Hedge Fund Manager Criticizes Yahoo for Wasting $3 Billion On Poor Acquisitions (businessinsider.com) 159
mrspoonsi writes: On Monday morning, Eric Jackson, manager of hedge fund SpringOwl, sent a brutal 99-page presentation to Yahoo's board, outlining his case for why the company should drop Marissa Mayer as CEO and find new management. Jackson points out that Yahoo has burned through $3 billion on M&A in the past three years since Mayer took the reins, which contributes to $10 billion in what Jackson calls Yahoo's misallocated capital. The value of all of those startups Yahoo has acquired, Jackson says, is worth nothing at Yahoo's current stock price. Jackson also points out that Yahoo has a history of buying up startups run by former Google APM members. While at Google, Mayer started the company's elite associate product-manager program. Of the 49 acquisitions Yahoo has made under Mayer's leadership, six were startups founded by ex-Googlers. The total cost of these six acquisitions is $319 million, according to Jackson's slide deck. Yahoo bought Polyvore in July for $230 million. Polyvore, a social commerce site that lets users make artistic collages of clothes and accessories...But Jackson does not mince words when it comes to Yahoo's decision to spend shareholder money acquiring Polyvore and companies like it. "It's not acceptable to pay $230M for zombie companies run by former APM members," he says, pointing out that Polyvore had raised $22 million in VC funding, was 8 years old, and had gone through multiple pivots. For all intents and purposes, it looked like a goner until Yahoo bought it.
Marissa must be a prepper (Score:5, Funny)
she bought those zombie companies for the coming apocalypse!
Either that or she was just doing a solid by her old Google buddies
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Hundreds of millions of dollars are not a solid, they are however a pretty profound hint of corruption and purchasing commissions. Offshore tax havens wreak havoc upon governments and even more upon corporations. You could imagine the chaos if those countries that funded offshore tax havens at enormous cost to those countries, demanded full details or threatened to cut off the tax havens by zeroing their currency, youch, a lot of very surprising people would end up in crowbar hotels and not friendly ones f
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That is not how currency exchange rates are set.
Please learn what arbitrage means and think about how it would leave anybody trying to 'zero a currency' bleeding from all orifices.
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Tax havens a net importers, hugely net importers, zero their currency and they starve to death, straight up. They can not buy anything, if their currency has to recognised value in the countries they wish to import from. You zero a currency by making it illegal to trade in it.
Re:Marissa must be a prepper (Score:5, Insightful)
Either that or she was just doing a solid by her old Google buddies
That's what CEO's do. When Yahoo eventually drops her, her buddies will ensure she gets another position at the top of another company without any shareholder input into it, or a nice fat golden parachute on her way out. It's how Léo Apotheker got hold of HP, and how he walked away with $25 Million when they had to boot him.
It's time we destroy the cult of the CEO, they're nothing but corporate leaches feeding the masses (shareholders) free bread (short term gains) while the company crumbles around them.
Re:Marissa must be a prepper (Score:4, Insightful)
her buddies will ensure she gets another position at the top of another company without any shareholder input into it,
What nonsense. Shareholders vote on the board, and the board selects the CEO. You can bet the holders of the majority of shares are content with a CEO selection. Yes, it's one vote per share, not per shareholder, but even so "minority shareholder lawsuit" is a common enough occurrence if the board ignores its fiduciary responsibility.
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Theoretically, yes. In practice, boards are independent commissions, which maintain themselves and run the company.
Ever seen a ballot for a shareholders' meeting? It is likely to have several questions on it, each with a recommendation by the board. I'd assume that the big institutional holders (mutual funds, retirement funds, etc.) vote the way the board recommends, rather than pay attention to details. The individual shareholders will typically either toss the ballot or vote the board's recommendat
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More's the pity. Still bitter about having worked for a startup that bootstrapped to profitability and never sold out. Because there were no VCs, the board was beholden to nobody. Founders didn't even shop the place out. Options ended up worthless. Eventually the company will end up worthless too. The company ended up working for the continued job preservation of its management. And the CEO didn't care.
If it was so important to be CEO, why not sell the company at a premium and use the money to start another one? We've wasted multiple startups' worth of funding on internal projects that went nowhere except to give product managers a product to manage, and developers a way to train for their next jobs at companies with futures.
They're managing the company responsibly as a going concern, not as a pump-and-dump opportunity. They're keeping the lights on and the workers paid. And you're pissed because you've got a steady job with training opportunities, a salary, and some moderately valuable shares, instead of an unearned, over-valued payday? Sign your letter of resignation and cash in, if you're that upset about it. Use that money to found your own company and whore it out to the biggest billionaire idiots you can find. Not willin
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It's common to offer equity, in the form of stock options, to valuable employees, because it's cheaper than paying them what they're worth, and a high-level employee can feel like he or she is working towards making those options valuable. In any case, if stock options are used as an incentive to take the job, it's part of the compensation, although a speculative part.
The problem with the options is that the shares are worthless without a market for them. The company I worked for had an IPO partly to a
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Re:Marissa must be a prepper (Score:4, Insightful)
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Well, they praised the sex of the CEO when they installed her. So what?
What the $&@! are M&A? (Score:2, Interesting)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Companies often have a large influential group that is involved in M&A activity. What did you expect on /. - a well written summary?
Re:What the $&@! are M&A? (Score:5, Informative)
Mergers and Acquisitions.
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T&A.
Quid quo (Score:1, Insightful)
If I were in charge of Yahoo at that point I could best ensure my own survive not by trying to mutate the company into something viable but by spreading the wealth and getting into as many crony networks as possible. I buy your gold plated turd for $250 million today, you buy mine tomorrow. That's how
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Prove it was corruption instead of negligence. The evidence is entirely circumstantial. Unless Mayer did something reckless or foolish it will be nearly impossible to pin anything on her in this respect. At the end of the day: don't let individual people make decisions if individual bias is an undesired factor in the decision making process.
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I don't think the fiduciary regulations cover negligence. You can, legally, be a negligent CEO. They're meant to cover willful acts and knowing acts, to the exclusion of all others, as far as I know. Basically, they can be a bumbling idiot but if they're purposefully a bumbling idiot WITH the aim of being harmful then it's a violation of the law. I think there's also a degree to which it can become a criminal act instead of just a civil offense though I'm not sure where the split lies.
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Quite possibly it is illegal. Now, get that established in court. Question any CEO decision and you'll get a lot of evidence from the company that it was discussed and done for reasons. It will be hard to get a preponderance of evidence that the CEO or board did something deliberately wrong. Criminal trials are mostly going to be futile, as in that case the prosecutor needs to prove beyond reasonable doubt that some individual person did something criminal.
incorrect (Score:2)
No, that IS illegal. The CEO has a responsibility to the shareholders.
Incorrect. The CEOs have a responsibility to themselves .
Merger and Acquisitions (Score:5, Informative)
In case anybody is wondering M&A stands for Mergers and Acquisitions.
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Re:Merger and Acquisitions (Score:5, Interesting)
I was at a company once where every time it was announced we were considering a merger, the stock price went up. When the merger when through, the stock price went up again. The VP of Acquisitions eventually became the CEO. The stock got up to unreasonable levels, at which point they announced considering an acquisition and an analyst said "hmm, I wonder if that's a good idea" and the stock plummed by half over the next two days. It was an industry leader though, it went through the dotcom boom and bust six months before of other companies.
But anyway, Mergers and Acquisitions has often been seen as a way to make money. And Yahoo did make money this way. They did almost too well with Alibaba which is worth more than Yahoo now (which raises tricky legal concerns about who owns who). The problem is falling into the trap of thinking mergers by itself is a good idea. Just because Google can buy useless companies by paying 100 times their estimated value does not mean everyone should follow suit.
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Yahoo now (which raises tricky legal concerns about who owns who).
Really how? in what way? Yahoo has a minority position in Alibaba. I don't see how its complicated at all. Yahoo I am sure has some voting rights or something where Alibaba is concerned, but I don't know I have never directly held stock in a Chinese company before so common vs preferred etc might work a little different.
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I would hope Yahoo owns Alibaba on the NYSE.
It's still a shaky thing. But better than owning anything on the Shanghai exchange these days.
You can get arrested in China for pointing out that the AVERAGE PE ratio on Shanghai was over 100 at the height of the insanity and is still north of 70.
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Jesus christ, your arrogance is blinding.
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And you don't see any problems in a system that forces employees to keep one eye on the market - and thus off their work - since they're the ones who're carrying the risk?
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No problems at all. Every adult is responsible for the consequences of one's choices. Doing the research before making important choices, like where to work, is a key part of being a grown-up, as is contingency planning for when it goes to shit anyhow.
Do you keep an eye on the weather before heading out? On the traffic before commuting? Do you blame the system when you get rained on because you didn't bother to bring an umbrella?
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So if the owner shuts down a department, will he have to find new equivalent jobs for the people who worked there? They lost their jobs as a result of his choices, so is he responsible for for those consequences?
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Your employers are not your parents. It's not their duty, not should it be, to look out for your best interests and no one should ever be confused by this. A job is not a hugbox. And none of that stops you from having a great life - you just have to plan responsibly for the shit that happens in life.
Re: Merger and Acquisitions (Score:2)
The days of putting your blinders on and working in your silo segregated from the rest of the company's operations and external influences are long gone. PHBs would love for you to do that as you are more manageable and closer to the cog they need but it is very detrimental to your personal growth and career.
All employees should be keeping an eye on the competition and motions within the company. This will help you dodge bad positions, career paths, and management. The docile employee is the perfect fall
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Personally, I'm a good developer. I'm crap at office politics, and I don't want to have to follow the market closely. I do know how the company operates, including what happens to orders from the people who actually give money to the company so that, among other things, I get paid.
If I can rely on management to be straight with me, rather than trying to deceive me or keep things hidden from me, I can concentrate on software and therefore I'm a more productive employee. If I have to take an adversarial
Well maybe Yahoo will replace Motorola (Score:4, Informative)
As the inspiration for most Dilbert strips.
Eh (Score:3)
Carly 2016 (Score:3, Funny)
She sounds like she has a bright future as Carly Fiorina's running mate!
Did Yahoo EVER make money? (Score:2)
I remember back around Y2K they were burning through capital and had zero profits to show.
Re:Did Yahoo EVER make money? (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember back around Y2K they were burning through capital and had zero profits to show.
Yahoo was an early investor in Alibaba. They have made billions and billions off of that investment. Other than that, they have not done much.
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That's because they *MIGHT* have to pay considerably more than $1.2B in US taxes (more like $16B) when they sell/convert those shares.
That's probably where this attack on Mayer is coming from... They all have their own ideas on what legal maneuvers the business should take to avoid the billions in taxes, and Mayer is going to be on the wrong side of one group or another.
Wasn't Alibaba (Score:3)
I don't know when they bought Flickr... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know when they bought Flickr, but it was under her tenure that they imposed infinite scrolling on us, and made Pro a nearly valueless product for many people. I hope they can spin out Flickr somehow, and make it for all the users again, not just a lame attempt to play to tablet people. Nothing against tablet people, but the world is more than quick-flipping through pictures and memes with text on the picture. For some of us, the prose under our pictures is just as important as the picture itself and when you make viewers hunt for the prose they won't do it. They'll just go "this picture isn't very sensational" and move on. So sad. End rant.
p.s., A wikipedia style non-profit for Flickr might not be a bad idea.
Just TODAY (Score:3)
Re:Just TODAY (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure who in their right mind would have held Yahoo, even before Mayer crashed and burned. Yahoo is a search engine that isn't Google with no entrepreneurial energy left to even sort of try to make a fight of it. They're basically a holding company for Alibaba stock. They need to resurrect Zombie Steve Jobs from the grave to save them. Marissa Mayer never had a chance. I'd almost feel sorry for her, except that she's making bank off this job. I just hope she didn't want to work as a CEO ever again of a company not bankrolled by herself.
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I may not be in my right mind but I noticed Yahoo! coming up, again and again, in often unrelated topics here on this site and a few others. So, I looked. Their stock was cheap and I figured that I'd buy some and maybe lose a little so I bought a lot as it would be unlikely that I'd lose a little. It wasn't long after that the stock started going up. It climbed quite a bit. I held it for a little while over a year and sold last November (mid-months as I recall). I don't know exactly what the values were but
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I did think about a scenario like your situation when I wrote my comment, and you certainly can make money on an upswing from news like hiring a hyped CEO like Mayer. I think I tend to think about longer term investment when talking about holding stock and that isn't the whole story.
However, there is a difference between buying up a fundamentally sound company like VW that just happens to be on a downswing, and a company like Yahoo who has shitty fundamentals and is teetering on the brink. People who buy
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Hey, but every since Marissa joined as the CEO the companies share price nearly doubled. I don't know how much of the price rise is attributed to Alibaba's price rise. But I think Marissa is not the only person who should take the brunt in the Yahoo story. I think the screw up began right from when Terry Semel was the CEO. Semel was one clueless CEO who made the most out of Yahoo, he was a freeloader. Carol Bartz lacked vision too but at least she knew how to streamline operations and turn Yahoo back into p
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> I just hope she didn't want to work as a CEO ever
> again of a company not bankrolled by herself.
Eh, she could always run for president.
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his opinions on Meyer's efforts: "DOA.".
YHOO was mostly "DOA" indeed when Mayer took over. However, with her initial efforts in being overly meticulous with the redesigning of the logo (the 30 days of logos), the bombardment of press releases concerning their Weather app and her Flickr changes, there was proof she was overly (too much?) involved in new projects. But then there was YHOO's Daily Fantasy product being released and that's when you knew Mayer had checked out and YHOO was dead under her leadership. In an industry that's raising 100s
She'll still get her golden parachute (Score:2)
Corporate America rewards their CEOs for failure.
Handing out the Golden Parachutes! (Score:2)
Maybe Marissa is getting the hint that Yahoo is going in, so the best thing to do is to try to steer the remaining cash to her cronies (and herself) while it lasts?
Nah...couldn't be!
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"Improving Shareholder Value" is the new pyramid scheme.
Example: IBM is "too small" to turn things around... so they need to merge with another company, strip off the business, and let go of a bunch of employees (funny that the execs always seem to do great in those deals and the top-heavy organization always remains top heavy with execs and upper management). They'll see an uptick in the stock price. When things fall again, rinse, lather, repeat....until you can no longer reverse the trend, then bail out w
So are they ready to invest in a long term CEO? (Score:3)
I will let employees and shareholders judge Marissa, but Yahoo is going through like one CEO per year. Would you expect any employee to be great before at least 3 years on a job? Why is it different for presumably the most difficult job in the organization?
Plus, some time is needed to turn around a large, bureaucratic company in any given direction. With Marissa, it has been killing of smaller projects and focusing on mobile apps. I give her some credit for at least getting people to talk about the company and putting it in front of customers with Firefox deal.
Now maybe there are other successful directions, like extreme cost cutting and collecting profits as long as they can possibly last. Oracle seems to be doing good job milking RDBMS which was dying longer than Yahoo was around.
But if you never allow a CEO to truly learn how to manage the company and spend time implementing a consistent vision, you are doomed to die as you throw away previous spending to chase the latest wishful thinking.
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"Would you expect any employee to be great before at least 3 years on a job? "
for her pay level? she's got 90 days or she is thrown out the door.
These people claim they are superstars that require obscene pay. They had better be able to shit dollar bills in 90 days.
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Are you kidding? They'd better be able to shit Krugerrands.
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Having money does not give people any magical superpowers when it comes to intelligence or people skills.
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Marissa has been CEO of Yahoo! since sometime in 2012, July(ish) as I recall.
While your post is interesting, it is neither informative nor based on factual data. My memory is faulty but I was interested and researched the company a couple of years ago. They've been around since like 1991 and have had something like 7 CEOs during that time.
Feel free to double check my work. A number or two might be off but that won't matter. Marissa's hire date should be at about that time and the overall number of CEOs is l
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What the hell are you talking about? RDBMS Still run the world. Do you think your bank uses noSql? or hotel reservation systems, or the IRS, or well hell you know everybody everywhere. Just because there are some cases where nosql is useful does not mean relational systems are dying.
Mind boggles (Score:2)
Seems bizarre that a company in Yahoo's situation would be doing M&As with companies that are not clearly wildly profitable. Trying to pick winners in startup space is something VCs should be doing; I'd not be impressed if I was a Yahoo shareholder.
All their acquisitions should be being done because it's more effective for them to invest shareholder money in the acquisition than it is to developed the equivalent product/revenue stream/service internally.
It's not really clear if the acquisitions of start
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This is true... I apply Slashdot logic and reasoning to (some) of my investing. I've been at it for nearly six years now. I don't drink now but I came up with the idea when I was drunk and, lo and behold, it actually, kind of, works. I should note that I quit drinking about three years ago, a bit over - actually. With that note comes this; I did absolutely horrific, losing great sums of cash, for the first year and a half. Coincidence? Probably.
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Wildly profitable companies aren't sold for peanuts. Or they aren't sold at all. It's not quite that easy.
M&As do sometimes turn out okay, but you need to know how to pick them. Berkshire Hathaway is one company that is well known for making M&As work very, very well.
Not just Yahoo (Score:5, Interesting)
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Well She Must Be Doing SOMETHING Right! (Score:3)
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If her job was get get PR for Yahoo, she'd be a big success. Unfortunately, since she's CEO, bad PR is not the PR she needs to make.
New YHOO investors deserve to lose money (Score:5, Interesting)
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Higher up this thread, I posted a different result than what you're expecting. I'm not going to repeat it but you're free to expand the thread or view my post history for one made a while before this one. I did quite well with a good chunk of Yahoo! stock. It was, shall we say, lucrative but I'm a gambling man yet, at the same time, not horribly greedy. I divested a little over a year ago.
She's consistant! (Score:1)
She sucked at her last 2 CEO jobs as well. Why did anyone expect anything different?
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She sucked at her last 2 CEO jobs as well. Why did anyone expect anything different?
She's only been the CEO of one company, and that's Yahoo.
The reason for Yahoo's poor acquisitions (Score:2)
Apparently their Mergers and Acquisitions team was looking for candidate companies by using a crappy hierarchical search technique rather than one using page ranking.
a dirty little secret (Score:5, Insightful)
... in Silicon Valley is that there is an axis amongst venture capitalists and M&A people. A surprising number of senior M&A people are also investors or even partners of VC firms. So when a company turns out to be a dog the VC people have a way to get their money back, the founders get themselves a new job at the acquiring company, and everyone else gets screwed.
To me it is shocking that a hedge fund guy is just figuring it out. It probably has been going on in one form or another for over forty years. And no, as far as I know it isn't even illegal.
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A bigger dirty little secret: Some CEOs are brought into failing companies not for rebuilding, but to make the declines manageable. A failing company diversifies via M&A's with what little money it has, then sells parts on a yearly basis to prop up the P&L while shrinking the company. This is often the real plan but the CEOs can't really divulge it or it'd go bust. It helps the shareholders because their stocks don't become worthless overnight. It helps the employees because the layoffs are mor
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I know it isn't even illegal.
Impossible to prove therefore impossible to prosecute certainly.
However if the M&A people are knowingly buying up dogs to bail out their VC and entrepreneur buddies they are not meeting their fiduciary responsibilities to the share holders. The SEC would have something to say about that.
The problem of course is all they have to say is "no I really believed with the rights synergies we could increase the value of that business..." and how can we ever prove otherwise. Unless they misrepresented or co
I Criticize Hedge Fund Manager (Score:2)
Dont blame Marissa. (Score:2)
in 1999 they were Google, Ebay, Match, Facebook and Steam. All rolled into one.
Whoever sacrificed the dominant position on the entire Internet to form an acquisitions firm for worthless tech companies is a fool. But that decision was made while Google was run from a garage and Ms Meyer was still at college.
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To paraphrase a German comedian, to blame her is like blaming one pig if the liver pie is oversalted.
Eric Jackson has been peeing on Yahoo for 7 years (Score:2)
Eric Jackson has been peeing on Yahoo for 7 years.
He advises people on How to be an activist investor, and it mostly comes down to making a lot of noise, even when you only own about 0.2% of the stock -- which is what his fund owns of Yahoo.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/ho... [wsj.com]
http://recode.net/2014/08/12/a... [recode.net]
http://greenbackd.com/tag/dr-e... [greenbackd.com]
His dream (now all but kaput, thanks to the financial crisis in China) was to have Alibaba flush with cash, spending it on acquiring Yahoo.
Sheep.... (Score:2)
"In Jackson's view, Yahoo's core business is undervalued after being poorly managed by Mayer. Selling today would mean selling it at a low point.
Since she arrived at yahoo, (Score:2)
99 Luftballons (Score:1)
Death by PowerPoint. A presentation that takes 99 slides to make its point its clearly pointless.
Come on (Score:2)
Come on... Almost all acquisitions are crap. Take the Apple take over of Beats. Did Apple need the branding kudos? Of course not. Did they need the expertise to make a music streaming service or a pair of headphones? Of course not. 99% of acquisitions are complete nonsense.
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Because it has to serve as a shining example of how to do business to Mayer's Number One Fan, Meg Whitman, who has aped everything Yahoo has been doing, using HP's bigger cash coffers.
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I'd sex the two of 'em. Bathe them and send them to my tent.
Better yet, don't bathe them.
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You haven't made a compelling case that the assessment of it as "worthless" was incorrect.
Actually, I suspect that it may have some value, and I don't know anything about it. The only problem is, the value may be negative, and I've seen no evidence to indicate that it isn't.
But "worthless" is almost never correct. It is, however, common for liabilities to exceed assets. And that's always a judgment call. E.g., I consider the liabilities of MSWind to exceed its assets, so I don't have it installed. Othe
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People who own Yahoo shares in theory owe money, since the company's market capitalization is negative if you subtract the value of Yahoo's Alibaba stock.
That's not how shares work. Your liability is limited to the unpaid nominal value of the shares. Their market value is irrelevant.
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What exactly is M&A?
It's the male counterpart of Marissa's management style (Muscles & Ass vs Tits & Ass.)
Seriously, It's alarming the number of posters who whined about not being able to find their way to a search engine to learn a term that they'd be best advised to tattoo on their entitled behinds right now, because in all probability they will lose a job one more more times in their career because of it. It's very much a part of technology.
Re: M&A is...? (Score:3)
They got to a search engine, but it was Yahoo!
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This is a tech site, not a financial news site. How hard would it be to explain what M&A stands for? Money and ass? Marissa and airplanes? Monkeys and aardvarks?
Expecting readers of a tech site to find that the definition of M&A is the first two results of a Google search seems a bit outlandish to me too. I mean, some of us might have heard of search engines before but certainly not most of us!
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"Expecting readers of a tech site to find that the definition of M&A is the first two results of a Google search seems a bit outlandish to me too"
Expecting thousands of people wasting if even 15 seconds each to find what M&A is instead of a single person expending the 5 seconds it takes to explicitly write "mergers & acquisitions" is not only bad taste but infuriating for any engineering-inclined mind.
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I do my fair share of technical editing, and one of the most frequent mistakes I encounter is not defining acronyms on first use. I constantly (and repeatedly) have to remind people to treat ANY technical document as if, even though it's expected that the reader is assumed to have some level of technical experience, that it's to be treated as if someone is picking up material on this particular subject for the first time. That includes defining all acronyms.
Don't get me started on how often I have to expl
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I do my fair share of technical editing, and one of the most frequent mistakes I encounter is not defining acronyms on first use. I constantly (and repeatedly) have to remind people to treat ANY technical document as if, even though it's expected that the reader is assumed to have some level of technical experience, that it's to be treated as if someone is picking up material on this particular subject for the first time. That includes defining all acronyms.
Don't get me started on how often I have to explain that "data" is plural.
Yes, but there are some acronyms which you are entitled to assume people know.
You wouldn't expect to see every article mentioning NASA or NATO spelling it out as National Aeronautics and Space Administration or North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, unless perhaps it was for children.
In context here, it is pretty obvious that the story is about Yahoo's finances, and M&A is a standard financial abbreviation. Slashdot is a site for adults, so it is not unreasonable to expect most readers to have a basic
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Quite. It's good writing and common courtesy, both of which are in short supply round here due to cunts like the GP.
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Couldn't find out what an M&A is in either the summary or the article.
Or Google I would presume, which is quite depressing since typing M&A into Google explains what it is six times including the first two results.
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And have you considered that Google tailors your search results based on your search history? Those results YOU get aren't what *I* get.
I did, which is why I googled with an incognito window and with my cell phone I got a week ago before I posted. They had the same results as my original search. While it does worry me that the quality of articles in Slashdot is declining, I am glad the editors at least respect their audience enough to expect us to do a quick Google search every once in a while. Not everyone has the resourcefulness of a petulant 3rd grader.