Why Yahoo and Marissa Mayer's Over Reliance On Alibaba Could Spell Trouble 91
DavidGilbert99 writes "Marissa Mayer has been in charge at Yahoo for one year now. In that time she has seen the share price rise 70% and she's made some headline grabbing acquisitions — notably Tumblr for over $1 billion last month. However, look beneath the surface and things are not going so well. In this week's quarterly results, we saw ad sales fell by 12% year-on-year and as Alistair Charlton says in IBTimes UK: ' Yahoo earned $846m in cash by redeeming its shares in the group, representing a significant chunk of Yahoo's $1.07bn revenue for the quarter, down 1% on last year. ... The next few years will be a balancing act as the stabilizing wheels are removed and Yahoo, with dozens of acquired startups patching up the rust, will have to make progress under its own steam.'"
Re:Income source (Score:4, Insightful)
Advertising revenue and fees for operating online stores, as far as I can tell. They probably sell business intelligence data from their tracking efforts, too.
Confusing luck with talent (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of those "superstar" business executives are no better than their college classmates. They just happened to land in the right company at the right time.
I don't believe that Mayer has CEO super powers. She was lucky to have worked at Google at a time when it was poised to take off. Putting her in charge of a wounded beast like Yahoo is a completely different ball game though. I don't know that she actually has the chops to handle that kind of situation.
The problem with Yahoo is that it's an aimless company. Essentially an answer to a question nobody asked. Everything that used to make Yahoo special, somebody else now does better. They either get back on top in search (unlikely) or find something new to excel at.
Re:Income source (Score:4, Insightful)
Ads. The same Google sells and Microsoft's Bing group sells. Yahoo is behind in the game, but the balance can change very quickly. The reason for that being that in the end it's about how much traffic you get and social network effects can make traffic grow or shrink at an exponential rate.
Re:Income source (Score:5, Insightful)
>> What exactly does Yahoo sell?
As a Yahoo webmail user, it appears that they sell an annoying little ad that looks just like an email entry and gets inserted into your list of emails. When people click on it (I've done it myself a couple of times by accident), some stupid mark gets charged and the clicker makes a mental note to never buy anything from that advertiser again.
Not all is lost. (Score:3, Insightful)
Slashdot apparently still has a special icon for Yahoo stories
Which can only mean one of two things: /. isn't
(1) Yahoo still is very cool, hip, and totally in.
or (2)
Re:Confusing luck with talent (Score:2, Insightful)
A proven track record of what? She was at Google when Google did extraordinarily well. Correlation doesn't equal causation. Using your criteria, until 2000 Steve Ballmer also had a "proven track record in industry".
If she had taken 3 companies to the height Google went to (or even half of that) she would have a "track record". Until she's done that all she had was wither the good sense or the dumb luck to join Google when she did.
Re:Income source (Score:2, Insightful)
Given that the previous CEOs were much worse than her, I would say your advice is shit.
Can she give Yahoo some new life ? I seriously doubt it. They lack technology "top guns" (superstart developers). Their search engine is outsourced to MS and it is frankly shite.
What she could do is to take Android phones and try to innovate and differentiate. Maybe less built-in, dragnet spying ? Maybe "due process, rule of law" and so on ? But I am sure she is too much immeresed into the GoogleNSAplex to use this massive opportunity.
But let's dream for a few seconds: Whatabout making a fully encrypted YahooDroid ? Government only gets access after performing twenty CPU hours of workload. That would still allow for Law enforcement to get access (they can force yahoo to provide them access), for SPECIFIC devices as opposed to "let's suck in the data of 1000 million Android users and store it forever".
But then, Mayer is already part of the ruling classes and what they want is as much control as they can get. They want to shaft the little guy to further their insane ambitions. That will do it for yahoo, as the world needs only one GooNSA.