Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang To Step Down 199
JagsLive was one of several readers to point out Jerry Yang's departure as Yahoo CEO. He's not leaving the company; he will return to his former role as Chief Yahoo, whatever that entails. Yang has been under fire in recent months from investors for his handling of Microsoft's recent acquisition attempt."Yahoo, under fierce financial pressure, has begun a search to replace company co-founder Jerry Yang as chief executive, the company said Monday. 'Jerry and the board have had an ongoing dialogue about succession timing, and we all agree that now is the right time to make the transition to a new CEO who can take the company to the next level,' Chairman Roy Bostock said in a statement."
Dividends? (Score:5, Interesting)
I just looked at the YHOO numbers and noticed there is no dividend. Watching some prophetic videos of Peter Schiff [youtube.com], he seems to be saying that every American stock is basically a speculative gamble, and that there is no place to invest in a company with a real balance sheet in the states.
Can anyone "in the business" comment on what he's saying? Is there a possibility of returning to the more formal method of investing as a stake/stockholder and receiving a share of real profits?
Something everyone always forgets, or just ignores (Score:5, Interesting)
Jerry Yang was never meant to be Yahoo's CEO.
He took ever when Terry Semel took a gigantic shit on the company. He failed to act on Yang's and Filo's suggestion that Yahoo acquire Google when that was still possible. This was when they were still using PageRank, prior to their major search engine acquisitions. I rememnber at the time that this was going on, I was constantly talking to Yahoo people about how much sense it made for them to do so. I also remember the looks on their faces when they all came back with "Semel's not going to do it." He also amassed a private fortune at the company's expense while letting Yahoo go down the drain.
They kicked him to the curb and fell back on Yang as interim CEO. He finally stuck to the position when it looked like that was all that would keep the shareholders happy. But it was simply never supposed to happen.
If I blame Yang for anything, it's for ever letting Semel head the company in the first place.
I've been cheering his rejection of Microsoft... (Score:4, Interesting)
...and I hope I'm not the only one. I actually use Yahoo Shopping on a regular basis, but if Yahoo were acquired by Microsoft I'd stop immediately, and find an alternate vendor-aggregator. Just a matter of principle (and maybe as much aesthetic as anything), but Microsoft just icks me out.
Kinda funny because it troubles me little to support an empire which would probably be just as evil if it had the same amount of power, Apple's. But Apple has an aesthetic sense, and has thus slipped perhaps-irrationally behind my defenses.
This whole Yahoo mess is also a fine example of the downside of going public -- you have amoral raiders screaming the battlecry "shareholder value" and using that to bludgeon anyone in a company who makes a principled decision which might not maximize stock prices in the short term.
(Mod me +2/-1 incoherent?)
Re:I've been cheering his rejection of Microsoft.. (Score:2, Interesting)
I really hope they make it.
Re:I've been cheering his rejection of Microsoft.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, I've got two Yahoo email accounts I've had since the Nineties (they said they were for life, I hope they meant my life, rather than their life...).
I like the Yahoo Mail interface, even more than the Gmail one in many respects. I've got a stack heaps of old emails (dating back 10 years almost).
But if Microsoft bought up Yahoo, I would be out as soon as I could.
Luckily I have access to POP for Yahoo, so I could just download all those emails that way (I should do that anyway...). (For those of you who have Yahoo email accounts, but don't have POP, I was going to tell you how to do it, but I can't get into my email account ... :(.)
Why don't I want Microsoft? Because I don't trust them. I don't trust Yahoo either, but inertia keeps me there...
Re:Dividends? (Score:5, Interesting)
Can't watch video since I'm on a machine without flash (or sound for that matter), but it's Schiff.
So he'll be pointing out that the US economy is fake, that it's all borrow and consume, and the US dollar is set to drop by a huge amount. And hence you should invest all your money overseas, via his firm of course.
He's basically right in principal, though I think he underestimates just how badly the US bursting will hurt the rest of the world, and he doesn't seem to notice that the US housing bubble is a dwarf compared with the UK... On Asia he's probably right, for the end game anyway.
Owning "growth" stocks that pay no dividends is gambling pure and simple. See Enron for how easy it is to create phantom earnings - it's a little harder to do so when you have to pay that dividend out... But that isn't US specific.
I would expect Schiff to not have any huge problems with US miners (of all sorts), US agriculture, and US oil companies. He does have the reverse of the norm view that the US has more "government risk" than other countries.
As in the US is more likely to declare a "windfall profit tax" and steal your dividends when those companies do very well as the domestic economy collapses or to simply confiscate your gold, etc than say China is. The really sad thing is that he's probably right on that one...
Re:I've been cheering his rejection of Microsoft.. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's all well and good when there is any "long term" to think about... but in the case of Yahoo, there's simply none. So it was a bad decision no matter how you look at it.
Re:I've been cheering his rejection of Microsoft.. (Score:3, Interesting)
...and I hope I'm not the only one.
No, you're not. I like Yahoo the way it is now. Just as I liked Hotmail the way it was before Microsoft fucked it all up. Sadly, many current Hotmail users have no clue that there was a time when Hotmail was streamlined, efficient and uncluttered. It ran on FreeBSD. It just worked without sucking.
Microsoft added the suckage to Hotmail, I am sure they'd manage to do the same with Yahoo.
Re:Dividends? (Score:2, Interesting)
Based on the current share price, the dividend is more than 2.5%, and the stock has has PEG of only 0.85.
Here's an interesting tidbit - MSFT's market cap is ~171B, which is *less* than what AAPL's was back in January.
Re:Isn't it kind of sad (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Isn't it kind of sad (Score:4, Interesting)
What you are missing is the shift that has occurred as to who exactly the customer is. Now days, for most large corporations the customer is the stock holder. We, the consumers are the product that is being sold. With Yahoo, Google, MSN etc. it's about how many eyeballs they have looking at their pages. For companies such as Ford, GM, Target, WalMart it's all about the size of their consumer base. That's why Ford and GM don't spend a lot of time building cars that tomorrows consumers might want. Their only focus is to build as many of whatever cars the consumer is buying today.
In this new world, as far as the corporations are concerned we're just a bunch of whores and their all fighting to see who is going to be our pimp.
Ya...what? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a former "Yahoo", and I've got to say that I spent much of my time hoping someone would buy the company, if only to mindwipe the boneheaded middle and upper management.
They could've been the AOL in an AOL/Time Warner sandwich — that "gem" that someone else paid too much for.
Now? Forget it. I did.
Yahoo search surrendered the search biz when they agreed to send search marketing results through google. Even with the Department of Justice shooting that down, well, it's a hell of a statement when even your competitor chooses The Other Guy.
Can't sell advertising (Score:4, Interesting)
Yahoo's problem is that they can't sell ads. Few companies want to buy ads on #2 or #3 when they're so far behind. That's the killer. Yahoo outsourced most of their ad operation to Google, which, over time, dooms them to irrelevance. Even Google's ad operation is in trouble. [alleyinsider.com] Online advertising is flat and has probably peaked. Google is no longer a growth stock.
Once you reach a certain level, search quality doesn't seem to affect market share much. Yahoo's search engine is fairly good. For about half of 2007, it was better than Google's. Yahoo had added all those specialized subengines (weather, stocks, celebrities, etc.) and Google had to catch up, which they did by late 2007. Yahoo's market share did not improve while they were better than Google. Search quality does matter if it's awful (see Cuil [cuil.com] and Rushmore Drive [rushmoredrive.com]), but once over the entry threshold, further improvements don't seem to affect the bottom line much. Advertising targeting matters more.
Yahoo still tries to be a "portal", but does anybody still use Yahoo as a home page other than people who somehow got it installed with their browser and doesn't know how to change? The trouble with "portals" is that the targeting is terrible; when the ads are displayed on the home page, the portal has no idea what the user wants yet.