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Comment by bjourne | Hacker News Reader

Wasn't here tenure at Yahoo almost a mirror image of Stephen Elop's at Nokia? He was put in place to save their mobile division but couldn't turn the company around and it was eventually bought by Microsoft. It seem self-evident that failing companies are hard for CEO:s to save.

And if any CEO should be burned at a stake, shouldn't it be that guy that refused to sell Yahoo for 47 billion to Microsoft?

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Elop trashed a company that dominated the world featurephone market, but was clearly going to start falling behind as smartphones took over. Elop accidentally announced that they were going to abandon the featurephone market, killing the business. He then scrapped their well-regarded smartphone experiment, and announced that they were going to switch to the marginal smartphone platform of a company with a history of failing at smartphones.

Mayer joined a horribly failing company with no core purpose for existing, experimented wildly in an attempt to shake things up and turn it around, then after failing, unwound the thing and sold it for far more than it was worth.

> And if any CEO should be burned at a stake, shouldn't it be that guy that refused to sell Yahoo for 47 billion to Microsoft?

That was Jerry Yang, a co-founder of Yahoo. And yes, he was "burned at the stake". He was fired from the CEO job within months of tanking that deal.

Jerry also bought the Alibaba shares in 2001 which is the reason why Yahoo is even alive.

After he left, Yahoo made the mistake of selling half of the Alibaba which are worth $36 Billion.

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