Marissa Mayer to Make Case That Yahoo Can Be Turned Around
Marissa Mayer is gearing up for yet another turnaround plan for Yahoo! Inc. Given the company's persistent growth slump, even a sweeping overhaul may do little to fend off activist investors threatening to wage a proxy war aimed at her removal.
Yahoo's chief executive officer, who has overseen falling sales in 7 of the past 10 quarters, promised to detail a plan to cut costs and boost growth. The effort, set to be announced with quarterly earnings Tuesday, will probably include job cuts, a person with knowledge of the matter has said.
Once a major gateway to the wealth of information, communities and entertainment on the Internet, people have in recent years ditched Yahoo in favor of Google, Facebook Inc. and other companies at the center of people's digital lives. Since her hiring in 2012, Mayer has made scant headway in efforts to restore growth at the Web pioneer. Now, she's mired in a complex project to decouple Yahoo's main business from its $25 billion stake in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Activist investors dissatisfied with progress have all but threatened a proxy war.
"She's almost out of time," said Ryan Jacob, who manages Yahoo shares as part of his Jacob Internet Fund. "At this point, it's hard to imagine a proxy fight being averted. I would welcome it, given the changes at Yahoo have just been incremental. That's what's been frustrating shareholders for years."
Yahoo to Lay Off 15%, Consider Reverse Spin-Off
Yahoo on Tuesday announced it would consider a reverse spinoff and cut about 15 percent of its workforce as part of a restructuring to boost a sluggish core business.
The tech company also posted quarterly results broadly in line with analysts' expectations. Yahoo reported adjusted fourth-quarter earnings of 13 cents per share on $1.27 billion in revenue.
Analysts expected Yahoo to report earnings of about 13 cents per share on $1.19 billion in revenue, according to a consensus estimate from Thomson Reuters. Yahoo shares fell nearly 3 percent in after-hours trading.
Related Stories
Yahoo! Inc. was accused in a lawsuit of manipulating employee performance evaluations to justify firing hundreds of workers in order to meet its financial targets.
Gregory Anderson, who was an editor for some of Yahoo's online news content, claims he and about 600 others at the company were unfairly fired in 2014 after managers retooled a numerical ranking system to downgrade their performance.
The mass terminations occurred without appropriate notice in violation of state and federal laws, according to the complaint filed Monday in federal court in San Jose, California. Anderson also accused the company of gender discrimination under the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964, citing internal promotions he said were limited to female candidates.
"The employees were never told their actual metric numeric ranking or how it had been determined," according to the complaint. The quarterly performance rating process "therefore permitted and encouraged discrimination based on gender and any other personal bias held by management."
California law requires that the termination of 50 or more employees within a month occur with a 60-day notice period. Anderson was told by Yahoo that he was fired while attending a journalism fellowship at the University of Michigan granted with the support of the company, according to the complaint. He said he was informed the decision was effective immediately.
Earlier Coverage: Yahoo! Turnaround Plan: Proxy War and Fire Mayer?
(Score: 3, Funny) by dyingtolive on Thursday February 04 2016, @09:49AM
What about third option: Flounder around like a chicken with its head cut off?
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 04 2016, @10:22AM
Been there, done that.
(Score: 2) by TheReaperD on Thursday February 04 2016, @10:06AM
Hmm... where have we heard this over and over again? Oh yea, HP! Tell me, how well was replacing CEOs every year or two because it "isn't getting fixed fast enough" work out for them? At this stage, if they follow the same path as HP, they'll circle the drain into final bankruptcy and have their few tangible assets sold at auction. At least HP makes a physical product that they can limp on with. Yahoo is a data and hype company. If their hype is gone, only what data they possess has value until it becomes too old then it is completely worthless.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit
(Score: 1) by tftp on Thursday February 04 2016, @10:22AM
If their hype is gone, only what data they possess has value until it becomes too old then it is completely worthless.
It had been a decade, probably, since I visited any of Yahoo Web sites. Well, I'm an extreme case, but how many common folks actually keep using Yahoo, and why? I have no idea what they are doing these days, and I never heard anything about them that would make me curious enough to check it out. I opened their home page, and it still looks like some old web portal right out of the age of Netscape, just with different colors and with less information. I have no idea how one could ever make money on that.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Thursday February 04 2016, @11:39AM
They bought - and promptly ruined - flickr, that is their main exposure to the common user these days
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Thursday February 04 2016, @12:41PM
I still know people who use AOL. Yes.
It was only a couple of years ago that Yahoo people made a presentation to me, wherein they laid out the value Yahoo brings. One of the things I recall was that a lot of people play chess and games like that through them.
Never underestimate the importance of inertia.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Webweasel on Thursday February 04 2016, @02:58PM
I still use yahoo email.
There are a few reasons why.
1) I'm lazy
2) I have had this account since 1996 (ish, I don't recall now)
3) There are dunno, a hundred? accounts registered to this email. i.e. the transfer would be a right pain and I'd forget about stuff
4) I like not having to maintain a bunch of home servers etc
5) I did mention the laziness right?
6) Lack of viable alternative? I don't really trust Google nor Microsoft (not that yahoo are to be trusted) but what other firm is going to be around the rest of my life?
Now that I think about it, I really should make a move.
Any helpful suggestions as to where I can get an email account that:
I can have an idea that it will be available for the rest of my life (Tough call I know)
and
I won't be spied upon.
Dammit, I'm just being unrealistic.
Priyom.org Number stations, Russian Military radio. "You are a bad, bad man. Do you have any other virtues?"-Runaway1956
(Score: 1) by tftp on Thursday February 04 2016, @09:00PM
When I got tired of Google's antics and their daily overhauls of Google Mail (with experimental, poorly thought out features thrown in for everyone) I went out and registered my own domain. Today you can run your mail server on a R-Pi or a BBB, or you can rent the smallest machine from AWS, or you can rent a real service from a datacenter... the difference is that the domain is yours, and no matter where you move, onto what hardware, and on what IP address, your email address will stay the same forever. That's the only way to be sure.©
I cannot say that the server works entirely on its own - you have to upgrade the software periodically. I also have DKIM, SPF configured, and I have a fairly aggressive fail2ban. But I also have my own Web site, and I can have any other service that I desire. A mail server requires a static IP address (workarounds are possible, but not recommended) and you have to have the RDNS configured. I have my own set of DNS servers, so that is easy. For other people it might be more worry - external DNS is often not working well, and all attempts to reach the tech support are useless. I had a situation when the provider's DNS was giving wrong answers every other query. Probably some server didn't get the memo. The tech support said it cannot be, and therefore there is nothing to discuss. I pulled the plug on them, deployed bind9 boxes at a few locations, and configured them to synchronize properly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 04 2016, @03:08PM
I use it every day.
Not for search or anything else. I use it for 'myyahoo'. I just like the RSS feed reader they have. It is nicely consolidated and lets me get thru 'the news' fairly quickly.
Also for tracking stocks it is pretty good. Especially considering it is free. If you want better you pretty much have to pay for it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 04 2016, @10:15AM
Seriously, what would you do as CEO of Yahoo?
Does Yahoo have anything new to offer that can make them more money? Do they have a "skunk works" team that has interesting stuff?
Or is it merely waiting to die, while pretending to the investors that there's hope.
Their finance site stuff was nice but I never paid a dime for it nor would I or most pay for it (it's nice, but not indispensable).
Their email was OK, but then they mucked about with it. To me if they didn't mess about so much I'd use their stuff just to have my info in different silos (Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc) and hopefully make the data collectors/miners do little a bit more work.
FWIW I lied about my birthday to Google (and Facebook) and one day people on Facebook were wishing me happy birthday on my Google "birth date"- I think it was via the Google Calendar thing, but I don't recall telling Google to share my birthday with others.
Yahoo doesn't appear to have shared my birthday in such a manner yet, or maybe that lie was too unbelievable and got rejected by the data miners/sharers, or not that many others are using Yahoo ;).
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 04 2016, @10:28AM
Seriously, what would you do as CEO of Yahoo?
It's a good question.
I think their infrastructure team (server operations, etc.) are pretty good. If they wanted to, I suppose they could enter the savage "cloud computing" or hosting fields. No guarantee of success there.
But, let's face it--quality isn't really what makes companies succeed these days, it's hype. More specifically, it's the age-old hype toward people with "disposable income."
So I'd hire a bunch of people aged 18-29, focus group the hell out of them, and start rolling the dice on weird startup-style ideas. Maybe this is the 2016 equivalent of Lockheed's "skunk works?" Yahoo! certainly (still) has the talent. People/investors might start noticing them if they did something new, relevant, and/or significant.
Who would've thought twitter, instagram, etc. would have ever taken off? Maybe there are still good ideas out there.
On the other hand I'd also talk to another group of 18-29ers and figure out how to streamline the entire Yahoo! experience so it's not such a navigation and advertising nightmare. I can't imagine why anyone would ever go to yahoo.com, simply because the experience is so bad. It gets weirder the deeper you drill into it--inconsistent page layouts, uneven/old content, etc. Time for a big refresh.
Those things may not save the company, but they'd at least catapult them to some level of relevance in today's world.
Prediction: They won't listen to an AC on soylentnews, and they'll go under or get bought by some ghoulish activist investor and dismembered.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 04 2016, @06:46PM
>> So I'd hire a bunch of people aged 18-29, focus group the hell out of them,
>> and start rolling the dice on weird startup-style ideas.
So basically, you have no ideas whatsoever. Here's what your bunch of 18-29 year olds will do when they hold the reins - piss it up against the wall until the money runs out.
(Score: 2) by WillR on Thursday February 04 2016, @07:29PM
So I'd hire a bunch of people aged 18-29, focus group the hell out of them, and start rolling the dice on weird startup-style ideas.
First, change the name.
For people under 30 Yahoo! is grandma's email, and the where "web 2.0" sites go to die - flickr, del.icio.us, tumblr, are all moribund or on the decline.
(And those of us over 30, it's the same but we also remember them buying and slowly killing GeoCities and Musicmatch Jukebox, too.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 04 2016, @04:04PM
Seriously, what would you do as CEO of Yahoo?
1) Ensure that existing customers don't get royally pissed off when I decide to cosmetically redesign everything. Most specifically, make sure that (in so far as possible) all existing services remain with options to be as they are while I roll out new designs to attract newer users.
2) Not piss off my workforce by dropping all telecommute options while carving out a niche at headquarters for my baby to reside at, thus showing the peon workers how little they're worth and how much I am.
3) Advertise, advertise, advertise the HELL out of my company. You know, like Google and Facebook do and Yahoo does not.
4) Restructure the pricing on my core services lower, to try and bring market share away from the other players. Become the more economical option while offering greater service.
5) Again, do NOT piss off my existing userbase by pissing all over my acquisitions.
That would be a good start.
Does Yahoo have anything new to offer that can make them more money? Do they have a "skunk works" team that has interesting stuff?
Not sure if you were implying this or not, but as the CEO I'd expect to have the ability to create an R&D division and/or ensure it is adequately funded.
Or is it merely waiting to die, while pretending to the investors that there's hope.
Since its 2014 revenue was 4.6 billion, I doubt it's dying any time soon. But now that you mention it, I'll add: 6) Hire the best spin control artists I can get to more accurately reflect Yahoo's position.
Their finance site stuff was nice but I never paid a dime for it nor would I or most pay for it (it's nice, but not indispensable).
Their email was OK, but then they mucked about with it. To me if they didn't mess about so much I'd use their stuff just to have my info in different silos (Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc) and hopefully make the data collectors/miners do little a bit more work.
FWIW I lied about my birthday to Google (and Facebook) and one day people on Facebook were wishing me happy birthday on my Google "birth date"- I think it was via the Google Calendar thing, but I don't recall telling Google to share my birthday with others.
Yahoo doesn't appear to have shared my birthday in such a manner yet, or maybe that lie was too unbelievable and got rejected by the data miners/sharers, or not that many others are using Yahoo ;).
MVVHO, Yahoo still has the ability to be the best services portal out there. I quit using it only because they "improved" it and thus trashed my existing layout, so I might be biased. But again, no hype, nobody knows it. The real key to success might be make sure the company is hyped more than the CEO is. And I have yet to see that from Mayer.
Oh, and, "Complexity is too hard and we'll make it easy for somebody to buy us out," should be immediate grounds for her removal. She has chosen what is easy over what is right.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 04 2016, @09:11PM
I thought Mayer did a good job revamping the home page. The endless crawl, with embedded sponsored content, was a good idea.
From the outside, it doesn't look like she didn't do a good job with much else.
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Friday February 05 2016, @01:52AM
I would restructure to boost stock prices, start a bunch of random hype-generating projects, carve up the company, sell, and bail out with a golden parachute!
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 04 2016, @10:26AM
Bubble.
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Thursday February 04 2016, @10:27AM
I currently use Yahoo mail as it allows me to send and receive via my many domain names. If there is another service that will allow me to do this then I would move. I don't use any social networking crap, and don't want to use gmail.
I just need a simple email solution that I can access from anywhere and is not self-hosted.
(Score: 1) by TobascoKid on Thursday February 04 2016, @10:42AM
If you're willing to pay for your email service, then Fastmail is a good option.
(Score: 2) by Alphatool on Thursday February 04 2016, @11:28AM
I use Yahoo mail for the multiple domains thing, and Fastmail is a good alternative except it's pretty expensive. I'd need to be on the Premier package at $120 per year, but as a legacy Yahoo mail plus subscriber I'm paying $19.99 for basically the same features at Yahoo. Honestly, I can't see myself changing until Yahoo stuff up really badly.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 04 2016, @02:41PM
$120? That's like 2-3 hours of salary for a programmer. Yeah, that *real* expensive.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 04 2016, @03:11PM
Yeah he should use an equivalent service that does the same thing for him all because 'he can afford it'. Salesman must love you. You are an easy 'i like to flaunt my wealth' type.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Demose on Thursday February 04 2016, @10:55AM
Let it burn.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday February 04 2016, @12:08PM
They'll just move on to a different site.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 04 2016, @02:34PM
They'll just move on to a different site...
...like this one.
I, for one, welcome our SJW overlords!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Thursday February 04 2016, @05:46PM
I, for one, welcome our SJW overlords!
How did this turn into a SJW story, exactly?
It's almost as if gender is playing a very large role in your analysis...
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday February 04 2016, @09:54PM
Tumblr is ground zero for that particular cultural debate:
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=tumblr+sjw [google.com]
https://www.reddit.com/r/TumblrInAction/ [reddit.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Thursday February 04 2016, @12:26PM
Another tech company is purging workers during this chronic talent "shortage" - I wish I had kept a list of these purges over the past few years and could add this to it. I can't remember all of them. If nothing else, enough IT workers ought to be freed up after the past 2-3 years of non-stop purges to satisfy demand for a couple of generations.
And Yahoo made 8% more revenue in 2015 than in 2014, on the order of billions. They're purging workers to save a few hundred thousand. If workers in IT are purged when companies are doing well (like Disney!), then what chance does anyone have? I could understand Yahoo getting rid of workers if they were doing badly.
Some of the purged workers may be dead weight, but they can't all be, because there are too many purges cutting too deep these days.
As for Yahoo, specifically, their woes seem to be completely the fault of bad management. They went on an acquisition spree and are writing down "goodwill" (an accounting term when you acquire something and can't figure out what it is). Without that, they'd be doing good. The funny thing is I have not heard one single thing about any of the stuff they bought. I can't even remember what they bought. You hear about Google, Facebook, and other company's acquisitions all the time because they acquire things they use and that help them. What technology has Yahoo bought and what have they done with it?
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 04 2016, @01:40PM
The workers at Disney were not purged, they were replaced with H1B's. Big difference.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday February 04 2016, @04:46PM
The real reason why Yahoo is still around. Once you get someone that's not particularly technically literate using your system, you've got them for life. A technically illiterate person doesn't want to learn about google or duckduckgo. In fact I have found that some people like all that junk on the yahoo homepage . . .
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Username on Thursday February 04 2016, @05:27PM
Just run for president.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by acid andy on Thursday February 04 2016, @05:59PM
I'd use Yahoo if they actually provided their own search engine that returns pages with exactly the terms I entered. I am sick of Google's I-know-better-than-you, dumbed down algorithm where most of the results don't have the words I typed. Bing doesn't seem much better either. DuckDuckGo is great but just hasn't indexed as many pages as the others.
With these stupid fuzzy search algorithms, I am often convinced there are pages out on the web that are now unreachable because the exact searches that I know would reach them get so diluted by the algorithm that I get pages of popular barely relevant sites returned instead. Anything nichey now and you're screwed. It's even worse when they try to tailor results based on your previous searches. A search engine should operate completely independently from any knowledge of the user who is doing the search because the whole point is that the user is looking for new, unbiased, independent information.
I think the years of keyword spamming are partly responsible for the situation we have now, but they don't excuse it. Keyword spamming sites are easily identifiable. You can avoid them by using a minus before spammy words that don't relate directly to your search. The search engines could identify them in a similar way. A site that has a huge number of nouns that are trying to cover too broad a range of topics would qualify as one.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by SanityCheck on Thursday February 04 2016, @06:38PM
Doesn't Bing handle Yahoo search now? (see: http://www.wired.com/2009/07/yahoo-gives-up/) [wired.com]
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday February 04 2016, @06:51PM
Ah yeah I knew they were using one of the other major search engines. I just couldn't remember exactly which one or whether they had changed again since. My point is though, if they want me to visit, they should get back to their roots and make a search engine that actually gives decent, precise results. I guess the world has moved on though so dumbed down is what sells. I also guess they couldn't justify the expenditure of maintaining their own enormous data centers and crawlers when they can just license them from someone else.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by len_harms on Thursday February 04 2016, @08:55PM
returns pages with exactly the terms I entered
That drives me bonkers sometimes too. However they have the ability to do exact search still.
1) type in your search
2) search tools
3) all results
4) verbatim
Have not figured out if you can make it stick thru a setting though :(
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Friday February 05 2016, @10:41AM
If you are fine with settling for the browser's built-in searches (ie from addressbar) just add &tbs=li:1 to th search url