Yahoo SEC Filing: Name change to Altaba Inc and director resignations

https://investor.yahoo.net/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1193125-17-5897&CIK=1011006&soc_src=mail&soc_trk=ma

by patmcguire • 10 years ago

399 358 10 years ago

investor.yahoo.net

Crito3• 10 years ago

I'm surprised she lasted this long.

r00fus2• 10 years ago

At times I wonder if these kind of CEO stints are entirely "fall-guy" propositions.

throwaway91111• 10 years ago

Nobody cares.

Crito3• 10 years ago

Sounds like you might. ;)

Apocryphon• 10 years ago

Etymology of that name - AltaVista + Ali Baba?

edvinbesic• 10 years ago

First thing I thought of as well.

Crito3• 10 years ago

Makes me thing "Alternate Ali Baba".

r00fus2• 10 years ago

Amusing since "Baba" is well known as either a sponge cake, a grandma, a holy man, father, baby or blanket [1].

so what's an alt-baba?

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/baba#Noun

georgeglue1• 10 years ago

I think it might be: Alt(ernate) + A(li) + Ba(ba)

sixothree2• 10 years ago

Alt-Tab-Away?

larkinrichards• 10 years ago

I figured it is pronounced "alt tabba"; it's so handy that you keep it an alt-tab away.

Perhaps Ogden Nash wrote a poem about it?

voidz6• 10 years ago

"T'alt-tab or not t'alt-tab?"

Wait, that wasn't Nash's. Never mind, carry on.

yabatopia• 10 years ago

In an alternate universe, Altaba Inc propably translates to Detroit Online. Once the center of The Web, now a shrinking core surrounded by blight.

codecamper• 10 years ago

It's Canadian for changing tasks: alt-tab, aye?

maxerickson• 10 years ago

That word is spelled "Eh", eh.

wopwopwop• 10 years ago

Around 4 years too late.

devopsproject• 10 years ago

this is dumb

meowschwitz• 10 years ago

the name is not the problem.

ryanlol• 10 years ago

now it might be!

shshhdhs• 10 years ago

Changing the brand under these circumstances doesn't make sense to me. Brands take years to build, and Yahoo dominates as a brand in Japan. It seems sloppy PR to pick a name like "Altaba" within mere weeks/months of deciding to buy Yahoo.

tlackemann• 10 years ago

This is what I'm confused about. Yahoo is a big brand with a lot of companies, is Tumblr now owned by Altaba? Altaba Weather?

bmuon5• 10 years ago

No. Nothing changes for the products. Altaba is a new company that just owns stock in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan. Tumblr will be owned by Yahoo Holdings, which will be owned by Verizon. Yahoo Weather will still be Yahoo Weather.

xja• 10 years ago

Yahoo Japan is a separate entity. Yahoo (Altaba) is a minority shareholder (35.5%).

Of course, the Yahoo brand in general has value elsewhere too, but I don't think this meaning Yahoo Japan will be rebranding.

bmuon5• 10 years ago

Yahoo is splitting into two companies: Yahoo Holdings and Altaba Inc. Yahoo Holdings owns the "Yahoo" trademark and is being sold to Verizon. Altaba is an investment company that owns everything that is not being sold to Verizon. Yahoo will still be alive in yahoo.com.

PaulRobinson• 10 years ago

First scan read I thought they were changing their name to "Alberta Inc." and thought to myself "well, that's one way to deal with the inauguration..."

"Alt + Tab" is the only reasonable thing I can think of it being rooted in. But even that sucks like a sucky thing.

TallGuyShort• 10 years ago

I wondered if it was related to Alibaba, which has been closely linked with Yahoo.

mkaziz• 10 years ago

Yeesh, that name sounds like something a fifth grader would come up with.

dingaling• 10 years ago

It has been registered for 15 years but it looks like it was purchased by Yahoo within the last three months:

Creation Date: 2001-10-09T04:22:42-0700

Updated Date: 2016-10-25T09:47:51-0700

Appears to have previously been owned by a Barcelona-based furniture supplier:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:altaba.com

who are now on altaba.cat.

But the new owners have quickly modified the robots.txt and hence locked-out public access on archive.org

LeoPanthera4• 10 years ago

The headline was changed but the new one reveals nothing. For those who don't want to dig through the filing: Meyer has resigned from the board and Yahoo is renaming to "Altaba".

Edit: It changed again. That's better.

cheald• 10 years ago

The document says that Mayer is resigning from the Board of Directors, not necessarily as CEO.

Marissa Mayer ... has indicated that he or she intends to resign from the Board effective upon the Closing,

ec109685• 10 years ago

Will resign. She hasn't resigned yet.

djsumdog4• 10 years ago

It was a link to a Buzzfeed news tweet. O_o

LeoPanthera4• 10 years ago

Fine, but I was more concerned with the text of the link, not the destination.

ceejayoz3• 10 years ago

There really needs to be a log of "Previously titled: X | Previously linked to: Y | Moderator comment: Foo bar." in these situations.

reid• 10 years ago

This says Marissa will not be involved with Altaba Inc. (RemainCo) after Yahoo's operating business is sold to Verizon. Which makes sense, since any future of her leadership is with the operating business instead of the investment company Altaba.

coderholic• 10 years ago

The only mention of Mayer I can find is

Each of David Filo, Eddy Hartenstein, Richard Hill, Marissa Mayer, Jane Shaw and Maynard Webb has indicated that he or she intends to resign from the Board effective upon the Closing, and that his or her intention to resign is not due to any disagreement with the Company on any matter relating to the Company’s operations, policies or practices.

Which indicates that she'll resign from the board, but doesn't say anything about her resigning as CEO. Is that just left off here because it doesn't require SEC disclosure, or is it a possibility that she'll stay?

SonOfLilit• 10 years ago

If she stays, it should be with Verizon Yahoo, not with Altaba (shell containing Alibaba shares formerly known as Yahoo), which is a kind of company Mayer has no experience managing (and also not a managerial challenge worth the kind of salary she can get elsewhere)

folz• 10 years ago

Key takeaways from this filing: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is resigning and the company is changing its name to "Altaba Inc."

(The article link was changed from https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedNews/status/818589759320637440 at around 50 points)

patmcguire• 10 years ago

Yeah, I feel like that one tweet was a better distillation of what is happening than a dump to the dry source. Oh well.

kchoudhu2• 10 years ago

How much is she being paid as part of this resignation?

bmuon5• 10 years ago

For the record, this is incorrect. The SEC filing does not indicate she is resigning as CEO. See other comments for explanations about what's actually going on.

stanleydrew7• 10 years ago

Rather than the inevitable bashing of Marissa that will undoubtedly unfurl on this thread, I'd like to put in a little reminder that we usually celebrate taking on big projects and big risks and that we should commend her for taking on the immense challenge of steadying the Yahoo ship.

Yes, she wasn't able to keep the ship from sinking. But I do think she put in a good-faith effort.

icelancer3• 10 years ago

I do as well. As outlined in The Halo Effect, people want very tidy, clean, and rational reasons why a company failed. Blame must be specifically laid somewhere. However, there's a pretty good chance no one available could have saved the demise of Yahoo. Variance is a thing.

Gargoyle2• 10 years ago

I don't really mind people failing.

I do think there's something wrong with someone earning massive amounts of money to fail and then everyone saying, "Oh well, anyone would have failed in that role."

Why pay someone huge sums of money if failure is the expected outcome?

narrator• 10 years ago

One reason I heard for the demise of Yahoo, from someone who worked there, was tech was totally anarchic. They didn't build up the vast amounts of shared software infrastructure that Google, Facebook and Amazon did. Apparently, each separate business unit did a lot of reinventing the wheel. That might have been something someone with a background in big company software architecture could have focused on, but that wasn't Marissa.

dilemma• 10 years ago

However, there's a pretty good chance no one available could have saved the demise of Yahoo.

Case in point. A clean, tidy, rational reason why Yahoo failed: it was impossible to save. Blame the company itself.

akjainaj4• 10 years ago

I think there is absolutely no indication that anybody, other than Jesus Christ himself descending from the skies mounted on a Harley Davidson in flames, could have saved Yahoo.

So, bashing Marissa here would be really, really pointless and sad.

djsumdog4• 10 years ago

I think back to Gillard and Australia. I liked her as a PM and felt that the reason she didn't make it is she simply wasn't heartless and evil enough to fight in that chaotic, insane and corrupt political environment. Abbott was and Rudd..ugh..something something party implosion; whatever.

It has nothing to do with her being a women. There just aren't many people who can put up with that endless rubbish.

With Yahoo, you have to give her credit. She has been there for a while and has attempted quite a bit. Saving Yahoo was going to be a totally chance attempt, as its competitors are crushing it in ... everything. From the surface it looked like she was in a better environment overall as well (compared to my Aussie politics stretching example anyway).

I think a company like Yahoo could have, and may still turn itself around. AOL did, mostly by investing itself in news and editorial sites. Maybe Verizon will be able to do something with their data, customers and brand -- and maybe like AOL we won't even realize they're the company owning the articles we're reading or the services we're using.

CalChris4• 10 years ago

Why'd she do it then? Got paid a lot, that's for damn sure. $219M over 4 years.

http://money.cnn.com/2016/07/25/technology/marissa-mayer-pay...

brandnewlow2• 10 years ago

Bashing her may also be naive. She may not have been hired to "save Yahoo!". She may have been hired to make a lot of money for Dan Loeb's hedge fund, and succeeded at that, if you believe the telling in this piece: http://www.businessinsider.com.au/marissa-mayer-biography-20...

Summary:

- Loeb decides he can make a bunch of money if he can invest in Yahoo!, clean out the board, and get a more compelling CEO in charge.

- Loeb buys 5% of Yahoo! (presumably at a price in the mid-teens) and starts a campaign.

- Loeb ousts then-CEO Thompson and recruits Marissa Meyer from Google to take the CEO job. She is announced in July 2012 to massive fanfare and media attention.

- Yahoo!'s stock rises to $28 or so over the next year. Seeing as how they shipped no new products of note during that time, it's fair to assume this was largely due to Meyer joining the company. In July 2013, Loeb sells off most of his holdings and is removed from the board.

Given this, it seems unfair to bash Meyer for not saving Yahoo!. She was never hired to do that. She was hired to make money for Dan Loeb and did a great job. All the handwringing about "saving Yahoo!" is a fake narrative foisted on the public by the tech press and Yahoo!'s PR people.

Once a company becomes a zombie, there's generally no saving it. If you can get enough people to believe it might happen though, you can make some money.

Also: This reading helps make sense of some of the other weirdness around Meyer's tenure. Why did Henrique De Castro get such a rich contract? Why did Meyer? Perhaps in part because some of the people negotiating those deals (Loeb and Wolf, ex president of MTV hired by Loeb to help with the Yahoo! affair) knew they'd be gone in a year and didn't care about the fallout.

cmurf• 10 years ago

I don't think that's JC but rather Johnny Blaze / Ghost Rider you're thinking of.

nikcub2• 10 years ago

I don't think that is true. In 2012 Yahoo had $5B a year in revenue and was the second most visited property on the web.

When Thompson stepped down the board were given two proposals. The first, revive Yahoo as a premium tech firm lead by someone like Mayer, or 2. admit that Yahoo is now a media co and double down on the verticals where Yahoo is winning - especially those where you can sell premium ads (Finance, Sport)

The board had delusions of grandeur and saw Yahoo's as still being on the same level as Google rather than taking the safer bet and building out the media company.

Being a media company isn't as interesting - but there are a lot of public, medium sized tech media co's out there who get along just fine (and some even have an innovative breakthrough every now and then - like IAC) - and Yahoo, with the later plan, would have been the best of this bunch.

BinaryIdiot4• 10 years ago

absolutely no indication that anybody, other than Jesus Christ himself descending from the skies mounted on a Harley Davidson in flames, could have saved Yahoo.

I mean, Yahoo has essentially failed so there is no way to validate your or my claims, but I disagree very much with this. If Yahoo had focused on its core strengths versus its flipping and flopping between becoming a media company or not, I think it could have become great. They also lost quite a bit of their best talent due to policy changes, work changes, etc.

Honestly I still think there are ways to turn the ship around. It may never become as big as it was before but I see no reason it can't become profitable and stick around for a long time.

WalterBright4• 10 years ago

bashing Marissa here would be really, really pointless and sad.

She took on the job, promised results, and demanded (and got) enormous compensation. Part and parcel of that is accepting responsibility for failure.

Keep in mind that if she had turned Yahoo around, she would have gotten the credit.

Shivetya• 10 years ago

She was paid to succeed and paid excessively on any level. Why should we not hold stars in the tech industry to higher standards. Why should we not vilify them like any other CEO presiding over a failing or failed company which sheds thousands if not tens of thousands of employees? She is the quintessential example of the CEO type many dislike. Overpaid, doesn't deliver, and walks off with money in the bank.

forgetsusername2• 10 years ago

So, bashing Marissa here would be really, really pointless and sad

If this was actually evident, what's the point of hiring her for the position with huge compensation? What's the point of taking the job, and why should that decision deserve praise? It sounds to me like she accepted an impossible task for tons of money. That isn't impressive.

javiayala• 10 years ago

I want to echo on your message and also to thank you for contributing with a positive comment and not with a harsh one like most people often do.

I remember a few years ago when some of the stuff that Marissa was doing to reshape Yahoo's internal structure were being looked with good eyes and were being replicated in other companies (Bringing in remote people, focusing on some products, etc.) I guess we can all agree that in the end she didn't do the best job but maybe no one else could've done it differently. No way to know now.

djsumdog4• 10 years ago

Sure we can. Just spin up a parallel universe instance and change just one or two decisions. There's an AWS offering for that right?

iaw4• 10 years ago

doing to reshape Yahoo's internal structure were being looked with good eyes

My recollection of those events were that Marissa Mayer exercised her privilege to have a daycare next to her office while ignoring the needs of all the parents that worked for her. Those were the events that made me dislike her, it showed antipathy for the people that had stuck at Yahoo.

nostromo• 10 years ago

Let's do away with excessive scorn for failed CEOs and excessive adulation for successful CEOs.

There's a lot of randomness in business and in life.

darkr• 10 years ago

Also the excessive pay then by that logic?

idlewords2• 10 years ago

She was very well compensated for her time sinking Yahoo. I think this kind of tone policing is unhealthy.

ceejayoz3• 10 years ago

I'd want to be well compensated for taking on a job where I was fairly certain I was doomed to fail because the company is being eaten alive by its competitors.

stanleydrew7• 10 years ago

Upvoted since I think this discussion might be interesting.

I'm wondering why people focus on financial compensation so much? Why does how much someone was paid justify more or less bashing, as the case might be?

And what's unhealthy about tone policing? I'll leave aside the way you've negatively framed my attempt to steer the conversation in a more positive direction, and just say that I don't see what the purpose of publicly bashing a well-compensated CEO who didn't have much success is.

Who is this unhealthy for? For her? For us? For future boards of directors who may be trying to attract a CEO to turn their company around?

pgodzin4• 10 years ago

What level of compensation would it take to make such a statement OK? I'm sure plenty of execs turned it down because of the risk of failure and the inevitable microscope and personal attacks associated with being the CEO of one of the most recognizable but failing companies in the world.

kchoudhu2• 10 years ago

I'm guessing her resignation comes with a hefty price tag as well. I'll be very interested to hear what that actual numbers are.

thaumaturgy2• 10 years ago

(reasonable) tone policing helps prevent a bunch of armchair quarterbacks with modestly successful programming backgrounds from assuming they have any idea what happens at the executive level of a company like Yahoo.

ones_and_zeros2• 10 years ago

Indeed. I recently found out Michael O'Church was banned from HN because he called her the c word because of the anti-worker policies she implemented at Yahoo. (somewhat indirectly, and I'm hesitant to use it myself for fear of being banned).

serge2k• 10 years ago

So what, give out a participation ribbon?

hk__23• 10 years ago

Out of curiosity, why do you call her by her first name instead of her last name (Meyer)? Is there another famous Meyer such that there could be a confusion here?

uptown2• 10 years ago

You spelled her last name wrong.

CarpetBench• 10 years ago

Eh? Does it matter?

Some people are referred to frequently by their first names (Sergey, Larry, Joel), some by their last name (Woz, Jobs), some by both or either.

Are you trying to imply something?

rconti• 10 years ago

Oscar.

Gargoyle2• 10 years ago

Funnily enough, there is a well-known Marissa MEyer as well as the Yahoo CEO Marissa MAyer.

http://ew.com/article/2013/02/14/marissa-meyer-talks-scarlet...

3minus1• 10 years ago

ask Elon

jinglbox2• 10 years ago

Steve Jobs worked himself to the bone and took zero money for years when he was trying to save Apple. That's what a good faith effort looks like. If he had failed he would have wasted years and got nothing in return. If Mayer had done this I would be impressed. But Mayer had no vision, didn't put in the effort required, and milked Yahoo for a hundred million dollars she didn't earn. Silicon Valley loves failure like Elon Musk's rockets blowing up the first few times. But not this corrupt Wall Street-style failure. Marissa Mayer's failure at Yahoo was caused by pure incompetence, negligence, and laziness of all involved. Nothing about it that deserves praise.

pgodzin4• 10 years ago

Not sure why a "good faith effort" requires taking such a crazy amount of personal risk. Yahoo was willing to pay millions to the exec they thought had the best chance to turn the company around. She should have declined that and and unnecessarily played on Extra Hard mode instead?

prostoalex6• 10 years ago

If he had failed he would have wasted years and got nothing in return.

Steve Jobs' personal wealth is mainly from Pixar (acquired by Disney) and less from Apple, especially after SEC shut down the goldmine of backdated options http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2007/01/snow...

redial• 10 years ago

Steve Jobs was paid in stocks. A lot.

speaktruth5• 10 years ago

"... milked Yahoo for a hundred million dollars she didn't earn."

"Marissa Mayer's failure at Yahoo was caused by pure incompetence, negligence, and laziness of all involved. Nothing about it that deserves praise."

I just wanted to thank you for this comment, because it is important that we get the facts straight. There was not one thing she brought in the company that showed a hint to financial success.

She is overrated at an almost fraudulent level.

gozur882• 10 years ago

As one of the founders, Jobs had an emotional investment in Apple you could never expect from an outsider brought in to helm a mature company.

The problem with Yahoo is nobody knows what the company does. I don't see how anybody could have turned what amounts to a couple popular news websites into something like Google or Apple without engaging in some kind of very-low-odds moon shot.

What they probably should have done was liquidated the company. The web sites would have fetched top dollar, and the company has technical expertise in business units that seem to be pretty much wasted at this point.

speby• 10 years ago

Difficult to say how much "good faith effort" she put in but nobody questions her commitment and work ethic. It's fairly well-documented, perhaps to a fault: http://www.redbookmag.com/life/money-career/a45516/marissa-m...

I am not suggesting that working long hours, even as CEO, is necessary or even good for success but I, for one, would definitely not assume Mayer isn't really trying to do a show of good faith, regardless of how much money Yahoo and its board agreed to pay her.

mortenjorck• 10 years ago

As an enthusiast photographer, she did one great thing in my book: She oversaw the attempted revitalization of Flickr. The old Flickr product and UI had stagnated for the better part of a decade, and under her administration, Yahoo rebooted a lot of the core experience. Some parts were rebooted more successfully than others, but on the balance, it was for the better.

mullingitover• 10 years ago

She did the bare minimum that needed to be done to keep flickr alive, I'm not sure it's worthy of praise. Flickr is currently comatose or dead, given that they haven't updated their mobile app in over a year, let alone anything else on the site. Yahoo could've used flickr to pre-empt YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram all in one, but Yahoo instead neglected it and ran it into the ground. I feel bad for the engineering talent that Yahoo wasted, but the executive leadership deserves nothing but scorn. They missed so many huge opportunities.

stefantalpalaru2• 10 years ago

Flickr was the only service that insisted I should stop paying the yearly fee and switch to a free plan. Shortly afterwards they drove me away for good with some silly zoom and pan effect on photo views.

glenstein• 10 years ago

If I may use the full benefits of hindsight, I wonder if Yahoo, instead of Google, ought to have been the company to go all-in on a social network competitor to facebook, (and I don't mean 360°). Yahoo had more organic components of a social community across its properties than Google ever did. If they wanted to mature into something that was more than a media company, that seems to me like the path to take.

Of course it's easy to say that. I have much more faith in Google's ability to execute on that front than Yahoo, and look what happened to G+. So who knows if they could have done it right.

ebbv• 10 years ago

She got paid an obscene amount of money to continue driving a sinking ship into the bottom of the ocean. She is not a plucky entrepreneur risking everything against the odds. She gets zero kudos from me.

colordrops2• 10 years ago

Pretty much every thread I've seen on Marissa since she started has had a comment like this.

tyingq2• 10 years ago

Saving it would have required big bold moves. Did she make any?

speaktruth5• 10 years ago

What exactly do you want to accomplish with this comment?

Are you really suggesting that we shouldn't analyze and criticize Marissa for failing? Why is it important to you to create a safe space for this CEO? This CEO had a very self-confident attitude but in the end got nothing right. There were no signs progress and development with her and the company. She showed no intrinsic focus and absolutely no creativity.

And what are this big risks you are talking about? "we usually celebrate taking on big projects and big risks ..."

All I know is that she got a compensation plan in 2012 for about 120 mio. dollars. If you play in this league you dont get points for "good-faith". Why gets someone who failed such a high compensation and why should it be wrong to criticize and even bash such a person?

cloakandswagger2• 10 years ago

I can answer that: because she's a woman. That's the ugly truth behind the rabid defense of Marissa. Because she joins a long line of failed female CEOs and the mere recognition of this fact sends certain people into a frenzy, so just deny, deny, deny.

I fully expect to be repudiated as a misogynist by a tidal wave of people drunk off this cognitive dissonance, but I simply speak the truth. Marissa was an abysmal CEO, and for years people will try to whitewash that to avoid its ugly stain on female professionals.

stanleydrew7• 10 years ago

What exactly do you want to accomplish with this comment?

Reduction in unsubstantiated nasty comments. A better conversation.

Are you really suggesting that we shouldn't analyze and criticize Marissa for failing?

No, I'm not suggesting that.

Why is it important to you to create a safe space for this CEO?

I'm not.

And what are this big risks you are talking about?

Attempting to save a company that appeared at the time to be completely unsaveable.

If you play in this league you dont get points for "good-faith".

Why not? What's different about that league compared to the one you and I play in?

iaw4• 10 years ago

I didn't see a good-faith effort, what I saw was a lot of conservative policies that tamped down innovation and then efforts to chase the market leaders.

Marissa Mayer didn't do a good job, her first acts at Yahoo alienated the loyal employees that she needed to embrace. I don't know if anyone could have saved Yahoo from sinking but she sure as shit didn't do anything to stave it off.

draw_down• 10 years ago

I agree. But part of leadership is that people criticize your performance- fairly or otherwise. Being a leader means accepting that.

bobbyi_settv• 10 years ago

How is anything she did a "big risk" if she is immune for any consequences of failure?

all_usernames• 10 years ago

She made over $200M in salary over four years. Her risk was zero.

I can see no analog here for anything a normal human being would recognize as a challenge despite tough odds.

AnimalMuppet• 10 years ago

There was a pretty major risk that her name would be tarred as "that loser who wrecked Yahoo". It might affect her ability to get any further C-level positions. That risk might not be something that a normal human being would want compensation to take on.

twblalock• 10 years ago

Yes, she wasn't able to keep the ship from sinking. But I do think she put in a good-faith effort.

Are we giving out an A for effort now? CEOs are hired to achieve results. If they fail, it doesn't matter how hard they tried.

Maybe nobody could have prevented the failure of Yahoo. But that doesn't get Mayer off the hook for being a bad CEO -- she made bad decisions, managed to piss off the shareholders, executive team, and rank-and-file employees, hid major security breaches, and did not succeed at any of the things she tried to do. She had no major positive achievements during her entire tenure as CEO.

The best that can realistically be said about her is that she was a bad CEO stuck in an impossible situation.

joering2• 10 years ago

Using your example, how much of a benefit is to have a "steady" ship while its still "sinking" ??

ACow_Adonis• 10 years ago

I can't speak for the rest of HN, but part of the "bashing" of Mayer is not just a personal attack on her, but a critique of our entire culture and economic system.

At the end of the day, she'll receive multiple millions of dollars for doing and achieving nothing.

Not a bad job of you can get it, but the phenomenon itself seems eminentl, judiciously and justifiably open to criticism to me.

She's just another caricature in the social pattern...

zigzigzag• 10 years ago

This. None of us know Mayer, have met her, really, none of us give a monkeys about her. I'm sure she's a lovely and pleasant person.

Criticism of her in this context are entirely criticisms of the events surrounding her time at Yahoo, for which there are multiple other examples. The habit corporate boards have of rewarding failure is a problem, but it's not clear how to solve it.

homero• 10 years ago

She raided the company, she did nothing good

king_kerr• 10 years ago

Couldn't agree more.

mtgx• 10 years ago

I don't blame Marissa for "not saving Yahoo".

I blame her for allowing the NSA to (illegally) get root access to Yahoo's servers so they can spy on everyone whenever they feel like it with no oversight, for doing it behind the security team's backs (not that it matters much in the grand scheme of things, but also shows what kind of person she is), and (perhaps related) allowing 1 billion of Yahoo accounts to be hacked so easily.

So what does this show us? Beyond her failing to "make great new products at Yahoo", which I guess you could argue no one other than Steve Jobs may have been able to do at Yahoo anymore, it shows that she likes to betray not just her colleagues but also the users at the companies she leads. And in the end she ended up getting paid more than handsomely for all of those failures or malicious actions in which she engaged.

So I'll make sure to never ever use a service run by Marissa Mayer and that everyone I know stays away from a company run by her.

nadim4• 10 years ago

I really wish this wasn't true. The Internet is effectively dead to me.

praneshp2• 10 years ago

I do not think she put in a good-faith effort. I am an ex-Yahoo, and found the hiring of several mid-level Googlers and buying a startup run by an ex-APM investigation-worthy.

pravda• 10 years ago

bashing of Marissa that will undoubtedly unfurl on this thread

Can we say something about the Tumblr acquisition?

ljk• 10 years ago

Yes, she wasn't able to keep the ship from sinking. But I do think she put in a good-faith effort.

yahoo was a sinking ship already but she illegally fired men because they were men and got rid of remote workers, is that really considered "good-faith effort"?

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-marissa-mayer-told-remote...

baybal22• 10 years ago

you criticize people screwing up. it is right thing to do

sonink• 10 years ago

If a CEO doesnt perform, she is accountable. If multiple CEO's dont perform, it is the board who must be held accountable.

syngrog66• 10 years ago

There are challenges and then there are challenges.

When the challenge is... "Try to increase/stabilize Yahoo profits and keep relevant/hip, and, no matter what, we'll give you X millions of dollars." I don't think that's a challenge, let alone an immense challenge.

Start with nothing. No code, no customers, no brand, no employees, no customers, no investors, and very little cash in the bank for runway, and try to build that up to Yahoo's level -- that's a challenge. That's a big challenge.

Being able to parachute into a high status, high privledge, highly paid (no matter what) role, where you can just kind of twiddle the bits and get to spin every more you make as the obviously smart thing to do -- that's easy. Even if you "fail" you still win. Very different from situations where when you fail you... starve, get evicted, etc.

gigatexal2• 10 years ago

end of an era -- I wonder what Jerry Yang is thinking right now?

hkon• 10 years ago

He remembers 2007, when he won the big one

petercooper• 10 years ago

I'd like to imagine the multi-billionaire has taken a nostalgic moment out to reminisce, but I doubt he will be too cut up :-)

gigatexal2• 10 years ago

right, i bet he's laughing a lot.

rocky1138• 10 years ago

Honestly, he should start a new simple web directory with David Filo called "Jerry and David's new guide to the World Wide Web" and run it completely manually in a curated fashion, just like the old days.

meesterdude• 10 years ago

It makes perfect sense if you look at it from the perspective of deliberate ship sinking.

voidz6• 10 years ago

Altabandon Ship?

Alt-A, Backspace?

All t'abort, aaaah!

(OK, I'll show myself out.)

Sneaks in edit: ah of course: Altabasta!

protomyth• 10 years ago

Was Marissa Mayer expected to stay with the investment company, move over to Verizon with the Yahoo property, or leave entirely?

harryh6• 10 years ago

She was expected to leave entirely. This is not a surprise.

praneshp2• 10 years ago

Source? She has said repeatedly she will be with the unit that is going to Verizon, and I didn't see anything different yet.

voidz6• 10 years ago

She'll be rebranded as Marwassa Nothx and offered a lead position in the archiving department.

(Ok, I think I've reached my joke quota. sorry, dang et al!)

djsumdog4• 10 years ago

I wish there was a real alternative to search. I use DuckDuckGo, but I believe they run on AWS and purchase index data from Yandex et. al.

At this point, is it even feasible for anyone to enter the general search market, or has Google simply set the barrier to entry too high? Are there any niche search engines that focus on things Google has either removed or doesn't index? Are there other alternatives besides DDG, StartPage, Yandex and Bing?

viraptor• 10 years ago

It's going to take a couple of years for it to be realistically usable day to day, but I have some faith in the distributed search. http://yacy.net/en/index.html

In a long run, but only is personal storage going to allow this easily, but our searches are usually pretty limited in scope. I could resolve ~90% of my queries with indexes of SO, cooking websites, very limited number of blogs, documentation of standard libraries of a few languages. This would even fit on my phone right now.

sixothree2• 10 years ago

What I miss about Yahoo! in the early days was explorability. Many sites were categorized. You could browse a category or find a site you liked and explore from there.

saycheese• 10 years ago

DuckDuckGo uses more than 400 sources: https://duck.co/help/results/sources

LeoPanthera4• 10 years ago

Actual list of sources: https://duck.co/ia

But these "sources" power the instant answers, and not the main search results.

hoorayimhelping• 10 years ago

"At this point, is it even feasible for anyone to enter the desktop computer market, or has Microsoft simply set the barrier to entry too high?"

-Us, 1999

One thing I've observed in tech over the past 25 years is that change comes from unexpected places and often very quickly.

Cyph0n5• 10 years ago

Uhhh how has the answer to that question changed though? Windows remains the undisputed king of the desktop.

crdoconnor• 10 years ago

Very rarely ever directly though. When Google became the number 1 search engine nobody else actually wanted to be the number 1 search engine - they wanted to be the "home page of the web".

iaw4• 10 years ago

It's possible but the volume investment required makes it unlikely. The resource requirements to create a quality scrape/search engine are pretty extensive.

sebleon• 10 years ago

Yes, definitely feasible, but challenging.

Some ideas: a) Focus on a niche, like the best search experience for hackers, or best search experience on mobile for high school students, etc.

b) Do content-based ranking, ie. figure out the good-ness of a website based on an automated analysis of what it's about, instead of depending on the link-graph that powers PageRank.

cpeterso• 10 years ago

Are there other alternatives besides DDG, StartPage, Yandex and Bing?

StartPage is just anonymized Google results and DDG is an anonymized mashup of Bing, Yandex, and other sources.

powera• 10 years ago

"In light of the fact that following the Closing the Company will operate as an investment company under the Investment Company Act of 1940" - this is why. It will let Verizon save billions of dollars on Alibaba stock if it can get Yahoo out of the way.

http://fortune.com/2016/02/08/verizon-yahoo-alibaba-taxes/

harryh6• 10 years ago

It won't let verizon save anything. Verizon is purchasing the operating companies and has nothing to do with the alibaba shares.

interknot2• 10 years ago

Well, at least they registered Altaba.com. No IP address as of now, though it looks like their mail is handled by Google Apps!

logicallee• 10 years ago

You're kidding. Tell me you're kidding.

akjainaj4• 10 years ago

And that's not everything because this is the TXT record

altaba.com. 1800 IN TXT "google-site-verification=vO3De5z6qb-AeM1GmHkcC5dlWA_cw-7WKN5xhcyFFPM"

interknot2• 10 years ago

Maybe I could be hitting a cache or something, but here's what I see:

  $ host Altaba.com
  Altaba.com mail is handled by 10 alt4.aspmx.l.google.com.
  Altaba.com mail is handled by 1 aspmx.l.google.com.
  Altaba.com mail is handled by 5 alt1.aspmx.l.google.com.
  Altaba.com mail is handled by 5 alt2.aspmx.l.google.com.
  Altaba.com mail is handled by 10 alt3.aspmx.l.google.com.

Here's yahoo.com for reference:

  $ host yahoo.com
  yahoo.com has address 206.190.36.45
  yahoo.com has address 98.138.253.109
  yahoo.com has address 98.139.183.24
  yahoo.com has IPv6 address 2001:4998:58:c02::a9
  yahoo.com has IPv6 address 2001:4998:c:a06::2:4008
  yahoo.com has IPv6 address 2001:4998:44:204::a7
  yahoo.com mail is handled by 1 mta7.am0.yahoodns.net.
  yahoo.com mail is handled by 1 mta5.am0.yahoodns.net.
  yahoo.com mail is handled by 1 mta6.am0.yahoodns.net.

pyromine• 10 years ago

Interstingly this could make sense, because they're selling off all of the Yahoo! assets there is no reason there is no incentive to use Yahoo! mail and in fact they lose the rights to those assets once the sale is completed.

Altaba will still be holding all of the other assets not sold to verizon so this is likely the best way to move forward for whoever is left working for this not quite dead entity once the sale is complete.

bencollier49• 10 years ago

Suppose they'll be less likely to get hacked.

jazoom• 10 years ago

Haha. Thanks for the chuckle.

inetsee• 10 years ago

Does this mean that my email addresses will change to "@altaba.com"?

bmuon5• 10 years ago

No. Yahoo as a brand will continue to exist. Verizon will own the brand.

voidz6• 10 years ago

Sounds contradictory though, doesn't it?

erickhill• 10 years ago

Changing a company name is one thing. Google did the same, essentially, with the formation of Alphabet. But please, dear God, don't tell me they are changing their domain. It's like the Eddie Murphy joke about falling down the stairs - for what seems like an eternity. ["My shoe!"]

It's hard to believe what's become of the mighty Y! brand.

voidz6• 10 years ago

You know what they say! The bigger they are...!

Yahoo, I mean. Or shoes.. I guess that this saying would indeed apply to shoes as well. So I guess that Yahoo and shoes have two things in common. 'Being grounded' being the other one.

BinaryIdiot4• 10 years ago

Yahoo will still be around. Essentially the assets / pieces sold to Verizon will be "Yahoo". The rest of this company will be under "Altaba".

shuri• 10 years ago

I'm guessing the brand doesn't need to change.

user982• 10 years ago

Altabax is a skin cream for bacterial infections.

ubercow• 10 years ago

I wonder what's going to happen to Flickr. I still haven't found a replacement place to host my pictures that I want to show off to others.

harryh6• 10 years ago

It will likely continue running in its current mostly neglected state under verizon ownership.

uptown2• 10 years ago

Check out Koken. Self-hosting but it's pretty great.

scott_karana• 10 years ago

Looks nice, but for some of us, Flickr is also about externalizing management of TBs of redundant storage ;)

ghaff2• 10 years ago

SmugMug? At one point pricing changes made it pricey for relatively casual users but current plans seem pretty reasonable.

poooogles• 10 years ago

500px is what I moved to a few years ago. No regrets.

CydeWeys2• 10 years ago

Is this like Google's move to be under Alphabet as a parent company? Altaba is for the holding group that controls that substantial overseas investments while Yahoo becomes just a brand used for some of their web properties that can be sold off if necessary?

harryh6• 10 years ago

That's exactly right except for the "if necessary" part. A deal to sell off all of the web properties to verizon has already been made.

CydeWeys2• 10 years ago

That deal may have gone pear-shaped following the latest and greatest breach, though. Maybe "if possible" would have been wording on my part.

gm-conspiracy• 10 years ago

Will they sell the broadcast.com domain (or will it 301 to altaba)?

I have a great idea to use that domain to host streaming of live youth sports.

harryh6• 10 years ago

broadcast.com (as well as all the rest of Yahoo's domains) is undoubtedly part of the sale of assets to Verizon.

thinkloop2• 10 years ago

What's the verdict on Marissa, did she do a bad job, or was yahoo simply unsaveable?

chmaynard• 10 years ago

All of the above.

rvail2• 10 years ago

I think it could have been saved. I stopped going there when 90% of the articles was either a sponsored story, or a story so left leaning it was almost unreadable.

riemannzeta• 10 years ago

For those confused, this filing is reporting a name change because the operating business (including its brand, domain name, etc.) is being acquired by Verizon out of what is now Yahoo! Inc. So the Yahoo business, its name, domains, and so on are not going anywhere as a result of this announcement. Altaba is just the name of of the company that will hold the investments that Verizon didn't acquire, including Alibaba shares.

sperglord2• 10 years ago

Haha, Verizon owns America Online as well. Perhaps they're going to collect all relics of the 90's internet into some kind of Voltron monster.

LeoPanthera4• 10 years ago

I hope someone at Verizon cares about history and is preserving things for future museums.

vthallam• 10 years ago

I understand the recent security failures of Yahoo must have weakened the company brand name to certain extent, but it's a 2 decade old web company almost every know off, not sure what made the decision in favor of the new name.

beedogs• 10 years ago

What an absolutely TERRIBLE new name. Why do they think this is a good idea?

dpark4• 10 years ago

Because it doesn't matter. It'll be a holding company for people who basically want to own Alibaba shares. From that perspective, it's a great name, because it reads a lot like "alternate alibaba".

voidz6• 10 years ago

Should have called it Yooha!

tyingq2• 10 years ago

I'd have gone with an semi-anagram like: Oh,Hay!

oh_sigh• 10 years ago

Is Altaba etymologically related to Alibaba?

Animats• 10 years ago

Altaba is just a investment company. The operating business will be sold to Verizon (if Verizon doesn't back out), and the money from the sale goes to Altaba. At that point Altaba ought to liquidate and divide the money among the shareholders, but the management may try to invest in other things to justify their jobs.

goldfishcaura• 10 years ago

When all else fails, try renaming the business...

rabboRubble• 10 years ago

Alta Vista + Alibaba = Altaba?

This new name is a confusing mishmash.

cowardlydragon• 10 years ago

I would like yahoo to go screw itself for one specific reason:

Microsoft had offered its war chest to buy them, and yahoo turned them down. It had a good chance of bringing down Microsoft in the long run, and yahoo would have done a solid for the world.

But they turned them down. The ONE TIME I want a goddamn company executive leadership to take the money and run, and they didn't.

jpswade• 10 years ago

Yahoo should focus on discussion.

akvadrako• 10 years ago

I wish Yahoo would make more great series like...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Space

mdekkers• 10 years ago

Altaba? Because a rebrand is certainly going to rescue the company. I can see the meetings now. "we need to do something" "....." "Let's do a rebrand! It will all give us the feeling we are doing something"

wbsun• 10 years ago

Probably shouldn't laugh at the new name, but "altaba" really sounds like "ali(baba)'s father" in Chinese...

Yahoo SEC Filing: Name change to Altaba Inc and director resignations

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