For those who like watching slow-motion train wrecks...

[jducoeur]

... I commend following the TechCrunch coverage of Yahoo right now. Pretty much everyone heard about the MicroHoo fiasco over the past couple of months, as Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo. But less covered in the major media is the fact that, now that the buyout has clearly failed, the company appears to be collapsing at the top. TC is keeping a list of executives leaving the company, and it's astonishing -- at this point, they're losing people nearly every day. Those leaving are scattering all over the industry (including, for instance, their Senior Director of Int'l Business, who is moving over to become the VP and GM of LiveJournal). The founders of Flikr and del.icio.us have quit in the past couple of days.

It's amazing, and rather sad -- clearly the end of an era. We'll see where things go for Yahoo, but at best the company is being shaken to its core. It's a remarkable object lesson in the importance of morale, and how quickly things can disintegrate when the employees stop beliving in the firm and its top management...

Comments

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

Do you think, or do the pundits think, that Yahoo will be broken out into its constituent bits for acquisition? That is, would they sell off Flickr or del.icio.us (et al.) separately?

[jducoeur]

I haven't yet seen any public speculation to that effect. Wouldn't astonish me, though, if things really fall apart -- since they haven't integrated some of the properties well, there is a clear argument for reselling those...

[serakit.livejournal.com]

What happened to Yahoo?

[jducoeur]

*Very* short summary of a pretty complex story: they've been kind of drifting for a while now, without a particularly clear strategy. Microsoft tried to buy them, and made a pretty reasonable offer. Yahoo's upper management (who utterly despise Microsoft) rebuffed the offer *very* aggressively, doing a lot of somewhat questionable stuff to scuttle the deal. In the end, they succeeded in turning Microsoft away.

Now, the shareholders are calling for the heads of the Board, on the theory that they blew Yahoo's best chance for getting really good stock value. Lawsuits are beginning to fly, it is broadly assumed that the CEO (the founder of the company) is going to be fired within days, and employees are abandoning ship left and right...

[querldox.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's not just that. In addition to the disaster the buyout would've been, I knew things were going down the tubes there when they did their layoff during the buyout attempt. People I knew and have worked with and I could personally attest to being excellent were getting hit, and they were working on what Yang was claiming were critical projects. Basically, they laid off by cost and perhaps politics, not by deadwood or project. Which is never a good sign.

[laurion]

Part of me is a little surprised that it didn't happen sooner. For the core brand products (search and e-mail and instant messaging) they've been outclassed for a while now, and certainly out marketed. They have a whole bevy of really good products they've bought over the past 5 years or so, including Flickr and del.icio.us, but they've fallen prey to not branding them strongly as Yahoo property.

Still, it is a sad notion, if only because they have tried very hard to do good overall, and the market itself will lose a lot.

Branding their acquisitions

[metageek.livejournal.com]

It's not just a failure to brand (though that is serious); their technical integration has fallen down, too. I recently tried the Flickr API, and discovered that, although it isn't documented, you cannot use a Yahoo! ID to access a pre-Yahoo! photostream (even if it has one); you have to use the person's full name. That one really threw me, since you don't use the full name to access it in the UI.