling.
Yes, but you don't go around making big changes when you're in a temp position. Once he was the real CEO he had free reign to execute a new plan and has shown steps that he's doing that (Moments launched literally the next day!).
"Ms. Mayer called a meeting with senior executives in August and asked them to sign a written agreement to stay with the company for at least three more years, according to two people familiar with the meeting."
Is such an agreement enforceable? Or is this some meaningless pledge?
If you want people to stay, give them a decent financial incentive.
You'd assume that if a CEO were asking you to sign such an agreement, they would offer some sort of incentive in return. Otherwise it seems more like an ultimatum for you to declare your loyalty.
Actually, contractually that gets really interesting.
Basically, for a contract to be valid both sides have to give something, this is referred to as "consideration".
Now, normally, with work-related contracts the consideration is "continuing to employ you", but with senior mgmt (golden parachutes, stock options, etc) I bet the waters are murky.
From what I recall "continuing to employ you" is not legally acceptable consideration, because you had the job before the contract, and therefore you are not getting anything new. If it involves a pay raise, promotion, a bonus, etc, then it can be acceptable.
Continued employment is sufficient consideration for some contracts http://www.jacksonlewis.com/publication/continued-employment.... However, I can't imagine that if Yahoo was so desperate to retain its executives that it would fire them if they didn't sign the agreement. I'm guessing that there was some additional incentive offered.
If you want people to stay, give them a decent financial incentive.
I keep seeing this sentiment, but I think it's important to distinguish between "don't give your people worthless equity instead of a good salary" and "I'm just here for the money." Starting to see a lot of the latter around here and it's disheartening. Sure, broken dreams and failed visions and all of that happens, but it's part of the process when you try to do "big" things. Widespread cynicism will kill high-tech.
> "I'm just here for the money"...it's disheartening
Yaa, how awful...because my landlord accepts a share of my company CEO's "vision", as does my grocer
> Widespread cynicism will kill high-tech
What a laugh that the heirs, the LP's, the VC's and seeds and angels aren't the cynics, your unhappiness is the twenty-something wage slaves slaving away at all hours building products are now disheartening, because they're buying the BS less and want to keep more of the wealth they're creating.
The heirs and LP's are not "here" for the money. They're in their yachts at Key West, and they have their bets spread.
Woe is us, how disheartening that the people creating the wealth want to keep more of the wealth they create, as opposed to believing the fairy tales the idle class and their myrmidions are telling them.
You're fighting a strawman my friend. I explicitly stated that I was not talking about inequitable distribution of capital in a podunk startup. Indeed, in the context of this, the executives that Mayer would be seeking to incentivize with cash are already in the upper stratosphere of ownership - so given that as a background my slant should have been clear.
Those people, including Mayer herself, are in it for the money and the power/glamour/fame. Look at Mayer -- a Google bigshot who has power over thousands of people at Google, who left because she felt overshadowed by the CEO. She went to Yahoo not because she wanted to do more/bigger/better things -- she could do anything she wanted at Google! -- but because she wanted to be CEO of something.
I like that you are saying people in their 20s making 6 figures are wage slaves. That is a worldview I never really even considered, so you have opened my mind to new possibilities.
making 6 figures can provide a comfortable life but yes definitely a wage slave.
I have worked for a few of the super rich and they could easily blow a few million just trying to watch their sporting team while on their yacht. Although this is in the past when they would have a private jet on standby to fly in a copy of the game. Now sat comms are good enough they blow similar amounts without any thought on other things.
There is nothing wrong with being at work just for the money, and it most definitely does not mean you are cynical. Funding a family or a hobby is a rewarding and valuable life to live. Being in it for the money can be a really powerful way to push through a lot of hard and boring work that nobody capable of doing could possibly be passionate about.
I think that is globally true, largely because for the vast majority of people that is the best that they can hope for given their station.
I however am restricting my evaluation to the domain [high-tech] : [startup], which after all is the core demographic for HN and YC more broadly.
In that context I don't think it's an optimal outlook - and in fact I think it is detrimental to the zeitgeist and pushes further away from the PARC roots of paradigm setting technology development.
I grant that in the current environment it's "idealistic" but I think at the core, the real innovators still have the vision of changing the future through technology - at least I do, and I know I'm not alone in that.
They're called retention bonuses. Similar to signing bonuses, you can be contractually obligated to pay them back if you don't stay for the term of the contract.
Most companies will keep retention bonuses very hush-hush.
It's not enforceable. In the US, you can't enforce an employment contract if it involves forcing someone to work for you. This was partially legislated as a legal defense against indentured servitude.
You can't get "specific performance," where the court physically forces you to uphold the agreement.
But it is enforceable in that Yahoo could sue for damages. The damages probably wouldn't be all that high though. It is more of an issue when the employment is something unique. Like a start athlete or movie star. You can't just find another person to play Tony Stark in Iron Man 4. But there are plenty of people who can be a Yahoo executive, relatively speaking.
You can certainly be forced to pay back a bonus you received by agreeing to work for the company for a certain amount of time.
All I'm saying is that a court can't make you work for any company, even if you sign a super-official-sounding document saying "I'll work for this company for ___ years".
> In the US, you can't enforce an employment contract if it involves forcing someone to work for you.
Well kind of. Technically you can't force them to work, but you can force them to pay someone else to work in their place. Most teachers have this kind of contract. They are not at will employees. They can't be fired during the school year and they can't leave either. If they don't show up to work, they have to pay the school back for the part of their contract they did not fulfill to pay for the substitute teacher. (This has nothing to do with tenure, BTW, it's true for tenured and untenured teachers alike).
Driven people want purpose and to be part of a team thats making an impact.
It's toxic to demand written agreement to stay. The request itself says "Things are so bad that nobody wants to be here. Maybe if we all sign this paper, then at least we're all in the same boat".
(Side note: money is among the least effective incentive. Waiting for a large incentive payout just makes the time more miserable.)
A standard vesting schedule is basically what is described there. An agreement to stay with the company and if you break it, you don't get your options/stock.
I would imagine that recruiting is harder for Yahoo than retention. It must be very difficult for them to attract good people, at all levels of the organization.
Talk about a gun to your head. If they don't, I can only assume they are short-listed under the "Not Loyal" column. Definitely curious about what sort of carrot/stick might be attached to such an agreement to make it even worth attempting that tactic.
_If you want people to stay, give them a decent financial incentive._
Nah. That doesn't work (assuming you're already paying well). Best people will consider this a sign of desperation and leave, and bottom of the barrel will stick around for stuff to vest. Fail/fail.
If you turn this idea around and employees (especially engineers) insisted that companies guaranteed employment for three years and give it in writing, there would be gasps of horror.
Couldn't read the article because it appears to be behind a paywall.
On the topic of Marissa Mayer though, has any analysis been done that's an overview of Meyer's major decisions/actions? I seem to see pieces come out almost monthly on things she's been doing at Yahoo, but as someone who doesn't follow executive movers and shakers too much, I don't want to come to an early judgement without fully understanding what her impact is.
That said, I can't help but feel that many of her early "successes" were coincidental and overly hyped, mostly as a result of Yahoo's fortunate investment in Alibaba. If I were currently seeking employment I would be extremely dubious towards anyone trying to convince me that Yahoo isn't still running on fumes, despite all the hype.
Even better, just for this sort of thing there is a link called "web" at the top of the page that links to Google with the title. It's in the same line as flag.
Sometimes, well it actually happens quite often, a company just runs its course and is better off just winding things up and closing shop.
IMHO it looks like the likely end game for Yahoo is:
- taken private by a Private Equity firm
- divest Yahoo Japan and Alibaba
- any divisions that aren't making an actual profit, (tumblr, flickr, fantasy sports, etc, will be shopped around and sold if possible, or shuttered if not possible.
- search, email and the yahoo front page will be sold to Microsoft
Yahoo has done everything by the MBA book to turn around the company, they are at the step of brining in Mckinsley consultants, never a terribly good sign.
Sometimes, time just passes a company by and you can't do much to turn it around, its not the leadership's fault or the engineers fault. The market just says the company is no longer needed.
This doesn't mean the company is un profitable. Corel was a company in the early 2000's that went this route. A company can circle the drain, making slightly less and less profit each year, slowly laying off people which causes them to miss their next quarter, which necessitates more layoffs and the circle continues until someone buys them out.
I think this is the likely fate of Yahoo.
The next step is to engage an investment bank to find them a takeover partner if Silver Lake doesn't want to be the one to take them private.
What other possible route is there?
They've brought in 4-5 CEO's each with their own vision of what yahoo should be and all of them has failed to turn the company around.
What is Yahoo's area of expertise that they make money at and can do better that Google, Microsoft, Facebook or Amazon?
Yahoo is textbook example of failure of online "advertising revenue" only company. Most such companies failed in last dot bomb. Only Yahoo survived because it was the largest with decent cash reserves. I am sure another dot bomb like event will take out today's darlings too.
Having watched way too much "House of Lies" where consultants often seem to be brought in to back-up the viewpoint of a given executive and make the case for whatever that person's agenda is...what would such consultants likely be doing in this case in "the real world?"
I admittedly haven't had the experience of working with any consultants, so I'm curious for opinions from those who have what happens when they come in during a "typical" engagement of this nature.
I spent a few years as a management consultant. Consultants are almost never hired to provide truly objective analysis. In most cases, they're hired to "back-up the viewpoint of a given executive". This is done by the executive to hedge the political risk required to go through with their action. They can point to McK when they defend their strategy to the board and then throw them under the bus if things don't pan out.
The rewards for the consultant are high fees and living a luxe lifestyle of staying at high end hotels, traveling first class, and dining at michelin starred restaurants (all of course on the client's dime). Plus of course guaranteed future work. Even if the project tanks and the executive is fired, they'll be sure to hire McK again at their next gig.
What most people don't realize is that consulting engagements are a careful collaboration between consultant and client. The findings are almost always driven by an iterative process where you go through review cycles with the buyer until you reach your "objective" conclusions, which by the very nature of how the work is performed, is totally subjective and biased. Doubly so for turnaround projects like this one. (not to mention that consultants are constantly trying to recycle previously performed analysis, regardless if it at all fits or applies in the target project).
Management consultant is the biggest circlejerk profession. Even moreso IMO than ibanking. Classic self-serving MBA type job. Management consultants are to entrepreneurs what food critics are to chefs.
Yap pretty much. Remember reading an expose with some examples of how consulting firms would hire fresh grads from Ivy Leagues, and then send them to big companies, for top dollar, (or to other countries like Saudi Arabia) to basically do what you describe -- support the viewpoint of the executive who hired them. Of course all done officially with power point slides, excel spreadsheets and pie charts.
At the top tier firms, the creation of slides, charts, etc is usually outsourced to a back office dedicated to the job. I'm not sure if this is still the case at McK, but this office used to be stationed in the developing world...
Consultants would draw and describe what they wanted, goto bed, and awake to slides, charts in their inbox.
Same thing with models. Most firms have "rockstar excel jockeys" (usually analysts/associates/etc.) that are pimped out to project teams to serve this singular role (making models, building business cases, etc.).
Management consulting, such a surreal profession...
Without being too cynical, there's a lot of truth in that. The one time I worked closely with management consultants, a few were sharp, one or two not so much. At the end, they came to similar conclusions that we had already come to anyway but they sold that analysis to the executives.
>Management consultants are to entrepreneurs what food critics are to chefs.
Eh. Good food critics cut through a lot of trendiness. Of course, a lot of food critics aren't good.
This is also a large part of why the "Ivy League" is perpetuated. Not because the graduates or the education is special, but because it provides a "stamp" that its alumni can give out to clients to give authority to client decisions and absorb heat from cover clients' mistakes.
I wonder why if this is the case that someone hasn’t tried to create a “discount” management consulting service which aims to give management cover, but without all the first class travel and high living. It can’t cost that much to put together a flashy powerpoint presentation.
The high cost is part of the service. "We spared no expense planning this failed initiative and hired the best consultants. What more could we have done?"
That is not part, it is ALL that you are paying for.
What is the difference between McK and Deloitte? One has Harvard grads the other has Cornell grads. The analysis is the same, but one is just wrapped up in a prettier package and more prestige.
Are there not managers looking for cover that don’t care about prestige? I can understand the need for cover when making controversial decisions, but not why it needs to be expensive.
Edit: is there a story I don't know about? I know a reasonable amount about gaming but I guess I'm drawing a blank on a successful Sega pivot. I remember some cool ads when I was a kid, I suppose.
Sega once participated in the video game industry roughly how Nintendo does today, by producing a home console and making first-party titles for it with their established properties like Sonic the Hedgehog. Sega's consoles definitely have fans, but the company was losing money and Sega did not produce another console after the Dreamcast. Today, they do perfectly fine for themselves by making games as a third-party developer and operating other assorted media ventures like merchandising for anime. They're also a major producer of arcade games.
Sega has been around quite a while but probably referring to when it discontinued console development and shifted gears to creating games for third-party platforms.
Not the person you are replying to, but I think they are referencing how SEGA ditched home consoles and is now all software and arcades. From what I have heard they are doing extremely well with arcade machines, especially in Japan. I know they make the popular UFO crane game machines.
i completely agree - its not Marissa fault either - steve jobs couldnt have turned that company around. they probably make a lot of money of fantasy sports though - that would be a lucrative brand to acquire; presumably tumblr is worth money also
It depends on who is trying to resurrect it: Marissa Meyer or Steve Jobs. Imagine a reality show: Jobs or Musk in 2010 were tasked to turn Yahoo around, and the rules were that they would only have access to Yahoo's internal resources and cash. I would bet with my money buying Yahoo stock that they would reverse the curves.
Steve Jobs and Elon Musk each had/have a different focus and drive to achieve different goals that probably have little overlap with Yahoo. They might see their best course of action as immediately resigning after taking a survey of the company, and going on to start a different company.
I don't believe that if you just throw enough smart managers at the top of a hierarchy, then eventually it will spit out gold. If anything, that can be problematic.
Yahoo, in its current large size, simply may not have the latitude to pivot to the degree required as a publicly traded company, since anything any CEO attempts will draw the ire of activist shareholders. Any major change becomes a large political endeavor.
Yahoo had one viable product: Yahoo mail. Instead of botching it, in 2010 they had a chance to make the best Android/iOS email/IM client by throwing a lot of weight behind it. The founders of WhatsApp were from Yahoo after all.
Musk is bold and not afraid to invest aggressively. but he goes for easy pickings that are encumbered in conflicting laws, which he mostly ignore. He would curl up and cry at yahoo.
> Jobs or Musk in 2010 were tasked to turn Yahoo around
Assuming either of them was actually given the mandate to do so by the board of directors, etc, I imagine they'd fire like 50-80% of the staff, get rid of anything that's not profitable, and produce one highly refined product at a time, something that hasn't been done well before.
Source: Am both a Jobs and Musk fanboy and have done an unhealthy amount of reading about their histories and decision-making. I particular like this video of Jobs at NeXT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNfRgSlhIW0
Seems not - from Wikipedia "The NeXT computers experienced relatively limited sales, with estimates of about 50,000 units shipped in total" "NeXT withdrew from the hardware business in 1993 "
Along these lines, here's an interesting quote about Steve Jobs' focus from a documentary photographer who had access to NeXT:
"...it seems to me that, in general terms for Steve, he was so passionate about the goal and trying to invent something impossible that everyone had to be on this mission to Mars, and if you weren’t on the mission you didn’t need to be here. It was really a focused approach, so it wasn’t about me or you or hard feelings or anyone. It was about the thing and making the thing better."
"When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact." -- Warren Buffett
I really doubt either Steve Jobs or Elon Musk could turn Yahoo around. With Jobs's Apple turnaround, he had the advantage of sharing (creating, really) Apple's cultural DNA; he didn't need to "turn around" a company, he needed to cut the fat and refocus it so it could do what it was doing a lot better. Elon Musk has never run a turnaround; his companies have certainly encountered difficulties, but it's easier to take a new organization with a strong mission and make it work than to take an old, sclerotic organization in a market that doesn't exist anymore and somehow make it relevant again.
On the flipside, sometimes it seems like we rely on hindsight bias. Would we still be talking about Apple in 2015 if Jobs hadn't come back? Or Tesla if Musk hadn't taken over as CEO in 2007? Both companies had significant uphill battles. And if you had the foresight to imagine Apple in 2015 back in 1997, you're probably a rich man.
Just hypothesizing but imagine if MySpace had focused its industry connections in the music industry to focus more on music instead of social networking, and pushed for an on-demand music streaming player for mobile and desktop. They had millions of dollars in the bank and a head start in the U.S. market over Spotify and Rdio.
Or imagine if Blockbuster video had either taken up Netflix's offer to be bought out or had invested in online streaming long before Netflix.
I'm not saying it's easy or always viable or that luck doesn't play a role, but I often think we discount the potential for a company to still exist today because the only outcome we know of is the outcome that happened rather than the potential of alternate decisions.
Warren Buffett once wrote:
With few exceptions, when a manager with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for poor fundamental economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.
It's not clear to me that Yahoo's business has poor fundamental economics because I don't quite know what business it's in.
It unfortunate she took the reigns of this business. I hoped her talent could pull off something big but Yahoo was really run too hard into the ground for her to have much of an effect. Sad given where it started and the potential it had.
> It's not clear to me that Yahoo's business has poor fundamental economics because I don't quite know what business it's in.
Buying, say, tumblr didn't help with that because it's not like a free blogging engine would appear to be a great money spinner. Suggesting you want to make it less R18 then suggests you didn't look too hard at what people use it for.
Similarly, when flickr has a lot of people who are prepared to pay to host photos spattering ads all over it seems like... a lack of understanding of how it works.
flickr makes me particularly sad. The user authentication fuck up was appalling. The ads were moronic. It only needs a couple of minor tweaks, some of which (like albums for groups) to make itself a Facebook alternative on the side.
Not so sure about this. My understanding is that Steve Jobs would walk around the company and personally fire anyone he believed wasn't doing a valuable job. (EDIT: He didn't hire McKinsey to do this.) He wanted true believers who were adding value ONLY. Not sure that has happened at Yahoo!.
Second, Steve Jobs focused the company around one or two important initiatives at a time. That was probably his greatest value add. He had a phenomenal sense for which projects were the right initiatives. The original Bondi Blue iMac came out pretty quickly after his return -- not quite a year after Steve had been named interim CEO. That's FAST.
Yahoo! needs to be streamlined (remove poisonous/slack elements), focused (one or two key projects ONLY, kill the others) and fast (release the key projects in 2016). They also need to pick the RIGHT projects. To do this, like another commenter said, they need to remember why they love the Internet. Otherwise they're dead.
You can bypass the paywall with this link: http://bit.ly/1XdzZgO (Google search the original URL in quotes in future)
Sounds like she's in a tough spot. You're pretty much forced into a situation of focusing on the good numbers when you're a public company or you'll get beaten up by the shareholders and shorts. So it's difficult to shine sunlight on the bad stuff to disinfect because that's not what public investors want to hear.
Going into search? That's just crazy talk. Google has the space completely wrapped up.
I think Yahoo has some excellent properties like finance.yahoo.com which is amazing and could unlock a deluge of cash with the right biz model. Retail investors visit the site in droves daily. Right now it's an advertising disaster. Prime space taken up by spammy link-baity ads injected into the main center content: "10 most popular fitness models on the planet". And prime spaces on the right taken up by amazon ads. The most targeted ads by etrade, scottrade and ameritrade are the smallest ads on the page with tiny icons on the left. They relaunched yahoo finance in September and sounds like their users hate the new site: https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/315477-finance-dd-3
The WSJ article isn't going to make life at Yahoo any easier unfortunately.
THANK YOU. WSJ is the one site I see regularly linked that has such an intrusive paywall, and I've previously avoided them entirely for this reason. No "10 free articles", no interstitials. Just blocked.
Really? The thing is with stuff like SnapChat, Facebook and Tumblr, I find myself actually using less and less of any web search. The only thing I search for is programming related questions. Nowadays I go directly to Stackoverflow.
it sounds like Google is doubling down on search - a very natural thing for a BigCo to double down on what they already have success in - while missing on "discovery"/"guidance"/"curation".
There's a field where Google has been doing slightly worse as time goes by: questionable search. It's a running joke by now that Bing's video search is much better for searching porn that Youtube. Similarly, searching for "<band> full album mp3 download" on Google is bound to return useless websites. Sometimes the actual results are to be found inside the text of a DMCA takedown notice, meaning that Google has the result, but refuses to show it to you.
And speaking of bad results, some specific terms (such as moving companies) are so full of SEO garbage that there's no way to get a reliable result.
There's definitely room for competition - otherwise, DuckDuckGo would have been out of business by now.
What about search going social. It seems to me that I find a lot of my information on the social media now like Facebook. It just seems like i search a lot less now than i used to. Its not that people search on social media. I get fed information relentlessly and i have little time or energy left to google anything.
Google's lead and "special sauce" seems to be much deeper than that, though. Unless you can think of a way to do better search without AI, how do you compete?
We're not talking about handset A vs. B. The technical and talent lead is much deeper wrt. Google and Machine Learning.
That really depends on what the upheaval is. Apple didn't make a better version of a black berry, it made an iPhone. I think Google is probably safe for a while, but it's hard to see seismic shifts coming.
> They relaunched yahoo finance in September and sounds like their users hate the new site
Wha?? I use it daily for the last 10+ years - I despise it, but for some reason there's nothing better afaik. And it would be so easy to make it so much better, no surprise the company is failing.
I don't think Google has wrapped up the search space but Yahoo's search has been laughable for so long now that they would struggle to take on search under the Yahoo brand.
> But perhaps none of these incidents damaged morale more than Mayer’s reorganization of Yahoo’s product teams. When Mayer launched the effort last fall, everyone agreed the existing structure had outlived its usefulness—for instance, mobile products was partitioned from other groups. But Mayer embarked on the process without laying out a grand vision for it. Instead, she began sketching out different scenarios in one-on-one meetings with various executives, floating one plan by one exec and a different by another. Unable to make up her mind, the process dragged on for months. “She went through 20 different permutations,” says an executive with knowledge of the process. “The product guys were twisting in the wind, not knowing what they were going to run.”
> Product releases slowed to a trickle, and a turf war brewed as executives became concerned with their futures. Jon McCormack, a star executive who had joined Yahoo in January from Amazon and was promised a broad engineering portfolio covering critical areas like mobile, landed in the vacuum created by Mayer’s indecision. He was gone by the end of February and now works for Google. When Mayer announced the new structure in April, it was too late. “That was the beginning of everyone losing faith,” says another senior executive. “That’s when people started to look for other jobs.”
I don't consider being the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company that's still trying to figure out where it fits in the 21st century a job anyone could possibly do, but it seems like Mayer's strategy has been a little all over the place with no real gain in any segment. From the WSJ article:
> As her strategy has shifted, Ms. Mayer has variously cast Yahoo as a challenger to Netflix Inc. in online video content and as a threat to Google Inc. in Web search, but has made little progress toward either goal.
I'm just not sure where she's trying to push Yahoo towards. What is their vision?
There hasn't really been a "focus" at Yahoo in a long while - it feels like the new HP, where almost all the folks who built previously successful businesses within it have moved on, while at the same time the company is too big and integrated to make any meaningful changes or grow new profit centers (given that their cash cow is stalling).
Its corporate stagflation. They are too diversified and have too many products to move quickly, generate almost no enthusiasm between either users (all old guard) or engineers/employees, and there's very little that any executive or employee can do.
See also news this morning that y-mail is blocking users who are running ad-blockers; I'd bet their confidentiality terms are headed for a revision too as the user info fire sale gets underway.
the fact that the SVP of marketing left to join the lowest grade studio Hollywood have is worrisome. so much so I'd think it was a demission and not someone leaving on will...
A genuine question for you. What exactly does Yahoo do? When I think of Google, I think of search. With Amazon, an ecommerce giant for my shopping needs comes to mind. But with Yahoo, nothing comes to mind except all the spams I got when I had their email...
(1) the owner of Flickr, an acquisition they've tried to futz around with, but haven't actually managed to damage too much yet. (True, the site design's become much more heavyweight, but that's a general web design issue) Interestingly, whilst they tried to go ad-only, removing "Pro" accounts, they later reinstated them - but with an oddly tone-deaf press release that trumpeted that account level's availability again, and that rates wouldn't go up for two years. Fair enough, except Pro had been $25/yr, and they quietly noted they'd be $50/yr in the future. Is ad-only revenue that strong to consider dispelling paid accounts?
(2) The original curated web index. Fiendishly difficult to scale, absolutely, but while it lasted, it was remarkably useful. Could such still work? It'd be a tremendous challenge, but, Wikipedia might suggest so - it's not as if Wikipedia is free of dead/changed links, but the footnote links do indeed tend to be useful.
Yet, as I recall, their finances are/were quite robust - we may well simply not be Yahoo's audience.
Effectively it would competing with Reddit, HN, Metafilter, and similar sites where the owners have an army of people curating the web for them, for free. Which makes it a hard ask. Obviously there's a demand because Reddit, HN, MF, etc, exist, but enough to make money off of?
Actually IMHO the curation of Reddit and HN is pretty bad. Just my $0.02. My problem is that it's focused on what's new and relevant. The web sorely needs (IMHO again) really well curated paths that are organized from first principles rather than novelty. But I'm not an expert, just a random guy with an opinion.
they are missing the whole "fuck you, were yahoo, were building the internet" chutzpah which was so charming, and for which we all have a little glowing candlewick in our hearts for.
For example .. I really wanted YUI to be usable .. it was so close.. but they didn't listen when people gave them feedback - eg. telling them to polish the table grid widget, this control was arguably the reason people were even using yui at all.
The internet pluggable data feed pipes thing was promising.. almost there but not quite gelling in the developer group-mind.
They have to hire some really opinionated people and let them loose on skunkworks [ but realworld ] projects .
I look at the yahoo front page once every 3m to see if its still dead.. I check my email there due to nostalgia.
They need to forget about ad revenue bullshit, get fired up and make stuff.
I can guarantee there are great people at yahoo gnawing their arms off because they have nothing to rally around.
They are dying anyway .. its time to hit for the bleachers.
Uh, she faces more than a mere "morale challenge". Her job is impossible. Her company is a gigantic load of bovine excrement with literally no redeeming qualities, products, or domain expertise to build upon. It should have been shut down five years ago and put out of its misery.
Yahoo started as a couple of people who said "This internet thing has a lot of content now, let's try to organize it for people." They should go back to doing that, and throw 20 years worth of technology and cultural growth at the problem. Along with as much manpower and machine learning tech as hundreds of millions of dollars can buy.
I do enjoy the drama of the Mayer Saga, but it doesn't seem like any of Yahoo's attempts at innovation are working. They shouldn't be competing with Google in search. They should be redefining search. Some times the best way to change the game is to go back to basics. Of course if I knew exactly what that looked like, I would be too busy walking the path to wealth to write hn comments. But it does seem like Yahoo isn't doing anything innovative right now. Their most valuable properties, mail and the yahoo home page, are simply good enough versions of products that have become commodities. They began by offering a service that no one else was providing, and have ended up being relegated to being the internet's generic alternative to everything.
It's Hail Mary time. If I were in Mayer's position, I would find a way to burn a few hundred million dollars of the alibaba money on a moon shot before the board had time to vote me out. The odds against may be overwhelming, but it's better than slightly slowing the angular velocity of their circle around the drain. With the recent tone of press articles about her tenure and what that does to an executive's reputation, I don't see what she has to lose.
>But it does seem like Yahoo isn't doing anything innovative right now.
Aren't they starting to stream nfl games for free? The first one they did was from what I heard handled very well. I thought there was talks about more.
With their brand equity, is it possible for them to innovate?
It isnt hip enough to be cool, it's not big enough to be Facebook or google, it's a $30billion company that some how has the branding of the internets AOL. If yahoo "innovates" it will immediately be uncool.
Morale issues definitely can make things more difficult but are things really that dire there? Best thing I can see they've got going for them is the analysts are still foolish enough to rate Amazon as a tech company and not as a Walmart competitor that does some tech; they don't have great ways to classify these companies. It doesnt seem like yahoo is doing foolish things, it might be more of a bellwether for the free everything and monetize the traffic industry.
If Yahoo cares about search, they should acquire DuckDuckGo. Both search engines use Bing on the backend, but the scrappy team at DuckDuckGo has built a much smarter search experience and UI than the entire Yahoo search team. What would be a fair valuation of DuckDuckGo?
Whenever I see a struggling company like this I ask myself the simple question. If the company didn't exist, would there be a need to create it? In the case of Yahoo I think the answer is no. If they disappeared tomorrow there would be no compelling reason for others to try and fill the gap it left behind. Hell, I doubt most people would even noticed they had gone.
So they need to build a new business from the dying ashes of the current revenue. At the moment it does not look like the CEO has any good ideas on how to do that.
I don't think you're doing something wrong but I think you're doing something differently from a Flickr Pro subscriber who is using the site to store curated high quality photos online.
I also have a Yahoo account, but i haven't tried to back it up externally.
Previously their paid product was called Mail Plus, and that was the only way you could get mail out in bulk. But a while ago they made a change. From an article I just found:
What Yahoo does not mention is that Pop3 access
is now available as well. While I cannot say if
it was enabled previously for free users, I know
for a fact that it was limited in the past to
paying Yahoo Mail users.
That doesn't say anything about IMAP, but I know that is also possible nowadays. I think they had to add that feature. E.g. my wife accesses her Yahoo Mail from her iPhone. Without IMAP, how could she get her messages? (Rhetorical question. Rhetorical answer: she couldn't!).
I had such high hopes for 500px when I tried to switch over a year (I even paid upfront before fully testing it). The features just didn't compare to Flickr.
On the other hand, Flickr's admin UI starting to fill up with crap I don't about, like creating mugs and books and shit. Fair enough, they're trying to make money, but that stuff has no place on the main interface.
It's still the easiest place for me to store and share photos, however.
> If the company didn't exist, would there be a need to create it?
Should I guess that you were not adult yet when Yahoo! started?
When Yahoo! was founded, there was a need for WWW site directory, and Yahoo! filled that vacuum. It was the go to place for finding the sites in your area of interest.
Some of the sections of Yahoo! for example: Finance and Sports are still go to places for me and I am sure countless others. I haven't come across any other sites that even come close to those two sections on Yahoo!. Even today, there is no single directory site with curated list of relevant sites, news and information from such sites. So, I will say there is still a need for a Yahoo! like portal with curated information. What Google spits out in search and associated sites is SEO crap. Google has inability to differentiate among 14,777 news articles on a topic and which one is the most relevant and comprehensive.
IMO, Yahoo! need to go back to their roots which was portal of curated information. If they wait too long and the direction FB is heading, they will fill the void left by Yahoo!.
> I haven't come across any other sites that even come close to [sports and finance] on Yahoo!
You haven't been able to find any other sites focusing on finance or sports on the internet? To be clear, yahoo does a decent job curating finance and sports sections, but it is extremely trivial to find sites similar to Yahoo. Here are a few, I found:
Finance:
========
Marketwatch[0], is very similar to yahoo finance. Owned by WSJ and Dow Jones.
Google Finance[1] is like Yahoo! finance, only done by google.
MSN Money[2] almost the exact same thing as Yahoo.
Then you have your more niche honorable mentions like motley fool, seekingalpha, zerohedge, etc.
SPORTS:
=======
Without repeating Google and Microsoft offerings, there is of course:
ESPN which is the second largest sports news provider, also they have a tv network about sports. They sports fairly hard.[3]
Bleecher Report is not to be out sportsed, sort of a hipster pitchfork media type sports player.[4]
CBS Sports[5]
NBC SPorts[6] This, and the preceding offering are large entrenched media rent collectors, which is similar to yahoo, except that they are profitable.
So, in finality, I find that statement absurd, but I am glad you enjoy yahoo. I am rooting for it as it is an under dog for sure.
I was pretty sure someone will make a comment like yours. You didn't disappoint. You want to me to go to 3 different sites for Finance when I can get everything at Yahoo! You want me to go to 4 different sites for Sports when I can get everything at Yahoo! Can you get Bleacher Report articles on ESPN? I will suggest comparing Yahoo! Finance and Sports with the sites you mentioned. You might be surprised that most sites you mentioned feed to Yahoo! and not vice-versa. I can go to all the sites you mentioned or just go to Yahoo!
Each mentioned site is missing something that is available on Yahoo! Either you browse through all the articles on Bleacher Report or you can see the most relevant ones on Yahoo! That is the difference.
Remember the keywords Portal, curated information, relevant information, comprehensive. None of the sites you mentioned are at a level of Yahoo!
I meant each site is as good as yahoo! not that you would have to go to each one, but I don't really care about sports. The finance sites are all drop in replacements and better than yahoo finance.
As for sports, if you want the same information but the caveat you seem hung up on is that it must come from different domains, just go to a reddit like aggregator. I get it, you like yahoo. Yahoo does a good job, and I also like yahoo. My point is it is patently rediculous to claim there is no other space on the internet that is close enough to Yahoo sports or finance.
Companies don't survive being ~10% better than the competition, and the stuff you are talking about sounds like it is moire about habit than anything tangible.
It's also going to get more difficult for Yahoo to differentiate itself as a curator/creator as it gets more difficult to survive on the Internet producing differentiated content.
Within sports, Grantland tried producing content that was different, and died. GigaOM tried focusing on enterprise tech, and died. FiveThirtyEight served policy wonks, and is struggling to attract a meaningful audience. The verdict is out on Vox, but they also may go within 18 months.
Yahoo has tried to solve this problem by hiring 'star names' but it doesn't seem to have moved the needle. People are happy to take the commodity churn article from Bleacher Report.
Oh, and to top all that off, it's unclear that there's really any serious money to be made from online content / eyeballs anyway.
Which is to say that even if they could execute on the 'trusted source of content' business model, it may not be enough to save them anyway.
> The finance sites are all drop in replacements and better than yahoo finance.
I completely disagree with that. I tried for over a year to switch from Yahoo to Google for finance and found it completely lacking, despite the nicer UI. The only site that can match Yahoo finance in my opinion is the Motley Fool. I still use both.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how people actually use the web today. "Portal" is an amazing video game and a 1990's buzzword.
Why would anyone rely on a single "portal" for content? A "portal" like Yahoo(!) was relevant when connections were slow and the potential of the internet was still nascent. That was 20 years ago.
These days, just open a new tab with a new site. Open 10 new tabs with 10 different sites. It's not that complicated.
>You want to me to go to 3 different sites for Finance when I can get everything at Yahoo! You want me to go to 4 different sites for Sports when I can get everything at Yahoo!
What? No. He/she meant that any of those sites can replace Yahoo by themselves, not that all of them are required.
Hands down, Yahoo Finance is a much better site than Marketwatch. I'm picking on Marketwatch since you say that it can replace Yahoo Finance.
Here are a few data points:
Interface - YF has all the three indices information (S&P, Dow and Nasdaq) right in front of you. MW has this in a small box on the right. While this may seem trivial, over a period of time - YF sticks but MW doesn't.
Content - All the content above the fold on YF is related to the markets. If you look at MW , for instance there is an article filling up which airline features you should pay for - totally unrelated to markets and in the main view of the fold. This is not a one time phenomenon, but happens all the time. One of the reasons I stopped using MW.
Quote lookup - The quotes are all on the left and the lookup bar is right below the quotes. Also if you look up a stock and revisit the home page, that information is stored - without requiring you to sign up. SO you can just build a portfolio of stocks without even signing up. (Of course, if you clear your cookies this will be lost). Try doing this on MW - The quote look up bar isn't even obvious ( you have to hit on the search button to make it visible).
I can go on and on about feature comparison but what I'm trying to get at is - Yahoo Finance is one of the most usable sites when it comes to market information for a vast majority of users interested in the markets. They have carried over the same interface to other geographies as well. For example yahoo finance India isn't drastically different from Yahoo Finance US. So it wouldn't be really wise for a company to just abandon that user base.
"When Yahoo! was founded, there was a need for WWW site directory, and Yahoo! filled that vacuum. ... IMO, Yahoo! need to go back to their roots which was portal of curated information."
Yahoo's Directory was shut down December 27, 2014.
What's left of Yahoo does some photo storage, some email, some video streaming, some finance and sports reporting, and some ad serving. They also resell Bing search. All those things are done better by others.
Beat me to it again. ;) Directory was my favorite part of Yahoo. People giving me the links I need in an organized fashion. It was one of the early forms of online serendipity: look for one thing you need or want only to find a bunch of other pieces of info with benefit.
Many forms of it now but I still think Directory could be revived. Maybe exceed the old one with curators for high profile topics plus crowd input. Some hybrid model.
It's highly debatable whether anyone does flickr "better". 500px, for example, have descended to suddenly announcing that they'll give away licenses for the photos you pay them to host and reward you with "exposure".
The "Distribution Network" document, which was updated a month or so ago (https://licensing.500px.com/distribution/) under the "Content publishing partners". Sony, Google/chromcast, and Samsung all have the right to use your material uncompensated.
There is an opt-out box buried away in your preferences, but (in a shitty move) you also have to opt out of selling your images through partners at the same time - you can't disable only uncompensated use.
Product aside, "When Yahoo! was founded", there was a need for high traffic web properties that could scale past a few hundred users. I think we forget about how 10k simultaneous connections was a big freaking deal back then. Yahoo! wasn't just a useful site, it was one of the only usable sites under heavy load.
I think a good idea would be to host an innovation challenge.
They are already bringing in outside consultants from McKinsey, but in this day and age, how about turning to the crowd for help? If they posted significant cash prices (say $1m total) and let their users vote on the best ideas, I bet they could find some fresh directions.
Also bet it would cost a fraction of what they pay McKinsey.
Edit: In fact, why stop there. How about making it a quarterly challenge. With follow-ups on what ideas they decided to work on and progress reports. Make Yahoo the People's company. Just my 2 cents.
Well I can't speak to their internal culture, but if it's either take advice from outside, or go under, maybe management over there needs to re-evaluate its priorities.
Everyone who is there now and especially rose through the ranks at some point stood behind and toed the line that brought them to that point ("Cheered for more desktop ads, agreed and liked the 'Mavens' metric"). Now they'd face a significant cognitive dissonance if they did an about face and said "Yap that was stupid, what were we thinking!?". It just doesn't happen.
It can only happen with new people, so a lot of existing ones have to be pushed out of the door. But new ones take a while to on-board, they are outsiders and so on, they'll face internal resistance in the changes they propose.
It's the downward spiral of doom. They'll start laying off people to save money. The more people they lay off, the less likely good people would want to go work there. The less progress they'll make, so they'll have to lay off more people etc.
If they lay off the right people, it's more likely good people would want to go work there. Those good people would be able to make more progress with less unnecessary pushback from people experiencing cognitive dissonance, and the layoffs would slow and ultimately hiring (of more good people) could pick up.
McKinsey isn't going to get them there. That's a move of a dying company. Marissa Mayer needs to do this herself. If she doesn't know who the right people are to keep versus release, that's a bad sign.
One problem I think with that (at least in principle) is that the people who are already with the company, and (at least hypothetically) have some sort of desire / incentive to see the company succeed, have a particular skillset.
To completely abandon that skillset in order to form fit the company to the most popular idea from the crowd could possibly be disastrous. Perhaps it would work if they made a conscious effort to ensure the idea the crowd proposed aligned well with the skillset / experience the employees already have.
> They are already bringing in outside consultants from McKinsey, but in this day and age, how about turning to the crowd for help? If they posted significant cash prices (say $1m total) and let their users vote on the best ideas, I bet they could find some fresh directions.
It would be fun to watch, but the markets would rightly interpret it as "we have no idea what we're doing".
If I read the article right, it looks like the investors already think that :)
Seriously though, if you use enough buzz-words, like crowd-sourced virtual incubator, or Kickstarter for Innovation, or whatever, I'm sure you could sell the idea to all the stakeholders somehow.
I see, very good. Other options for branding the idea: Yahoo Ventures, Yahoo 20% Time (for internal "ideation"). In fact I'm now convinced it's a good idea!
> They are already bringing in outside consultants from McKinsey
This usually means a the execs need to take a political difficult action (layoffs, etc.) and need the "cover" of a highly paid firm to look like "experts" suggested it to redirect blame away from the execs.
I think that this is definitely the ideal move under different circumstances. But that wouldn't be a viable solution for Yahoo.
Currently, even at its 'dying' state, Yahoo has huge traffic from extremely loyal users who are mostly in the higher income (30+) age range. To dump that out the window would be an incredibly irresponsible business move. It's easy for a small, young company to pivot, but an old giant like Yahoo has to move slowly.
That being said, I think it would be a great move to really accept the growing age and therefore unique needs of this internet company rather than trying to follow new trends. That's truly their strongest leverage material at this point. Can they reinvent how the Internet is used by people over 40?
"Yahoo has huge traffic from extremely loyal users who are mostly in the higher income (30+) age range."
Is that statement a fact? If so, care to substantiate it.
I work for one of the largest companies in the world and we no longer use Yahoo; we use too. Every year in the US, the Superbowl pulls in HUGE dollars in advertisements. I have to plan for this every year and have been doing this for the past 10 years.
Around Superbowl time, we increase our public facing web server presence due to the increase load. It use to be that Yahoo represented more than 50% of the clicks but that is less than 10% as of last year.
I work for a fortune-5 company. We use Akami to help distribute the load. I wish I could publish more info like the data and the company but unfortunately I'm not legally permitted.
I will say this: I doubt Yahoo Ad revenue will return at least from my perspective and what I've seen over the past 7-10 years. More and more of our Ad refs come from youtube.
Some companies have onerous restrictions on employees using their names in public, but hinting obliquely is fine. It's a matter of not appearing to endorse random, unvetted public posts by employees, not a matter of secrecy.
The OP says "Fortune 5". The candidates are Walmart, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Berkshire Hathaway, and Apple. Which one of those has super bowl ads and uses Akamai? There's your answer.
No, I have my own hosting company. It is not related to the Fortune-5 I was speaking of. To clarify, I own an IT consulting company and I have been on contract with the fortune-5. I supply contract heads else where too - H1Bs.
I own my own company. In fact, I own two companies.
One of my customers is a fortune-5. I am contracted and I have a small team that I manage within.
If I must explain, I'm a serial entrepreneur. I've owned 3-4 companies in my past including a cable TV company too. It would be more accurate to say I have my hands in many things with not much time on my hands.
THe fortune-5 company is an automotive company genius.
They don't need to kill it, but they need to create new businesses. And they can't just acquire them either, unless they let them completely independent, but continue to fund them.
This is from last year. A market that is mostly 35+ and women of higher income (aka the spending decision makers)? It's not something that should be dismissed.
I think yes, though a lot smaller. Yahoo is used by millions in Asia because of how well it caters to the local languages, as opposed to google which is a distinctly foreign product with some translations skinned on top.
I feel like Netflix understands how to keep morale high, and that's paying top of market and firing people who don't deserve that pay. Free lunches, massage rooms, etc are all marginally important compared to good pay. Perhaps Yahoo could innovate further by offering private offices.
This isn't the panacea for innovation or a large company, but if the goal is to raise morale and hire top talent - I know those two things combined would get some experienced candidates to consider joining Yahoo.
Those were some of the things that they did first. In her first month she made the meals free and gave raises to the top folks. Then she authorized management to hire new people at top of market. I had a few friends leave Netflix for Yahoo because they actually got raises and believed in the vision.
Many have subsequently left when they realized the problems run deeper than that.
Don't get me wrong. I love the fact that Yahoo took a chance on Marissa Mayer. The thing that I can't overlook is none of the stories I have read indicate this was a matter of a perfect vision that was just poorly executed.
All of the stories I've read lead me to believe there has been a somewhat muddled vision and less than spectacular execution on top of that.
Then again it was only mid-2012 that she was appointed CEO. Not enough time IMO, though the stories these days make one wonder if allowing a full 5 years (I think a reasonable minimum term for CEO of a large corporation like Yahoo) is going to be more destructive than constructive. Especially when there seem to be many documented failures, and not much to hang one's hat on, in the form of successes, to this point.
I'm not sure that "perfect vision that was just poorly executed" is worth much. If execution is the hard part, then any sort of vision that didn't include execution is just nonsense.
In terms of assessing a CEO's impact on an organization I think it could play an important role.
For example if people are trying to knock down the doors to purchase / use what Yahoo is working on but they're abandoning because of scalability issues or buggy systems or continuous delays in delivery timelines, this sounds to me like we're dealing more with execution issues.
On the other hand, if the site / products hum along without glitches, yet are receiving little to no attention or traction from the outside world, this could be a sign that the company is on the wrong track in a more fundamental way. Perhaps more directly linked to the "output" / "work product" of Marissa Mayer as CEO.
Google is getting platform locking, much like Microsoft. Even if Yahoo did come out with a world class Docs, or Email, or Youtube, or Blogger, or Sites, or AppEngine - I would still stick with the Google equivalent because I am all connected. I sign into Chrome or an Android device and everything just works and syncs.
I am locked into Google and I don't even have a Google+ account.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] threadTumblr acquisition was not a good one. It was too web oriented and users were moving more to mobile.
It takes a long time to reverse momentum, and to try a lot of things.
I miss picks because that's how I kept track performance of results from my own algos and compare with supposedly experts and crowds.
I have a feeling that there are structural problems at Yahoo, like Twitter, that even a unicorn CEO would have difficulty fixing. A lot of analysts and investors seem very leadership oriented in their blame anyway.
Steve Jobs is the epitome of the Magic CEO archetype, in this school of thought, and yet, he founded expensive failures, too, and almost rode Apple into the ground, to boot.
There are so many variables that it seems harmful to the industry and the world as a whole to place so much value and so much blame on CEOs when things go right or wrong.
All that said, I'd like to see an experiment where a CEO steps in, cuts C-level salaries dramatically (taking the hit from people leaving who care more about the million dollar bonus than the company itself), including their own, and re-directing that money to higher wages for employees and deeper, further ranging, research and development. Kinda replicate the history of HP, in reverse: Start with high executive salaries, awful outdated products, and defeated company morale, and start building a culture that looks toward the future, takes care of everyone in the company (before C-levels get bonuses) and treats them all with respect from top to bottom, and build products that define the market not follow it.
But, I've never built or run a billion dollar company. I might be an idiot that no one should ever listen to.
But, you're right, I guess. Steve Jobs' life is a long story arc that ends in massive success, with many smaller successes and failures along the path. In all cases, the credit and blame should (in a just world) be distributed a bit more widely than it is. Apple without Wozniak (or any of the several dozen other superstar engineers that Apple attracted in the early years) would not have become Apple.
Steve would have destroyed Apple completely had he been CEO prior to his experiences running NeXT and Pixar. He almost did anyway -- read up on the stories about how he treated the Apple II division -- the only part of the company that made money up until after the point Steve had left.
Is such an agreement enforceable? Or is this some meaningless pledge?
If you want people to stay, give them a decent financial incentive.
Basically, for a contract to be valid both sides have to give something, this is referred to as "consideration".
Now, normally, with work-related contracts the consideration is "continuing to employ you", but with senior mgmt (golden parachutes, stock options, etc) I bet the waters are murky.
IANAL.
If you want people to stay, give them a decent financial incentive.
I keep seeing this sentiment, but I think it's important to distinguish between "don't give your people worthless equity instead of a good salary" and "I'm just here for the money." Starting to see a lot of the latter around here and it's disheartening. Sure, broken dreams and failed visions and all of that happens, but it's part of the process when you try to do "big" things. Widespread cynicism will kill high-tech.
Yaa, how awful...because my landlord accepts a share of my company CEO's "vision", as does my grocer
> Widespread cynicism will kill high-tech
What a laugh that the heirs, the LP's, the VC's and seeds and angels aren't the cynics, your unhappiness is the twenty-something wage slaves slaving away at all hours building products are now disheartening, because they're buying the BS less and want to keep more of the wealth they're creating.
The heirs and LP's are not "here" for the money. They're in their yachts at Key West, and they have their bets spread.
Woe is us, how disheartening that the people creating the wealth want to keep more of the wealth they create, as opposed to believing the fairy tales the idle class and their myrmidions are telling them.
I however am restricting my evaluation to the domain [high-tech] : [startup], which after all is the core demographic for HN and YC more broadly.
In that context I don't think it's an optimal outlook - and in fact I think it is detrimental to the zeitgeist and pushes further away from the PARC roots of paradigm setting technology development.
I grant that in the current environment it's "idealistic" but I think at the core, the real innovators still have the vision of changing the future through technology - at least I do, and I know I'm not alone in that.
They're called retention bonuses. Similar to signing bonuses, you can be contractually obligated to pay them back if you don't stay for the term of the contract.
Most companies will keep retention bonuses very hush-hush.
(Note: cash paid if you're still there after a period is very much legal)
But it is enforceable in that Yahoo could sue for damages. The damages probably wouldn't be all that high though. It is more of an issue when the employment is something unique. Like a start athlete or movie star. You can't just find another person to play Tony Stark in Iron Man 4. But there are plenty of people who can be a Yahoo executive, relatively speaking.
All I'm saying is that a court can't make you work for any company, even if you sign a super-official-sounding document saying "I'll work for this company for ___ years".
Well kind of. Technically you can't force them to work, but you can force them to pay someone else to work in their place. Most teachers have this kind of contract. They are not at will employees. They can't be fired during the school year and they can't leave either. If they don't show up to work, they have to pay the school back for the part of their contract they did not fulfill to pay for the substitute teacher. (This has nothing to do with tenure, BTW, it's true for tenured and untenured teachers alike).
It's toxic to demand written agreement to stay. The request itself says "Things are so bad that nobody wants to be here. Maybe if we all sign this paper, then at least we're all in the same boat".
(Side note: money is among the least effective incentive. Waiting for a large incentive payout just makes the time more miserable.)
Nah. That doesn't work (assuming you're already paying well). Best people will consider this a sign of desperation and leave, and bottom of the barrel will stick around for stuff to vest. Fail/fail.
Marissa must be truly desperate.
On the topic of Marissa Mayer though, has any analysis been done that's an overview of Meyer's major decisions/actions? I seem to see pieces come out almost monthly on things she's been doing at Yahoo, but as someone who doesn't follow executive movers and shakers too much, I don't want to come to an early judgement without fully understanding what her impact is.
That said, I can't help but feel that many of her early "successes" were coincidental and overly hyped, mostly as a result of Yahoo's fortunate investment in Alibaba. If I were currently seeking employment I would be extremely dubious towards anyone trying to convince me that Yahoo isn't still running on fumes, despite all the hype.
IMHO it looks like the likely end game for Yahoo is:
- taken private by a Private Equity firm
- divest Yahoo Japan and Alibaba
- any divisions that aren't making an actual profit, (tumblr, flickr, fantasy sports, etc, will be shopped around and sold if possible, or shuttered if not possible.
- search, email and the yahoo front page will be sold to Microsoft
Yahoo has done everything by the MBA book to turn around the company, they are at the step of brining in Mckinsley consultants, never a terribly good sign.
Sometimes, time just passes a company by and you can't do much to turn it around, its not the leadership's fault or the engineers fault. The market just says the company is no longer needed.
This doesn't mean the company is un profitable. Corel was a company in the early 2000's that went this route. A company can circle the drain, making slightly less and less profit each year, slowly laying off people which causes them to miss their next quarter, which necessitates more layoffs and the circle continues until someone buys them out.
I think this is the likely fate of Yahoo.
The next step is to engage an investment bank to find them a takeover partner if Silver Lake doesn't want to be the one to take them private.
What other possible route is there?
They've brought in 4-5 CEO's each with their own vision of what yahoo should be and all of them has failed to turn the company around.
What is Yahoo's area of expertise that they make money at and can do better that Google, Microsoft, Facebook or Amazon?
I admittedly haven't had the experience of working with any consultants, so I'm curious for opinions from those who have what happens when they come in during a "typical" engagement of this nature.
The rewards for the consultant are high fees and living a luxe lifestyle of staying at high end hotels, traveling first class, and dining at michelin starred restaurants (all of course on the client's dime). Plus of course guaranteed future work. Even if the project tanks and the executive is fired, they'll be sure to hire McK again at their next gig.
What most people don't realize is that consulting engagements are a careful collaboration between consultant and client. The findings are almost always driven by an iterative process where you go through review cycles with the buyer until you reach your "objective" conclusions, which by the very nature of how the work is performed, is totally subjective and biased. Doubly so for turnaround projects like this one. (not to mention that consultants are constantly trying to recycle previously performed analysis, regardless if it at all fits or applies in the target project).
Management consultant is the biggest circlejerk profession. Even moreso IMO than ibanking. Classic self-serving MBA type job. Management consultants are to entrepreneurs what food critics are to chefs.
Consultants would draw and describe what they wanted, goto bed, and awake to slides, charts in their inbox.
Same thing with models. Most firms have "rockstar excel jockeys" (usually analysts/associates/etc.) that are pimped out to project teams to serve this singular role (making models, building business cases, etc.).
Management consulting, such a surreal profession...
>Management consultants are to entrepreneurs what food critics are to chefs.
Eh. Good food critics cut through a lot of trendiness. Of course, a lot of food critics aren't good.
Consultants:entrepreneurs = husbands:Kardashian sisters.
What is the difference between McK and Deloitte? One has Harvard grads the other has Cornell grads. The analysis is the same, but one is just wrapped up in a prettier package and more prestige.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
Fantasy sports.
In much the same way Sega pivoted, Yahoo could.
Edit: is there a story I don't know about? I know a reasonable amount about gaming but I guess I'm drawing a blank on a successful Sega pivot. I remember some cool ads when I was a kid, I suppose.
I don't believe that if you just throw enough smart managers at the top of a hierarchy, then eventually it will spit out gold. If anything, that can be problematic.
Yahoo, in its current large size, simply may not have the latitude to pivot to the degree required as a publicly traded company, since anything any CEO attempts will draw the ire of activist shareholders. Any major change becomes a large political endeavor.
Assuming either of them was actually given the mandate to do so by the board of directors, etc, I imagine they'd fire like 50-80% of the staff, get rid of anything that's not profitable, and produce one highly refined product at a time, something that hasn't been done well before.
Source: Am both a Jobs and Musk fanboy and have done an unhealthy amount of reading about their histories and decision-making. I particular like this video of Jobs at NeXT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNfRgSlhIW0
Did NEXT manage to execute the plan and sell 50k workstations in 1991?
So I'm guessing more like 20k.
"...it seems to me that, in general terms for Steve, he was so passionate about the goal and trying to invent something impossible that everyone had to be on this mission to Mars, and if you weren’t on the mission you didn’t need to be here. It was really a focused approach, so it wasn’t about me or you or hard feelings or anyone. It was about the thing and making the thing better."
Read more at: http://nextshark.com/doug-menuez-who-spent-3-years-with-stev...
I really doubt either Steve Jobs or Elon Musk could turn Yahoo around. With Jobs's Apple turnaround, he had the advantage of sharing (creating, really) Apple's cultural DNA; he didn't need to "turn around" a company, he needed to cut the fat and refocus it so it could do what it was doing a lot better. Elon Musk has never run a turnaround; his companies have certainly encountered difficulties, but it's easier to take a new organization with a strong mission and make it work than to take an old, sclerotic organization in a market that doesn't exist anymore and somehow make it relevant again.
So Mckinsley consultants are the nursing home cats of the corporate world?
http://nypost.com/2010/01/31/nursing-home-cat-can-predict-im...
Just hypothesizing but imagine if MySpace had focused its industry connections in the music industry to focus more on music instead of social networking, and pushed for an on-demand music streaming player for mobile and desktop. They had millions of dollars in the bank and a head start in the U.S. market over Spotify and Rdio.
Or imagine if Blockbuster video had either taken up Netflix's offer to be bought out or had invested in online streaming long before Netflix.
I'm not saying it's easy or always viable or that luck doesn't play a role, but I often think we discount the potential for a company to still exist today because the only outcome we know of is the outcome that happened rather than the potential of alternate decisions.
It's not clear to me that Yahoo's business has poor fundamental economics because I don't quite know what business it's in.
Buying, say, tumblr didn't help with that because it's not like a free blogging engine would appear to be a great money spinner. Suggesting you want to make it less R18 then suggests you didn't look too hard at what people use it for.
Similarly, when flickr has a lot of people who are prepared to pay to host photos spattering ads all over it seems like... a lack of understanding of how it works.
flickr makes me particularly sad. The user authentication fuck up was appalling. The ads were moronic. It only needs a couple of minor tweaks, some of which (like albums for groups) to make itself a Facebook alternative on the side.
Second, Steve Jobs focused the company around one or two important initiatives at a time. That was probably his greatest value add. He had a phenomenal sense for which projects were the right initiatives. The original Bondi Blue iMac came out pretty quickly after his return -- not quite a year after Steve had been named interim CEO. That's FAST.
Yahoo! needs to be streamlined (remove poisonous/slack elements), focused (one or two key projects ONLY, kill the others) and fast (release the key projects in 2016). They also need to pick the RIGHT projects. To do this, like another commenter said, they need to remember why they love the Internet. Otherwise they're dead.
Sounds like she's in a tough spot. You're pretty much forced into a situation of focusing on the good numbers when you're a public company or you'll get beaten up by the shareholders and shorts. So it's difficult to shine sunlight on the bad stuff to disinfect because that's not what public investors want to hear.
Going into search? That's just crazy talk. Google has the space completely wrapped up.
I think Yahoo has some excellent properties like finance.yahoo.com which is amazing and could unlock a deluge of cash with the right biz model. Retail investors visit the site in droves daily. Right now it's an advertising disaster. Prime space taken up by spammy link-baity ads injected into the main center content: "10 most popular fitness models on the planet". And prime spaces on the right taken up by amazon ads. The most targeted ads by etrade, scottrade and ameritrade are the smallest ads on the page with tiny icons on the left. They relaunched yahoo finance in September and sounds like their users hate the new site: https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/315477-finance-dd-3
The WSJ article isn't going to make life at Yahoo any easier unfortunately.
If you haven't yet, check out the bottom of the page, in particular "Guidelines", "FAQ" and the search bar. Also, helpful formatting tips:
https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
> bad manners will be corrected. I guarantee that.
We'll hold you to your words. Do so, or the downvotes will follow. ;).
The space is ripe for upheaval.
There's a field where Google has been doing slightly worse as time goes by: questionable search. It's a running joke by now that Bing's video search is much better for searching porn that Youtube. Similarly, searching for "<band> full album mp3 download" on Google is bound to return useless websites. Sometimes the actual results are to be found inside the text of a DMCA takedown notice, meaning that Google has the result, but refuses to show it to you.
And speaking of bad results, some specific terms (such as moving companies) are so full of SEO garbage that there's no way to get a reliable result.
There's definitely room for competition - otherwise, DuckDuckGo would have been out of business by now.
We're not talking about handset A vs. B. The technical and talent lead is much deeper wrt. Google and Machine Learning.
Wha?? I use it daily for the last 10+ years - I despise it, but for some reason there's nothing better afaik. And it would be so easy to make it so much better, no surprise the company is failing.
On top of stories about large number of executives have left over the course of 2015 (http://recode.net/2015/10/19/yahoo-talent-exodus-accelerates...), the lack of vision/planning that contributed to executive discontent:
> But perhaps none of these incidents damaged morale more than Mayer’s reorganization of Yahoo’s product teams. When Mayer launched the effort last fall, everyone agreed the existing structure had outlived its usefulness—for instance, mobile products was partitioned from other groups. But Mayer embarked on the process without laying out a grand vision for it. Instead, she began sketching out different scenarios in one-on-one meetings with various executives, floating one plan by one exec and a different by another. Unable to make up her mind, the process dragged on for months. “She went through 20 different permutations,” says an executive with knowledge of the process. “The product guys were twisting in the wind, not knowing what they were going to run.”
> Product releases slowed to a trickle, and a turf war brewed as executives became concerned with their futures. Jon McCormack, a star executive who had joined Yahoo in January from Amazon and was promised a broad engineering portfolio covering critical areas like mobile, landed in the vacuum created by Mayer’s indecision. He was gone by the end of February and now works for Google. When Mayer announced the new structure in April, it was too late. “That was the beginning of everyone losing faith,” says another senior executive. “That’s when people started to look for other jobs.”
I don't consider being the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company that's still trying to figure out where it fits in the 21st century a job anyone could possibly do, but it seems like Mayer's strategy has been a little all over the place with no real gain in any segment. From the WSJ article:
> As her strategy has shifted, Ms. Mayer has variously cast Yahoo as a challenger to Netflix Inc. in online video content and as a threat to Google Inc. in Web search, but has made little progress toward either goal.
I'm just not sure where she's trying to push Yahoo towards. What is their vision?
Its corporate stagflation. They are too diversified and have too many products to move quickly, generate almost no enthusiasm between either users (all old guard) or engineers/employees, and there's very little that any executive or employee can do.
(1) the owner of Flickr, an acquisition they've tried to futz around with, but haven't actually managed to damage too much yet. (True, the site design's become much more heavyweight, but that's a general web design issue) Interestingly, whilst they tried to go ad-only, removing "Pro" accounts, they later reinstated them - but with an oddly tone-deaf press release that trumpeted that account level's availability again, and that rates wouldn't go up for two years. Fair enough, except Pro had been $25/yr, and they quietly noted they'd be $50/yr in the future. Is ad-only revenue that strong to consider dispelling paid accounts?
(2) The original curated web index. Fiendishly difficult to scale, absolutely, but while it lasted, it was remarkably useful. Could such still work? It'd be a tremendous challenge, but, Wikipedia might suggest so - it's not as if Wikipedia is free of dead/changed links, but the footnote links do indeed tend to be useful.
Yet, as I recall, their finances are/were quite robust - we may well simply not be Yahoo's audience.
Effectively it would competing with Reddit, HN, Metafilter, and similar sites where the owners have an army of people curating the web for them, for free. Which makes it a hard ask. Obviously there's a demand because Reddit, HN, MF, etc, exist, but enough to make money off of?
they are missing the whole "fuck you, were yahoo, were building the internet" chutzpah which was so charming, and for which we all have a little glowing candlewick in our hearts for.
For example .. I really wanted YUI to be usable .. it was so close.. but they didn't listen when people gave them feedback - eg. telling them to polish the table grid widget, this control was arguably the reason people were even using yui at all.
The internet pluggable data feed pipes thing was promising.. almost there but not quite gelling in the developer group-mind.
They have to hire some really opinionated people and let them loose on skunkworks [ but realworld ] projects .
I look at the yahoo front page once every 3m to see if its still dead.. I check my email there due to nostalgia.
They need to forget about ad revenue bullshit, get fired up and make stuff.
I can guarantee there are great people at yahoo gnawing their arms off because they have nothing to rally around.
They are dying anyway .. its time to hit for the bleachers.
I look at the yahoo.com front page, I look at msn.com front page - they look similar and are both spam to a first order approximation.
If they wanted to, they could turn sentiment around in 3 months.
There are so many things they can do :
- become the datafeed API for the internet
- buy a startup thats kicking ass [ and leave them alone to win ]
- buy a tech video review media site thats growing fast
- put up a $200k prize for best Yahoo innovation app
- take 7 devs / designers / product people, put them in a room and let them have at it to make an app
For any of these to work, they have to build a firewall around it, insulating if from the process of a big company, so it feels like a startup.
It's the only way...to turn this ship around.
I do enjoy the drama of the Mayer Saga, but it doesn't seem like any of Yahoo's attempts at innovation are working. They shouldn't be competing with Google in search. They should be redefining search. Some times the best way to change the game is to go back to basics. Of course if I knew exactly what that looked like, I would be too busy walking the path to wealth to write hn comments. But it does seem like Yahoo isn't doing anything innovative right now. Their most valuable properties, mail and the yahoo home page, are simply good enough versions of products that have become commodities. They began by offering a service that no one else was providing, and have ended up being relegated to being the internet's generic alternative to everything.
It's Hail Mary time. If I were in Mayer's position, I would find a way to burn a few hundred million dollars of the alibaba money on a moon shot before the board had time to vote me out. The odds against may be overwhelming, but it's better than slightly slowing the angular velocity of their circle around the drain. With the recent tone of press articles about her tenure and what that does to an executive's reputation, I don't see what she has to lose.
Yahoo is hardly trying to compete with Google in search; they have literally been outsourcing search to Bing for several years now.
The problem is that they're trying to figure out what they should be doing instead, and struggling.
Aren't they starting to stream nfl games for free? The first one they did was from what I heard handled very well. I thought there was talks about more.
It isnt hip enough to be cool, it's not big enough to be Facebook or google, it's a $30billion company that some how has the branding of the internets AOL. If yahoo "innovates" it will immediately be uncool.
Morale issues definitely can make things more difficult but are things really that dire there? Best thing I can see they've got going for them is the analysts are still foolish enough to rate Amazon as a tech company and not as a Walmart competitor that does some tech; they don't have great ways to classify these companies. It doesnt seem like yahoo is doing foolish things, it might be more of a bellwether for the free everything and monetize the traffic industry.
So they need to build a new business from the dying ashes of the current revenue. At the moment it does not look like the CEO has any good ideas on how to do that.
Having tried to use 500px for a few months, they cannot even manage to do album privacy correctly.
Previously their paid product was called Mail Plus, and that was the only way you could get mail out in bulk. But a while ago they made a change. From an article I just found:
That doesn't say anything about IMAP, but I know that is also possible nowadays. I think they had to add that feature. E.g. my wife accesses her Yahoo Mail from her iPhone. Without IMAP, how could she get her messages? (Rhetorical question. Rhetorical answer: she couldn't!).http://www.ghacks.net/2013/10/08/yahoo-mail-plus-turns-yahoo...
On the other hand, Flickr's admin UI starting to fill up with crap I don't about, like creating mugs and books and shit. Fair enough, they're trying to make money, but that stuff has no place on the main interface.
It's still the easiest place for me to store and share photos, however.
Should I guess that you were not adult yet when Yahoo! started?
When Yahoo! was founded, there was a need for WWW site directory, and Yahoo! filled that vacuum. It was the go to place for finding the sites in your area of interest.
Some of the sections of Yahoo! for example: Finance and Sports are still go to places for me and I am sure countless others. I haven't come across any other sites that even come close to those two sections on Yahoo!. Even today, there is no single directory site with curated list of relevant sites, news and information from such sites. So, I will say there is still a need for a Yahoo! like portal with curated information. What Google spits out in search and associated sites is SEO crap. Google has inability to differentiate among 14,777 news articles on a topic and which one is the most relevant and comprehensive.
IMO, Yahoo! need to go back to their roots which was portal of curated information. If they wait too long and the direction FB is heading, they will fill the void left by Yahoo!.
You haven't been able to find any other sites focusing on finance or sports on the internet? To be clear, yahoo does a decent job curating finance and sports sections, but it is extremely trivial to find sites similar to Yahoo. Here are a few, I found:
Finance:
========
Marketwatch[0], is very similar to yahoo finance. Owned by WSJ and Dow Jones.
Google Finance[1] is like Yahoo! finance, only done by google.
MSN Money[2] almost the exact same thing as Yahoo.
Then you have your more niche honorable mentions like motley fool, seekingalpha, zerohedge, etc.
SPORTS:
=======
Without repeating Google and Microsoft offerings, there is of course:
ESPN which is the second largest sports news provider, also they have a tv network about sports. They sports fairly hard.[3]
Bleecher Report is not to be out sportsed, sort of a hipster pitchfork media type sports player.[4]
CBS Sports[5]
NBC SPorts[6] This, and the preceding offering are large entrenched media rent collectors, which is similar to yahoo, except that they are profitable.
So, in finality, I find that statement absurd, but I am glad you enjoy yahoo. I am rooting for it as it is an under dog for sure.
[0]http://www.marketwatch.com
[1]http://www.google.com/finance
[2]http://www.msn.com/en-us/money
[3]http://espn.go.com
[4]BleacherReport.com
[5]CBSSports.com
[6]http://www.nbcsports.com
Each mentioned site is missing something that is available on Yahoo! Either you browse through all the articles on Bleacher Report or you can see the most relevant ones on Yahoo! That is the difference.
Remember the keywords Portal, curated information, relevant information, comprehensive. None of the sites you mentioned are at a level of Yahoo!
As for sports, if you want the same information but the caveat you seem hung up on is that it must come from different domains, just go to a reddit like aggregator. I get it, you like yahoo. Yahoo does a good job, and I also like yahoo. My point is it is patently rediculous to claim there is no other space on the internet that is close enough to Yahoo sports or finance.
Companies don't survive being ~10% better than the competition, and the stuff you are talking about sounds like it is moire about habit than anything tangible.
Within sports, Grantland tried producing content that was different, and died. GigaOM tried focusing on enterprise tech, and died. FiveThirtyEight served policy wonks, and is struggling to attract a meaningful audience. The verdict is out on Vox, but they also may go within 18 months.
Yahoo has tried to solve this problem by hiring 'star names' but it doesn't seem to have moved the needle. People are happy to take the commodity churn article from Bleacher Report.
Oh, and to top all that off, it's unclear that there's really any serious money to be made from online content / eyeballs anyway.
Which is to say that even if they could execute on the 'trusted source of content' business model, it may not be enough to save them anyway.
I completely disagree with that. I tried for over a year to switch from Yahoo to Google for finance and found it completely lacking, despite the nicer UI. The only site that can match Yahoo finance in my opinion is the Motley Fool. I still use both.
Why would anyone rely on a single "portal" for content? A "portal" like Yahoo(!) was relevant when connections were slow and the potential of the internet was still nascent. That was 20 years ago.
These days, just open a new tab with a new site. Open 10 new tabs with 10 different sites. It's not that complicated.
What? No. He/she meant that any of those sites can replace Yahoo by themselves, not that all of them are required.
Here are a few data points:
Interface - YF has all the three indices information (S&P, Dow and Nasdaq) right in front of you. MW has this in a small box on the right. While this may seem trivial, over a period of time - YF sticks but MW doesn't.
Content - All the content above the fold on YF is related to the markets. If you look at MW , for instance there is an article filling up which airline features you should pay for - totally unrelated to markets and in the main view of the fold. This is not a one time phenomenon, but happens all the time. One of the reasons I stopped using MW.
Quote lookup - The quotes are all on the left and the lookup bar is right below the quotes. Also if you look up a stock and revisit the home page, that information is stored - without requiring you to sign up. SO you can just build a portfolio of stocks without even signing up. (Of course, if you clear your cookies this will be lost). Try doing this on MW - The quote look up bar isn't even obvious ( you have to hit on the search button to make it visible).
I can go on and on about feature comparison but what I'm trying to get at is - Yahoo Finance is one of the most usable sites when it comes to market information for a vast majority of users interested in the markets. They have carried over the same interface to other geographies as well. For example yahoo finance India isn't drastically different from Yahoo Finance US. So it wouldn't be really wise for a company to just abandon that user base.
Yahoo's Directory was shut down December 27, 2014.
What's left of Yahoo does some photo storage, some email, some video streaming, some finance and sports reporting, and some ad serving. They also resell Bing search. All those things are done better by others.
Many forms of it now but I still think Directory could be revived. Maybe exceed the old one with curators for high profile topics plus crowd input. Some hybrid model.
It's highly debatable whether anyone does flickr "better". 500px, for example, have descended to suddenly announcing that they'll give away licenses for the photos you pay them to host and reward you with "exposure".
There is an opt-out box buried away in your preferences, but (in a shitty move) you also have to opt out of selling your images through partners at the same time - you can't disable only uncompensated use.
They are already bringing in outside consultants from McKinsey, but in this day and age, how about turning to the crowd for help? If they posted significant cash prices (say $1m total) and let their users vote on the best ideas, I bet they could find some fresh directions.
Also bet it would cost a fraction of what they pay McKinsey.
Edit: In fact, why stop there. How about making it a quarterly challenge. With follow-ups on what ideas they decided to work on and progress reports. Make Yahoo the People's company. Just my 2 cents.
Everyone who is there now and especially rose through the ranks at some point stood behind and toed the line that brought them to that point ("Cheered for more desktop ads, agreed and liked the 'Mavens' metric"). Now they'd face a significant cognitive dissonance if they did an about face and said "Yap that was stupid, what were we thinking!?". It just doesn't happen.
It can only happen with new people, so a lot of existing ones have to be pushed out of the door. But new ones take a while to on-board, they are outsiders and so on, they'll face internal resistance in the changes they propose.
It's the downward spiral of doom. They'll start laying off people to save money. The more people they lay off, the less likely good people would want to go work there. The less progress they'll make, so they'll have to lay off more people etc.
McKinsey isn't going to get them there. That's a move of a dying company. Marissa Mayer needs to do this herself. If she doesn't know who the right people are to keep versus release, that's a bad sign.
To completely abandon that skillset in order to form fit the company to the most popular idea from the crowd could possibly be disastrous. Perhaps it would work if they made a conscious effort to ensure the idea the crowd proposed aligned well with the skillset / experience the employees already have.
It would be fun to watch, but the markets would rightly interpret it as "we have no idea what we're doing".
Seriously though, if you use enough buzz-words, like crowd-sourced virtual incubator, or Kickstarter for Innovation, or whatever, I'm sure you could sell the idea to all the stakeholders somehow.
>They are already bringing in outside consultants from McKinsey
i think these 2 things are incompatible to say the least. McKinsey indicate completely different stage in a company lifecycle.
This usually means a the execs need to take a political difficult action (layoffs, etc.) and need the "cover" of a highly paid firm to look like "experts" suggested it to redirect blame away from the execs.
Currently, even at its 'dying' state, Yahoo has huge traffic from extremely loyal users who are mostly in the higher income (30+) age range. To dump that out the window would be an incredibly irresponsible business move. It's easy for a small, young company to pivot, but an old giant like Yahoo has to move slowly.
That being said, I think it would be a great move to really accept the growing age and therefore unique needs of this internet company rather than trying to follow new trends. That's truly their strongest leverage material at this point. Can they reinvent how the Internet is used by people over 40?
Is that statement a fact? If so, care to substantiate it.
I work for one of the largest companies in the world and we no longer use Yahoo; we use too. Every year in the US, the Superbowl pulls in HUGE dollars in advertisements. I have to plan for this every year and have been doing this for the past 10 years.
Around Superbowl time, we increase our public facing web server presence due to the increase load. It use to be that Yahoo represented more than 50% of the clicks but that is less than 10% as of last year.
I work for a fortune-5 company. We use Akami to help distribute the load. I wish I could publish more info like the data and the company but unfortunately I'm not legally permitted.
I will say this: I doubt Yahoo Ad revenue will return at least from my perspective and what I've seen over the past 7-10 years. More and more of our Ad refs come from youtube.
"I run an entire data center of Slackware Linux on Dell servers."
so, definitely not apple. which leads me to think all that is BS and they just have too much time on their hands.
One of my customers is a fortune-5. I am contracted and I have a small team that I manage within.
If I must explain, I'm a serial entrepreneur. I've owned 3-4 companies in my past including a cable TV company too. It would be more accurate to say I have my hands in many things with not much time on my hands.
THe fortune-5 company is an automotive company genius.
This is from last year. A market that is mostly 35+ and women of higher income (aka the spending decision makers)? It's not something that should be dismissed.
Doesn't the talk about "when you are not the consumer yada yada" does not apply for the convenience of your argument?
http://www.scmp.com/article/1007460/yahoo-still-hks-top-sear...
This isn't the panacea for innovation or a large company, but if the goal is to raise morale and hire top talent - I know those two things combined would get some experienced candidates to consider joining Yahoo.
Many have subsequently left when they realized the problems run deeper than that.
All of the stories I've read lead me to believe there has been a somewhat muddled vision and less than spectacular execution on top of that.
Then again it was only mid-2012 that she was appointed CEO. Not enough time IMO, though the stories these days make one wonder if allowing a full 5 years (I think a reasonable minimum term for CEO of a large corporation like Yahoo) is going to be more destructive than constructive. Especially when there seem to be many documented failures, and not much to hang one's hat on, in the form of successes, to this point.
For example if people are trying to knock down the doors to purchase / use what Yahoo is working on but they're abandoning because of scalability issues or buggy systems or continuous delays in delivery timelines, this sounds to me like we're dealing more with execution issues.
On the other hand, if the site / products hum along without glitches, yet are receiving little to no attention or traction from the outside world, this could be a sign that the company is on the wrong track in a more fundamental way. Perhaps more directly linked to the "output" / "work product" of Marissa Mayer as CEO.
I am locked into Google and I don't even have a Google+ account.