Yahoo had to do this. They had been hanging onto the belief that the IRS wouldn't tax their Alibaba spin out, a belief that they and their tax accountants alone believed.<p>Most telling is that Yahoo was up after the markets closed on this news. Heck Bloomberg just sent me a note saying the sentiment of the news on Yahoo was very positive, even the machines like this news:)<p>Sadly this probably means 3 things are going to happen in the next 6 months:<p>1) The CEO leaves, and is replaced by an interm CEO from a PE firm who will negotiate the wind down of Yahoo.<p>2) There will be a lot of companies coming to look at Yahoo. If a deal can be done quickly then I don't think there will be layoffs right away. If no deal can be reached quickly then in 6 months I'll bet there is a very large round of layoffs as the company shutters what it can't sell to make the rest of Yahoo look more appetizing.<p>3) If Alibaba buys the holding portion of Yahoo( Alibaba and Yahoo Japan) then look for Alibaba to seek to acquire the rest of Yahoo Japan.<p>From teh article:<p>> Yahoo’s shift in strategy comes as Ms. Mayer and her husband, Zachary Bogue, are expecting the birth of twin daughters this month<p>I hope she takes a full year off, if not more. The past 4 years couldn't have been easy on her. It will be interesting to see what she does next.<p>It's clear she's great at product design and not so good at people skills. Unfortunately, that doesn't fit well with becoming a CEO again.
Oh just give this poor old dog the old Yeller treatment already. I don't know what's more sad, the fact that Yahoo has fallen from where it once was, or that it's falling so slowly and that it's new CEO, once thought to be it's saving grace, is letting the bleeding continue for seemingly as long as she possibly can.<p>I can't imagine the morale issues in the trenches of Yahoo, it's gotta be just horrible in there.
So I don't understand one simple thing: The stock is up 120% since Mayer took over. Even adjusting for compounding interest over 3.43 years, this is like 25+% yearly growth. So the core business is crapping out? So what? Why is everyone dumping on Mayer? I don't even think I could fix the core Yahoo business. They have to pay a 50% premium for developers just because it's Yahoo and their core audience is the technically illiterate; a group that is fairly difficult to monetize.
Paul Graham's <i>What happened to Yahoo</i>[0] is probably just as relevent now as when he wrote it in 2010.<p>> One of the weirdest things about Yahoo when I went to work there was the way they insisted on calling themselves a "media company.<p>That was a bad decision then, but at the time content and media were newer on the internet and had value. They don't anymore. Yahoo finance and fantasy sports are nice things to provide, but they aren't a google killer for sure.<p>Yahoo's core business is <i>media</i> not technology. If the NYT and Wall Street Journal are any indication, media is a bad business to be in.<p>[0]<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html</a>
Respect, old boy Cringely actually got this one right: <a href="http://www.cringely.com/2015/11/30/soylent-green-now-made-with-more-women/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cringely.com/2015/11/30/soylent-green-now-made-wi...</a>
To come in as an outsider and try to save an ailing web giant nearly everyone had already written off is no easy feat. Wall St. is valuing things like Tumblr at zero and so now she has to do a 180 and unwind this company, maximally and efficiently, while pregnant with twins. Naturally we're inclined to armchair QB, but I think the hand she took over when she sat down at the table was bad. While she never went "all in" on a moonshot, that would have been a literal gamble, and she played smart. Wall Street can be inefficient. Core Yahoo is worth more than nothing.
When Yahoo finally dies, my main concern is what happens to the @yahoo.com email address I've had for a couple of decades, and which now lives next to my name in countless address books. Does it perpetually forward to an address I choose? Does Yahoo try to charge for this? Do Russian identity thieves buy the domain and make my life hell?
Marissa Mayer and Maynard Webb were on CNBC this morning talking about the spin:<p>Part 1: <a href="https://amp.twimg.com/v/76b8a5e2-9a6c-40c3-9c1b-e2c8bcf91159" rel="nofollow">https://amp.twimg.com/v/76b8a5e2-9a6c-40c3-9c1b-e2c8bcf91159</a>
Part 2: <a href="https://amp.twimg.com/v/ce42d263-7b9c-4716-8d06-b320ed243606" rel="nofollow">https://amp.twimg.com/v/ce42d263-7b9c-4716-8d06-b320ed243606</a><p>Mayer seems completely bored by the whole thing and keeps passing stuff off to Webb as "board level consideration". Doesn't make me excited for Yahoo whatsoever.
Yahoo management lacks vision. They had the most popular brand names in social media space, still couldn't innovate.<p>1. Messenger<p>2. Mail<p>3. Flickr<p>4. Tumblr
I never understood farming out their search engine to Bing in the first place. Google literally prints money with their adwords search business. Seems instead of attempting to innovate they just threw in the towel and gave up? I just find it hard to believe that Google is the only way you can run a successful search engine.
Again I ask, where should I take ~30GB of photos that I have on Flickr? Yes, I have other backups but I need offsite storage. Guess I'll have to budget for it now. Backblaze B2 isn't quite ready yet.
Ms.Mayer took a very difficult job. There is no sense in feeling for her, she knew what she was getting into and she was paid highly as if she already accomplished a turn around. Every thing said and done, Ms.Mayer will have $400 Million, even if Yahoo as we know is Kaput. It is a demonstration that C-level execs do not have skin in the game any more, they are paid like they already accomplished the task they have set to.
I'm not sure I quite understand.<p>The article puts Yahoo's Alibaba stake at 31bn. Google finance is reporting Yahoo's market cap as 32.75bn. Does this mean that Yahoo's non-Alibaba value is a rounding error?
It's almost as if Yahoo doesn't know what their core businesses are anymore. It will be interesting to see if they come out of this with better understanding of their identity.
Certainly the end of the beginning. Yahoo!, one of perhaps a handful of companies, was the first "Internet"[1]. Those companies blazed an interesting trail and brought the mainstream population of the US into the "online" world. That they emerged across the chasm that was the dot.com crash, was a testament to the amount of momentum they carried with them.<p>I have a tremendous amount of respect for them, but even with Marissa at the helm the biggest challenge they have not seemed able to overcome, was to tranform into something more 'web 3.0' ish.<p>I would not be surprised in the slightest if Microsoft spun out Bing as a subsidiary, and absorbed the assets and IP of Yahoo! into their own search centered business with a portal attached.<p>By resizing that combined business to be profitable based on the search and ad revenue I expect the case could be made for that as a long lived entity that remains when Google implodes. And having an already separate (or separable) would allow Microsoft to step away to avoid anti-trust concerns while keeping a partial interest to capture the value appreciation.<p>[1] the 0th Internet was what emerged right after HTTP started propagating, GNN, bookmarks etc.
What's the difference aside from the tax liability? Either way you wind up with two companies. One with the Alibaba shares, and the other with everything else.
Any reason I shouldn't see this as a complicated tax dodge? Simply more multinational pilfering from public coffers? Why <i>shouldn't</i> the Alibaba capital gains be taxed?
I thought Yahoo's stock price would rise on this news (because it removes the uncertainty that was overshadowing the original Aabaco spin-off plan) but, despite a brief opening spike, the stock is down on yesterday's close.<p>On the conference call this morning, the management team sounded really downbeat. I expected them to sound positive and optimistic, talking about unlocking shareholder value and focusing on Yahoo Core but they sounded like somebody had died.<p>As of this moment, the market value of Yahoo's stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan are $32.5bn and $8.67bn respectively, while Yahoo itself has a market cap of $32.37bn.<p>To quote Matt Levine, "the whole point of Yahoo as a company right now is to not pay taxes on Alibaba. [...] If there was a way to avoid paying taxes on the Alibaba shares that involved burning all of Yahoo's actual businesses to the ground, Yahoo should do that all day long, and then do it again the next day. It would still add shareholder value."<p>"And the market, right now, is valuing Yahoo as though it will fail in that mission, which is its only mission."<p>Source: <a href="http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-12-02/yahoo-is-looking-for-a-new-way-around-alibaba-taxes" rel="nofollow">http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-12-02/yahoo-is-lo...</a>
Is this a harbinger for darker times to come? Or is it simply Yahoo's time finally? I think there is still value in Yahoo it's just expectations vs market reality to me are at odds. I don't know what I'll set my grandma's homepage to now.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Yahoo!-owned_sites_and_services" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Yahoo!-owned_sites_and...</a>
What a graveyard.
So now Yahoo stock is basically going to be a faux Ali Baba stock. This totally seems like a healthy thing and evidence that there is nothing at all wrong with our market system.
Do you guys think our emails on Yahoo mail are safe after this? I will backup mine as soon as I find the time to do so.<p>Yahoo has a terrible track record regarding emails. I already lost one due to inactivity. They gave it to somebody else. That somebody probably has access to several of my accounts now. On websites where I used my Yahoo address and then just forgot about it.
Yahoo bought my favorite task manager, and killed it. Yahoo bought Flickr, and has been slowly killing it for years.<p>Yahoo bought delicious.com, said they were going to kill it, but later sold it. Most of the users that left never came back.<p>Has Yahoo done anything worthwhile in the last 15 years besides disrupt innovation in a bad way?
Wait, so since they can't spin off the Alibaba stake tax free, they're going to spin off Yahoo (and pay taxes on that lesser-valued spin off)? Shareholders would then own 'YHOO' which are basically BABA pass-through stocks, and whatever other company Yahoo becomes?
Yahoo is the Motorola of the Internet Sector.<p>Always playing catch up in an industry that is lead or die. Good to great engineers with failed leadership trying to coast on past success then, when the stuff hits the fan, trying to effect a culture change on a bloated structure. Finally, the sell off.
"The decision not to sell the Alibaba stake, which was reported on Tuesday, was driven by “the market’s perception of tax risk” associated with the Alibaba plan"<p>It's unfortunate that the tax code is so complex that ambiguous "tax risk" is a thing.
Yahoo Core Business valuation is at this point low enough that any one of the Unicorns, e.g. Uber, Airbnb,... could easily afford it. Tumblr could have raised more money to become a bigger Unicorn and could have acquired Yahoo. Absurdity is reality.
Can someone explain why do business like to create new company? What are the benefits for the financial return other than having a book reporting individual revenue? In the end, aren't they going to be under the same parent company, which, if one wishes, can actually challenge and even overrule the child company CEO's decision behind the scene? HP, Google, now Yahoo.
what multiple of its earnings was Yahoo trading at at the height of its glory?<p>given that we now know the postscript (or at least much of it)<p>did that multiple make any sense?
What I want to know is, how has Yahoo lasted so long?<p>Google has beaten them at search, maps, email, and news. And their homepages is still confusing web 1.0 jumbled mess.<p>What do people still use Yahoo for anyway?