This is cleverer than people are giving them credit for. It delivers immediate value to shareholders; it delivers opportunities for long term growth to shareholders; it creates one valuable Asian property that can acquire other properties and continue to deliver shareholder value; it creates a US company that is easier to acquire than it used to be, without the Alibaba share, and thus could be bought by a big media company that values all the core assets and will keep the engineers.

Everyone wins here. Managers win, of course, but shareholders, who have been patient, get short-term returns and the potential for long-term ones as well. Employees will see their jobs stay, because of this repackaging.

Yes, Mayer will be gone in a year, replaced by someone with experience selling a company. But it's been a good run. She turned Yahoo from a place with mediocre engineers into a decent place to work; she resuscitated existing brands and gave them a place in the world; and now she did some reasonably clever financial engineering.