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Yahoo Announces Resignation of Jerry Yang
- barredo 15y agoWonder if Yahoo! will get real shitty. Then, 10 years from now, Yang will come back, save the company and make it the most tech profitable company ever. Better buy some stock. :-)
- slippytoad 15y agoNice one :)
- tsotha 15y agoSure, we can put it with our Sun stock.
- gcb 15y agonot that far fetched. think you being mostly downvoted for language and emoticon. this is a /. comment about the case, mentioning jobs "resigned after 9 years. Sold all his stock. Apple III had failed. Mac was fine, but the board wanted an "adult" in charge. Steve returned in 12 years"
- barredo 15y agoI'm not angry about downvotes. I know jokes have no place in HN :-)
- beatle 15y agoThis is a good thing for Yahoo! Jerry Yang was a good founder and entrepreneur, but he doesn't have the skills or knowledge to run a Fortune 500 company. His decision not to sell to Microsoft and hiring Carol Bartz are some of his most fatal mistakes as Chief Yahoo!
- dsimms 15y agoQ. When does Microsoft announce the acquisition?
- bluedevil2k 15y agoI'd be interested to learn about his views and opinions on Yahoo during these past 15+ years. From the various things I've read about him, he seems like he was just a nerd at heart who wasn't interested in the entire business side of Yahoo, and when Yahoo started exploding, he had that "Allen/Woz" mentality of missing the "good old days". I heard about the stories (fair or not) of him spending more time on the golf course than the board room. I also have to think back a few years to when he said "No" to Microsoft's offer for acquisition, a very foolish move looking back. I guess what I'm really saying is I'd like to read his biography when it comes out.
- beatle 15y agoHere's a good title for his biography The Rise and Fall of Jerry Yang How he built a great company and then orchestrated one of the greatest destruction of value in the history of business
- MattGrommes 15y agoFacts? I've heard more bad things about the Board of Yahoo than I've heard about his decisions personally.
- phillmv 15y agoThat's a little hyperbolic. Also, what about the AOL-TimeWarner people?
- gcb 15y ago<quote>when he said "No" to Microsoft's offer for acquisition, a very foolish move looking back.</quote> name companies acquired by Microsoft when microsoft already had competing products, which ended up well for both parties. honest question. I have to believe there are a couple. and i'd like to know about.
- bluedevil2k 15y agoHis job was to do what was best for shareholders, not his employees and definitely not himself. Tough to argue that turning down $33 for the current $15.50 was best for shareholders.
- kingofspain 15y agoYahoo is usually talked about as if it's a joke or a failure. According to a cursory check (ahoy - I'm no finance king so I could be reading this wrong) it's worth $19 billion. If I could fail half as well, I'd be pretty happy. Honest question: Am I missing something really obvious? Is Yahoo really falling apart (slowly I guess as the same has been said for the past decade)? Or is it a case of not fulfilling potential?
- beatle 15y agoYahoo is way under valued. Yahoo was considering selling its stakes in Yahoo Japan and Alibaba Group for $17 billion. Yahoo's current market cap is $19 billion PLUS $2 billion cash. Does that somehow make the value of its U.S. assets negative?
- true_religion 15y agoWhat value that Yahoo chooses to assign to its own divisions is kind of besides the point.
- dodedo 15y agoThose are not divisions, they are shares in entirely separate, publicly traded companies. The valuation is market valuation -- not a number made up by Yahoo.
- kalistoga 15y agoThe problem is people don't invest in the present but invest solely based on the perception of the company's future.
- rdl 15y agoYahoo, like a lot of shitty corporations in death spiral, is worth less than the sum of its parts. It's not as if the stock price times shares = market cap is really a great figure, at least over short periods of time, but in the long term, reality tends to converge. Sun was sitting on a cash hoard of billions when Oracle bought it -- plus MySQL, plus some actually valuable technology, plus a lot of great engineers, plus patent portfolio. The assets were probably worth 2-3x the acquisition price! When HP split into HP and Agilent, the printer business alone was valued at more than the entire market cap of the company; the rest of HP was perceived as having negative value. A lot of Yahoo's value is in investments in Asia, investments which are rapidly trying to divorce themselves from Yahoo. Yahoo arguably has a sustainable display ad business, and some destination sites, (although I personally am not into advertising), but to make the turnaround, you'd want to axe the top several tiers of management. The new CEO is a good start; this is a great second step. A rational world with honest and effective boards of directors, coupled with greedy and self interested PE firms of large size probably would have already broken up Yahoo, HP, and RIM. The biggest crime with these companies is the thousands of great engineers stuck there, not accomplishing what they could at more effective organizations.
- ww520 15y agoDoes it mean Yahoo is on the verge of being brought?
- MrFoof 15y agoThere are also sources reporting that four more board members may be following him: Roy Bostock, Arthur Kern, Vyomesh Joshi and Gary Wilson. http://allthingsd.com/20120117/sources-four-more-board-members-will-be-following-yang-out-the-door/?mod=tweet http://allthingsd.com/20120117/sources-four-more-board-membe... Still rumor at this point, but the Wall Street Journal has a pretty good track record overall.
- teyc 15y agoYahoo is lost as a brand. My children don't know what Yahoo is. It is one of the million insipid content destinations on the web.
- fleitz 15y agoYour children also probably don't know what Petrochina is but like Yahoo that doesn't make them an unprofitable company. The nice thing about no one knowing who you are is that 22 year old college geeks don't get the idea to 'disrupt' your industry and instead focus on 'disrupting' a more well known brand like Facebook. I'd suggest educating your children as to how to make money instead of brand recognition.
- teyc 15y agoDoes anybody else get what fleitz was trying to say here? The nice thing about no one knowing who you are is that 22 year old college geeks don't get the idea to 'disrupt' your industry and instead focus on 'disrupting' a more well known brand like Facebook.
- tsotha 15y agoNobody bothers trying to catch the losers?
- fleitz 15y agoWhat I'm saying is that you can easily get yourself into the 1% with out having to make a huge name for yourself and if you want to get REALLY rich it's also possible to do without huge branding. Although YHOO and MSFT in the tech press are 'dying' businesses in the 'real world' they are hugely profitable. If you build yourself a business that puts you into the 1% with out making a huge name for yourself you're less likely to have your revenue stream threatened because most people aren't even thinking of competing with you.
- teyc 15y agoI understand the point you are bringing up. However, there's one thing about tech companies is that their cashflow can only be sustained if their position were defensible. RIM and Nokia demonstrate how quickly a stellar business can fall into the precipice. In terms of business lifecycle, Yahoo is effectively a cash cow. http://www.valuebasedmanagement.net/methods_bcgmatrix.html http://www.valuebasedmanagement.net/methods_bcgmatrix.html It may generate a lot of profit, but it is in a business that isn't growing its market share, and risks not replacing its lost audience.
- startupfounder 15y ago17 years is a really long time at any company. Jerry has done an amazing job building Yahoo! from a startup to dominate player in the tech industry and has created 13,600 jobs. Yahoo! already up 3.24% in after hours trading... so the market liked the decision. Its a choice between shareholder value and wanting to hold onto the core culture of the company. An interesting discussion on the Microsoft offer: http://www.quora.com/Yahoo/Why-did-Jerry-Yang-pass-on-the-Microsoft-offer http://www.quora.com/Yahoo/Why-did-Jerry-Yang-pass-on-the-Mi...
- joshu 15y agostandard disclaimer: afterhours trading is very thin liquidity, so a small amount of trading can move the stock price significantly without meaning much. tomorrow's opening price is the first real indicator of what "the market" thinks.
- dr_ 15y agoMaybe I'm in the minority here, but I don't think "fixing" Yahoo ought to be as difficult as people make it seem. It's still a well regarded brand, and many millions rely on it for email and as a homepage. It's finance section remains extremely popular. They purchased Sportacular, the app I use to keep track of games. Theyve just been very poorly managed. They acquired companies like delicious and Flickr, one they let wilted and the other they never really integrated into their platform- Flickr just feels like a freestanding entity. They should cut out the garbage that doesnt get many users and should focus on their prized assets. They should push ahead in developing unique content for their viewers. It may be too late to get into the mobile OS game, but TV is still pretty wide open and Yahoo can really do something here, using their existing assets and by further developing or partnering with content providers. I'm hopeful.
- nkassis 15y agoI agree with you on this. They have some really good things that they squander with bad management. Delicious should have replaced what ever was being developed internally since it was clearly superior but the company is full of politically minded middle managers who are breading in fighting. Maybe they could start there at fixing the thing, fire the majority of managers.
- microarchitect 15y agoMaybe I'm in the minority here, but I don't think "fixing" Yahoo ought to be as difficult as people make it seem. I worked for a semi-dysfunctional semiconductor company and so I think I have some perspective on what it takes to "fix" a company like Yahoo. I think the biggest reason a company becomes like Yahoo has less to do with senior management and more to do with the fact that the company is filled with low to mediocre quality middle managers and employees. Mediocre managers aren't very good at their job, so it seems like they make up by playing politics. Once politics is rampant, what gets done is not what works the best, but what helps you or your team get ahead in the political game. At this point you start bleeding talent because good people prefer not to work in an irrational workplace. You also lose the focus and initiative you need to keep a successful product successful. The worst part is that there's nothing you can really do to fix this. You can try to fire the bottom 10%, but if you only have a problem with the bottom 10%, you're not yahoo. You probably need to fire the bottom 50%, but then you wouldn't have enough personnel to keep all your assets going AND some of that 50% would also be good employees who lost out in the last edition the political olympic games. Any well-intentioned change in process or product focus by top-management will also inevitable morph into something completely different thanks to your low-quality middle managers who won't understand what you're trying to do, but will understand that they need to step up the politics to keep their jobs. I guess the point of my rant is that a big company is like an emergent system and you can't really fix a dysfunctional emergent system by changing a small number of things that are part of that system.
- blueplastic 15y agoYahoo!'s new spinoff, HortonWorks, can become a billion dollar Hadoop company down the line if they carefully navigate around Cloudera and MapR. Not sure how/if that affects Yahoo shareholders.
- ilaksh 15y agoApparently this thread is full of people who are better at being CEO of a multi-billion dollar company than anyone at Yahoo in the last several years.
- greut 15y agoI don't believe Yang did write that since he never (ever) used any capital letters in any of his communication.