Hacker News Reader

Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

No need to fire everyone. Yahoo made $38M net profit on operations last quarter. All they would have to do is maintain their current assets and employees and the owners get $160m/year in free cash. Then, using their effectively unlimited supply of capital in the form of Alibaba stock, they could make some very smart acquisitions (think for example of buying an instagram for $1b cash and growing it to what it is today) and they could pretty quickly be a $100b company.

I am not not sure if Marissa is up to the task, but they do have a legion of smart employees and an insane amount of capital. If they fail to build meaningful growth now, it's her fault.

View on HN

They do still have some smart people, but I don't think anyone or any amount of money can turn things around for them in any meaningful way.

Their pre-Marissa acquisitions were almost universally wastes of time and money. It's too soon to tell about the recent acquisitions, but I don't see them making that $1bn back from Tumblr in my lifetime.

Yahoo is an also ran, constantly playing catch up and trying to emulate the successful behaviors of other companies. The negative public perception of a lot of their services in the technical community is mirrored inside the company, and there is nothing anyone can do to force positive change. Things that Google and Facebook and others announce were projects 3-4 years ago inside Yahoo, that never launched. Once you see that happen a few times, you get sufficiently disillusioned and leave. I don't think for all of Marissa's impact that this has fundamentally changed.

For example: Yahoo employees have to use Yahoo Mail for all of their work e-mail. The web interface only, with ads. It's a great exercise in dogfooding, IF you commit to rapidly iterating on the product to make it best of breed for your employees (not to mention real users). But that will never happen at Yahoo, there is no will to make an excellent product for a technically demanding audience.

Now your employee productivity suffers, which means every other product in the company suffers. Eventually you will have to let them go back to using e-mail the way they want to or they will find a way to screen scrape the messages into fetchmail in order to get back to work.

> But that will never happen at Yahoo, there is no will to make an excellent product for a technically demanding audience.

That seriously leads me to ask me what the fuck the engineers are actually doing there if they're not improving a core product.

In my experience, there is an astonishing amount of work to do just keeping your head above water. Particularly in a corporate environment where you spend 90% of your time getting permission and buy-in for the other 10% where real work occurs. It's demoralizing to say the least.

>Yahoo employees have to use Yahoo Mail for all of their work e-mail. The web interface only, with ads.

That is... terrifying. No wonder smart people leave.

> Yahoo employees have to use Yahoo Mail for all of their work e-mail. The web interface only, with ads.

I don't know where you got this from, if it was true but no longer isn't, or if it's only true in parts of the company, but I was just there for 13 months after an acqui-hire and no one ever made me or anyone on my team use Yahoo Mail.

The mandate to use Yahoo Mail for corp users is from the last month or two. Perhaps it does not cover the entire company, but my understanding was that it did.

Yahoo corp mail was previously Exchange (!). Also awful, but at least it supports IMAP.

OK, nevermind -- your information is newer than mine. I escaped Yahoo late last year, so I wouldn't've heard about this.

Why don't you think Marisa is up to the task? She seems more than capable to me, and has done a remarkable job leading Yahoo so far.

From an IQ perspective, I think she is probably among the top 5 executives in the Valley - likely smarter than Sergey Brin or Larry Page, her former co-workers at Google. She's brilliant. I'm only going by her performance thus far - for whatever reason, most of her acquisitions have been blunders. There are valuable start-ups all around - it doesn't make sense to me that Yahoo can't find them. I realize that there is a negative perception surrounding Yahoo, but money is money and many teams will take the deal if enough is offered. It's also her responsibility to turn that negative perception around by making some smart, successful acquisitions.

I would never just write someone with her intellect off - but she does still have something to prove. Hopefully she can do it.

On the basis of what evidence do you make such grand claims about her intellectual abilities?

Well, for a start, she paid someone to ghost write a book about her.

Everything I have read/seen/listened to about her indicates she is brilliant (including the opinions of her co-workers, watching speeches she has given etc). But intelligence and business aptitude are not synonymous. Pretty sure thats what I said. I wasn't backing off my opinion.

Truth be told, I was hoping for a more substantial answer, something that I could look at that unequivocally shows her "brilliance". The public statements of her's that I'm familiar with are pretty hum-drum.

a. You don't have to get immediately defensive when someone question it. Learn to stand your opinion. He could be just another shill and can't do anything. b. "likely smarter than Sergey Brin or Larry Page" -- This make think either you are high or some mumbo jumbo junior.

Like what ? Firing 1000 people , removing WFH option , buying companies of no value ? Amount of shill-ing-ness I smell is just ridiculous. Also be polite next time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com