Yahoo! boss! Mayer! promises! shake-up! in! bid! to! save! her! job! The latest effort to turn around internet stalwart Yahoo! appears to have stalled again with a disappointing earnings report. Shares dropped 2 per cent on the news that the company had missed its third-quarter targets with 15 cents a share in income and $1.23bn in revenue. The markets were expecting 17 cents and $1.26bn. …
She blamed "revenue headwinds in our core business."
What is their "core business"? Even the search is contracted out.... so..?????
the new team now has the "skills, passion and ability to executive growth."
This one makes me chuckle. I'm not sure what she's saying.... "executive growth"? Like all us C-Suite types will find better jobs maybe?
Along with AOHell, why don't they just put a bullet into both and let those brands go gently into the Good Night..
"What is their "core business"? Even the search is contracted out.... so..?????"
I think that's Yahoo's big problem really. They have no idea. After losing the search engine wars, they've just kind of existed and lived off some fairly good share purchases. Which actually means Yahoo's business model is somewhere between 'hedge fund' and 'pension fund'.
"I'm thinking that Yahoo's core business is selling ad space."
I'm not so sure tbh. I think Yahoo! think that they're an ad space firm... but they're not very good at it. IF it weren't for their (extremely fortuitous) Alibaba stake, I don't think anyone would have bothered to mention Yahoo over the past year or two.
"Marissa Mayer, who has been trying for three years to turn the company around, with limited success."
She could start by pissing off that abominable and faulty new mail interface. I'm quite sure not only her users, but internal staff would be quite happy to say the improvement would be significantly more than "limited".
Yahoo Groups was one of the more compelling services on Yahoo!, at least for those unable or unwilling to move their group to the Facebook equivalent. The redesign completely borked functionality and even now is not back to where it was. I looked around that time and wasn't able to find something that came even close in functionality - most were nothing more than glorified email reflectors.
About the same time, I started finding bugs in Yahoo Mail. I reported the one I found with "reply to" not working (at all) but some 3 years later it still isn't fixed despite promises to do so and allegations I was setting it up wrong.
My Yahoo email address was used as semi-disposable for business use but I migrated that to a paid for IMAP provider 2 years ago. Not only is their email platform rock solid but they also don't monitor my every word to force adverts at me. When I spotted a problem my ticket was promptly escalated to one of the senior developers who acknowledged the problem and promised a fix.
That's the whole problem; Marrisa is trying to make Yahoo Groups (among other things) like Facebook, when it had its own firm identity and group owners had extensive customization options for it. It also actually worked right on mobile devices as it was, rather than the new interface that doesn't work properly on anything.
I still use Yahoo - I've been using the same email account with them since 1998. I can't remember the last time I ever visited their website and like many of the above posters I really don't know what they do any more.
It seems to me that, quite simply, if they don't sort out a core identity with which people can - well, identify - then they have no hope as a company.
...but shucks, I quite like having had an email account in use non-stop for 17 years.
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