Yahoo Sale ‘Book’ Reveals Financial Meltdown and Big Bet on Mobile Voice Search
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It has also been largely ignored for better part of a decade. Three areas where Yahoo just fumbled the ball: 1) Portfolio tracking, 2) Message boards and 3) Monetization. None of these have been upgraded in years.
Portfolio tracking is an exercise in good UI & UX. Yahoo could and should have bought any number of good teams over the years that have built portfolio trackers.
Yahoo finance message boards have very low signal to noise ratio. They should have either gone the reddit model of comments or even better, Yahoo should have bought Seeking Alpha a long time ago. Alternatively, when Seeking Alpha began to grow, Yahoo should have built a competitive product. Instead Yahoo let their message boards turn into a low value destination.
Monetization - this is just comically inept. Visitors to finance sites have and care about their money. They also tend to be older. Some of the highest paid ads target these people: Credit cards, mortgages, health, travel, banking, personal loans, autos, etc.
Yahoo finance should have been the center of a massive business unit at Yahoo generating a substantial percentage of their revenue.
What went wrong?
> While some are scared by the numbers, everyone I spoke to plans to make a bid of some sort, largely because even as financially precarious as it has become, Yahoo remains one of the biggest properties on the Web and it is hard to be able to buy that kind scale easily.
> “It’s like a dilapidated house in Silicon Valley — you walk in and are overwhelmed by the work that needs to be done and how bad it has gotten,” said one potential buyer. “But then it’s in a good neighborhood, the market is nuts and there’s not many like it anymore, so you have to hope you can fix it.”
there's a saying that translates roughly to "you bad-mouthing things you want to buy".
Based on your second sentence, I don't think you mean the word 'mismanaged' here. That would imply those inside the company are intentionally trying to lower its value.
I think what you mean is, potential buyers are bad-mouthing the company, or deliberately talking down it's value in public to try to get a better deal.
Edit: It occurred to me, this could have been a substitution error of 'mismanaged,' for 'misrepresented.'
I wouldn't immediately throw that possibility out the window.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/07/technology/marissa-mayer-sev...
If getting the deal done is the only objective, exaggerating the direness of the situation might help shareholders get on board for a deal, perhaps out of fear. It also makes a lower price more palatable.
Of course, I have no details of what is actually going on, so what I've written could just be rampant speculation.
The real issue is when a star is put in charge who cannot fail yet does and no one is willing to call them out on it till its too late.
Yes. This site is one of the worst I encounter when it comes to ensuring the PC path is taken regarding sexism. It's odd that a group of, predominantly, males feels the need to make so much effort to say, "I'm not sexist!" or "You're a sexist!"
Go back and read any of the old threads regarding Mrs. Mayer's hiring. They're a hoot.
Remember when Mrs. Meyer was named CEO and HN vehemently argued that she was going to turn the place around? And anyone who said otherwise was accused of being sexist?
Here's a doozy from back then:
"every once in a while I wonder whether she's so much smarter than me that I just can't comprehend her strategy."
Now the narrative is that she mismanaged it intentionally? Should she be thrown in jail for ripping off shareholders then, like this place calls for the heads of banking CEOs?
2016 Google bids for purchase of Yahoo.
Your explanation is the most likely. Seems pretty obvious.
Among other things they have the best map data and the largest auction site.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites
Sorry for being snarky, but seriously, not knowing that Yahoo is a top 5 destination is embarrassing if you work in the web business.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_D%27Aloisio#Summly
Though on a nicer note, great to see that that 15-year old, who was already well-off before becoming a Yahoo millionaire, ended up quitting to go to school to study computer science.
You can get an insane amount of actual good product work done for 30 million, and even if you reserve say just 1 to 5 million out of the 30 for generating awareness (aka marketing), you actually have a hell of a greater chance of generating revenue and even, gasp, profits (provided your product is not some piece of fluff).
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/13/16-year-old-programmer-rais...
http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/15/trimit-summarizes-emails-bl...
Even if you hypothesize that he got all of the $30 million...does Li Ka-Shing care? That's less than .1% of his net worth.
Nick did not write the summarization algorithms, from what I've heard. He had a couple of NLP PhDs write the core algorithms, which he then bundled into an app.
The businesses they have their hands in, they do poorly.
Content? Most of the articles are from other sources and give you a snippet of the content with a link to the actual article.
Media? Again, their videos are curated from youtube and other video sites.
Search engine? They have one of the worst in the business. Mozilla uses it as their default, which is helping, but most times I run a query on Yahoo, I get frustrated so I'll go back to Google anyways.
Email service? Have you used the current version? I still have mine which has become a spam address I use now. The few times a month I go in and clean it out, it's practically unusable. It's clunky, it's terribly slow, and often times just randomly logs me out.
News source? Most of the news is click baity, gossip, or other "viral" news and isn't that deep. If I want real news, I go somewhere else.
I had no idea they have a Developer Network: https://developer.yahoo.com/ How much visibility does it get? Hardly any. I'm not even sure they're really courting developers. Most of their cool products like Yahoo pipes were closed down years ago.
Now throw in Verizon's offer to buy them. Maybe they'll have the balls to put the company out of its misery.
I'm a heavy user of their email service. Have been for years. Even paid for it for a while. It's not as snappy as gmail (which I use for work) but I find it very usable. The mobile app has improved markedly over the last six months.
I agree that their search engine is ... suboptimal. If you are looking for news or a common website ("where's that bank located?") it's fine, but for most of the searches I use for work, Google beats the pants off of them. However, if stackoverflow is in the yahoo results, it's usually the right answer.
Anyway, not an apologist, just a happy user of yahoo mail.
I might give it another look and try it on mobile though.
Honestly, haven't done much to improve the experience.
I did turn off the conversation view, because I don't like threading of my emails.
I also have (over time) memorized the keyboard shortcuts: https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN3578.html
Mobile is a different world. Still have ads, but just one at the top. It seems to get features before the web version (specifically when I reply to a message sent to one of my aliases, the mobile version was the first to set the 'from' correctly, but the web version seems to now). The only issue I've had with mobile is that sometimes I need to search for something twice, especially if I have cleared my cache.
But they're still #5 globally, and Yahoo Japan is #16 globally, if you look at Alexa. That's a LOT of users, and showing ads to all of those users is easily worth billions of dollars a year.
I still use yahoogroups (for some lists I help with) and yahoo mail (haven't bothered to move, have a decade's worth of email).
I also use their search engine occasionally (and Bing's)--just trying to keep search from being a monoculture.
Anecdotally, among people I know (many of whom are not in tech), I see very few personal Yahoo email addresses.
I do still use Yahoogroups for one organization I belong to and that's just because it's what existed at the time and there's been no reason to move off of it. I'm also a Flickr Pro member and would be sad to see Flickr go away--but that's more because it's a good source of Creative Commons photos for presentations etc. than because I really care that much for my own pics; I could move to someone like Smugmug relatively easily.
I think in an interesting way, this stems from their origins. They started out as a directory for the web. At the time, few, if any, knew what that meant.[0] And so it remains on up to today.
[0]Meaning, sure we could understand HTML and the protocols involved, but what were web pages, what sort of media were they meant to contain? What sort of things could they make possible?
Yahoo for various reasons pitched themselves as a media company even though "If you walked around their offices, it seemed like a software company. The cubicles were full of programmers writing code, product managers thinking about feature lists and ship dates..."
"The worst consequence of trying to be a media company was that they didn't take programming seriously enough. "
"In technology, once you have bad programmers, you're doomed. I can't think of an instance where a company has sunk into technical mediocrity and recovered. Good programmers want to work with other good programmers. So once the quality of programmers at your company starts to drop, you enter a death spiral from which there is no recovery."
Since then various CEOs have announced various strategies and not that much has worked well. Apart from buying part of Alibaba of course.
Instead of improving these products, Mayer went on a shopping spree and bought useless things , like Tumblr (I'm sorry but Tumblr is a complete failure under Yahoo), Sumly and basically let them rot, just like the previous products. And she want to stay 3 more years ? without a serious plan ?
Ultimately, MSFT will buy Yahoo, so I'm sure Mayer will get a good bonus, but what a fiasco she was.
If you want to see failures, look at flickr or delicious.
Tumblr is a commercial failure under Yahoo. It didn't make money then, it won't make money now.
> twitter, facebook, and pinterest have shown anything
Neither of them have been acquired by another company... let alone Yahoo.
> look at flickr
Flickr has actual paid users and is one of the only service at yahoo that is still relevant.
Buying Tumblr and then causing it to underperform are two separate points. The potential for success (before acquisition) would characterize it a useful thing.
Yahoo has actively devalued Tumblr, like the other web 2.0 acquisitions, seemingly because they are stuck in a previous era.
> Yahoo had/has a cool products, mail, groups, pipes, boss, Flickr
You think they should compete with gmail? Groups is worthless. Pipes is a cute experiment and will never appeal to the mainstream. Flickr, if only they could target the camera in everyones pocket instead of the prosumer cream. None of these are good bets...
Yahoo Shopping could be considered a success for it's time, should they do that again?
If there is a next purchase, they should take the opportunity to learn from the new success, rather than try to re-apply the ways of old.
Conversations with a different focus might lead to Yahoo's problems with marketing, HR, technology, products, etc.
I imagine there must be companies already buying voice prints and cross referencing them with voiced heard in stores to identify/target customers somehow.
What is Yahoo Japan? A completely different company or something?
Years ago they had a chance to claw their way back, but not any more.
They should take their capital and diversify, creating entirely new products and brands, and/or become a VC company. I.e. milk the current company and plan to abandon ship.
Over the years they've had decent income, they have great traffic numbers, they have all these things that seem to indicate success inside the echo chamber. Now they've got a shit brand, the brand is right there with AOL. They aren't going to have google or facebook numbers though, I don't know that I'd expect any other company to match those though.
It's just a game now, tons of people are envious of their traffic. they've probably got some great properties as well, sports, finance and fantasy sports seem to be universally enjoyed. Someone just wants to steal it for as cheap as possible.
And remove Marissa Mayer, who has made some absolutely dreadful business decisions and continues to make them. Sorry this is harsh, but she's had many years to prove herself now, and she has shown that she's not the leader that Yahoo needs to restore its past glories.
Unfortunately Yahoo is a shell of its former self, so I can't see how else they can resolve their problems except by giving different business more autonomy and zero interference. It's rather Darwinian, but those who will succeed will survive, and those who were never viable (of which there were many companies who were purchased for Mayer who would have ultimately folded eventually) will wither and die on the vine.
That's the cargo cult she follows from her days at Google: valuable employees like herself get lotza stock, and therefore the company magically prospers.
So, cab fare for most new engineering hires.
You have deep learning, what would you build with Yahoo's data?