The Brutal Decline of Yahoo

[maxprogram]

A sad case study of terrible capital allocation and overpaid executives:

 

http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/11/yahoo-decline/

 

Nothing but a complete transfer of wealth from shareholders to executives and other tech companies who were smart/lucky enough to benefit. The Paul Graham essay is also a good read.

[Myth465]

Its amazing that they rebuffed the MSFT offer. I guess Yang wanted the 125 per share back.

[stahleyp]

on a bit different note, amazon has returned almost 19% per annum for the past 10 years.

[jasonw1]

Yahoo made many mistakes, the article missed mentioning Yahoo's best assets today, stakes in Yahoo Japan and Alibaba Group. The investment in Alibaba Group, $1 billion plus Yahoo China's asset, is probably worth $15-20 billion today. That's been Yahoo and Yang's best move.

[shalab]

One has to add these companies to the "Accidental Empires" list. Yahoo! founders made a lot of people wealthy and contributed to the US economy - think Dallas Mavericks  ;D

 

That said, the founder(s) or the current management has no clue how to run Yahoo! You can see deterioration in every service owned by Yahoo! When Semel/Yang were around, they cared to improve their services, now even that isnt happening.

 

Paul Graham essay is right but it is also wrong. A lot of companies and individuals lose their way because they dont know how to reinvest their capital to bear better results. Whenever I read about Buffett/Munger, the thing that impresses me is how deeply these folks have thought about business, human psychology and permanent value. Andy Kilpatrick's "Of Permanent Value" is named appropriately.

[DCG]

Side note: I use a few of Yahoo's sites daily..mainly Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Sports. If I had a dollar for every time I get a message of 'Unable to process request at this time' or 'Internal Server Error' when using their sites I'd be doing much better than their shareholders.

 

Seriously...I've gotten the 'Internal Server Error' message twice already this morning. I view that as a sign of how big of a mess this company is right now. This has been going on for months. It blows my mind that their engineers don't seem to be capable of fixing these problems...not sure if they even care. They're probably all spending most of their days working on their resumes and trying to move to a better company.

 

 

And I've posted in other threads on how horrible I think Carol Bartz is.

[Myth465]

I honestly hope they discontinue Yahoo Finance.

 

I waste quite of time on that site but cant stop.  :)

[Guest Bronco]

Jerry Yang is one of the biggest a-holes of our generation. 

 

Its one thing to be stubborn.

 

Another to be stupid and incompetent.

 

Yet another to be greedy.

 

And finally another to take a crap on your fidiciary duty and screw your shareholders.

 

Jerry Yang was blessed with the ability to combine all of the above. 

[StubbleJumper]

I honestly hope they discontinue Yahoo Finance.

 

I waste quite of time on that site but cant stop.  :)

 

 

IMO Yahoo Finance and Yahoo mail are the only elements of any value in the entire Yahoo family.  I like the collection of information that can be easily access from Yahoo finance (profile, fundamentals, options chain), and the site is usually pretty fast (even if it's sometimes unreliable).  It's also nice that they do not hassle you to sign-up for an account just so you can access the very basic finance information.

 

It's dying a slow death, but I still use it a bit.

 

SJ

[bookie71]

Their "historical prices" has been invaluable to me.