This is linkbait. There's only one relevant sentence:<p><i>> in the same press release, the chairman of Yahoo's board announced that the board is going to "engage on qualified strategic proposals" — that is, consider offers to sell the company.</i><p>Yahoo is not up for sale. With the alarmist linkbait title and the URL "yahoo-marissa-mayer-fail", this is possibly a sting piece with motives other than journalism.<p>I have no political ties to Yahoo (nor Vox) but this is not good reporting.
My thoughts:<p>1. Activist investment firms use Yakuza tactics. They buy a small share and the company bends over backwards so the 'investors" get an extra percentage point instead of focusing on long term strategies.<p>2. If Yahoo had expanded on their Pipes and Konfabulator products and capitalized on people's uproar after iGoogle was shut down they could have been great competitors to Google's App Engine, Azure or Amazon Web services. Instead they focused on making the investors an extra percentage point by throwing the baby (great products) out with the bathwater (smart engineers that worked hard to deliver great products).<p>3. Investors and venture capitalists really don't know diddly squat (to put it mildly) about technology these days...
I see this as propaganda to push the concept that Yahoo has negative value, which, I'm guessing would be beneficial for some group of shareholders to promote this view.<p>Personally I don't give a crap what those shareholders want.<p>There is more to a corporation that just shareholder value, and I don't particularly relish thousands of people losing their jobs so some people can make a quick buck.
Listening to Marissa Myer this morning talk about the company she could not identify a core function within the company or a future.<p>She had a number of buzzwords laid out and did not give any idea of what they were going for. I need her to say things like:<p>1. We are working to create a cross-platform experience that outdoes Google and Apple within their app system. The best photo sharing program across app and web for me is Flickr and we are going to become the anti-facebook by guaranteeing your content privacy.<p>2. What is Yahoo? As it stands now, it is an amalgamation of multiple properties that bring in revenue streams. If this is the case, then if I were an investor, I would be trying to find a way to squeeze assets out.
Yahoo is "focusing on its most successful products — including its search engine". I don't understand this. Isn't their search engine just Bing?
The crazy thing about Yahoo! was that they were actually in a pretty decent position just a few years ago. Alibaba exploded, Yahoo! is still the third most popular website in the world, and their finance and sports centers are still incredibly popular.<p>I think what we've seen is a complete failure to execute on any level. Compare that to someone like AOL who saw their brand tanking noticeably but intelligently diversified their business model.
Seems like a sensationalist headline designed to generate page-views. The company has not announced it's "for sale"; instead people are reading between the lines and coming to that as a conclusion based on corporate speak.
Is it actually for sale? Everyone is saying that it's basically for sale but the language used in the earnings call was very corporate, actually skating over the issue completely, talking about sale on "non-strategic" assets.
It is saddening to see names like Yahoo going through so much trouble, but there seems to be an inevitability here that many knew about for a long time.<p>Yahoo, after Marissa Mayer took over, also seems to have focused more on revenue from graphical ads compared to getting any revenue directly from users.<p>* Although mail may be a good product for Yahoo (as this article states), it's not really improved over time and has in fact gotten worse.<p>* The previous Yahoo Mail Plus, which was $20 a year for an ad-free experience with some extras (like POP email) was replaced with a who-would-even-want-this $50 a year ad-free option. Frankly, I doubt if many people even bothered to get this one, more so because among the people who started email with the likes of Hotmail and Yahoo, multiple email addresses were the norm (they continue to be so). For such users who stuck with Yahoo, there's no way to justify spending more than a hundred dollars a year for email.<p>* With no sign of IMAP in the paid option while Google has been giving free IMAP for years, Yahoo's offering in email was really substandard.<p>* Yahoo mail is still quite slow. Not the interface, but the backend. Sending a mail to oneself (by a CC when replying or emailing someone) still takes several minutes to show up in the inbox. In Gmail, this would be in the inbox in a second or two.<p>* Yahoo mail's spam filtering is many a times as bad as a coin toss. Emails that you mark as Not Spam for specific senders continue to go to the spam folder for subsequent mails from the same sender. Many emails that are true spam and have been marked as such don't seem to put similar mails in the spam folder.<p>* The vertical graphical ads on the right side, in an attempt to avoid ads from going off screen while scrolling through emails, are really annoying.<p>* Flickr, providing an astonishing 1TB of storage for "free" (with ads). The next paid option is $50 a year just to remove ads (double of what Flickr Pro used to cost). What???<p>* Any value assigned to user experience before was completely eliminated through these "more ads" move, where Yahoo was sure that almost nobody would opt for the paid options.<p>I wonder what would've happened if Yahoo had instead lowered the prices even more for an ad-free option, added some useful features (like IMAP in email) in a tiered pricing structure and made the product better (like handling email delivery quickly). Perhaps it's too late to wonder about these though. If Yahoo isn't bought by one of the top five tech companies, its products will likely disappear within the next decade.
Marissa Miller should be ashamed not because here tenure at Yahoo has largely been a failure (like most of her recent predecessors), but that she has been paid so much for accomplishing so little (like most of her recent predecessors).
I should probably start moving my accounts associated with my yahoo email off to another email.<p>Not sure what guarantee I would have of a new company handling my web mail with same privacy regard.