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from Breakingviews:
Marissa Mayer puts exclamation point back in Yahoo
By Jeffrey Goldfarb
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Marissa Mayer has made her mark on Yahoo in less than a year. The website chief’s $1.1 billion deal to buy blogging site Tumblr on Monday goes a long way to restoring the faded and vainglorious exclamation point to the company’s name.
When Yahoo poached Google employee number 20 last July, the $30 billion Sunnyvale, California, company was little more than a purple road kill stain on the information superhighway. In the five years leading up to her appointment, a succession of five chief executives failed to develop a coherent business model and ultimately destroyed value. Yahoo shares had tumbled 38 percent compared to the 6 percent gain in the Nasdaq.
The spiral into irrelevance is a hard one from which to recover in the world of technology. If nothing else, and despite little tangible sense of her “mobile first” strategy until the Tumblr announcement, Mayer has stopped the descent. Her chromosomal makeup alone generated fresh buzz for Yahoo when she was named CEO – and disclosed simultaneously that she was pregnant.
from MediaFile:
How Tumblr might ‘screw up’ Yahoo
There’s a lot to unpack in Yahoo’s reported $1.1 billion deal for Tumblr, but much of the reporting today is focused on the rather bland challenge of turning Tumblr into a profitable company. Forcing Tumblr to make money will eventually become an important mission for Yahoo, but for now it’s far from the point.
This deal’s most pressing issue isn’t what will come of balance sheets, it’s what will come of each organization’s corporate culture. Marissa Mayer has promised, in her post on the deal, “not to screw it up.” She’s talking about Tumblr. But that’s just Mayer’s very smart way of inverting what she must be hoping Tumblr becomes for Yahoo: a threat to its older, established, some might say calcified culture that has been short on innovation, creativity and user-focused design for many years now. Tumblr, indeed, will be far from “screwed up” as it gets used to its new home under Yahoo. Tumblr seems to have a bright future as something like a design lab and an already-functioning charter city under the aegis of the Yahoo brand. It will be, and already is, something Mayer will point at to tell her team, “why don’t you do it that way?”
from MediaFile:
The future of search only cost $30 million
On the surface, Nick D’Aloisio’s story is the kind tech lives for, and sometimes regrets. It’s the tale of a kid selling an obscure startup for an inflated price, and then it becomes as irrelevant as Netscape, and its buyer’s remorse is part of the company's enduring legacy.
But the story of Summly, a startup whose app appeared in the Apple Store only five months ago and was purchased on Monday by Yahoo for a reported $30 million, isn't part of this trite arc.
from Unstructured Finance:
Daniel Loeb surfing to the top of the hedge fund charts again
Something must be in the water over at 399 Park Avenue, where Daniel Loeb’s hedge fund Third Point is headquartered. His Third Point Ultra fund has already gained 12.42 percent this year through the 13th of March, according to data from HSBC’s Private Bank.
The portfolio added 3.3 percent alone between March 1 and March 13. By comparison, hedge funds have returned about 4 percent year-to-date, according to HSBC.
from Jack Shafer:
Is this story less than the Summly of its parts?
Like children at bedtime, news consumers love nothing more than to be told the same story again and again. Oh sure, they need the names of the principals to change, the location to vary, and the supporting cast of characters to shift. But the closer the popular press can come to retelling a vital and engaging Ur-tale as opposed to building a new one from scratch, the happier readers tend to be.
If today's coverage of Yahoo's $30 million acquisition of Summly — maker of a news-condensing app developed by London schoolboy Nick D’Aloisio — fit the tech-acquisition news template any more snuggly, it would be the first layer of news epidermis. The company's founder is all of 17 years old, a fact that earns prominent mention in the opening sentences of the accounts in the New York Times (Page One), the Washington Post, Bloomberg News, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, and practically everywhere else.
from MediaFile:
Have AOL and Yahoo picked up the pieces?
"There are no second acts in American lives." — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Good thing Fitzgerald didn’t live long enough to tell that to AOL and Yahoo, which are confounding wet blankets with sparks of renewed life and relevance. The bit of renaissance for these Internet pioneers comes when Google and Apple are in a bit of a rut and Facebook seems to have found its bottom. (The one constant: Groupon and Zynga are still floundering.)
None of these things are related, of course. There is no astrology of technology, aligning the stars in such a way as to favor some and deny others. Tech success isn't a zero-sum game, especially when valuations aren’t everything. Just look at Apple's rise and fall and rebirth.
from Jack Shafer:
Why the Yahoos at Yahoo were wrong to fire David Chalian
If you're a journalist and you've ever said anything "inappropriate," as David Chalian got caught doing yesterday -- and you know you have -- please step forward to be fired now.
Chalian, the Washington bureau chief for Yahoo News, ridiculed Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann, during a Monday webcast from the Republican National Convention. It's not uncommon for bureau chiefs, beat reporters or copy editors to verbally eviscerate politicians, corporate leaders, slumping sluggers or any other notable not in the room at the time, but they usually have the good sense to first check to see if a microphone is on. Chalian did not.
from Breakingviews:
Yahoo investors counting on Mayer burning cash
By Robert Cyran
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
This looks like a case of lost in translation for Yahoo. The internet group led by Marissa Mayer says it may use much of the bounty from selling its stake in Alibaba, the Chinese web conglomerate, for acquisitions, rather than returning it to shareholders in the form a special dividend or buyback. As crummy as that sounds, it is already baked into Yahoo’s value. Investors seem resigned to Mayer wasting a chunk of their cash.
Yahoo obviously did not hire Mayer to wind down the troubled company. The former Google hotshot is ambitious. And the $70 million pay package the company granted her must be predicated on bigger things than acting as a caretaker or liquidator. Yet investors seemed startled that Mayer now may hang on to the $4.2 billion or so Yahoo will reap after taxes from the sale of half of its stake in Alibaba. Yahoo’s shares fell almost 6 percent.
from Breakingviews:
Yahoo pays up for dream of CEO stardust
By Robert Cyran
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.Yahoo is paying up for the dream of a chief executive sprinkling stardust. After churning through several CEOs in quick succession, it’s easy to see why Google hotshot Marissa Mayer snagged a $70 million pay deal from the fading internet search firm. But as J.C. Penney with its ex-Apple boss shows, there are no quick fixes.
The motivations of Mayer and Yahoo are easy enough to discern. Mayer was the 20th employee at Google, in charge of several of its most important businesses, and a natural candidate for chief executive. But that path was blocked by co-founder Larry Page. Now she will have the chance to be a CEO and to make her mark at the fourth biggest site on the Internet. At 37, Mayer is also young enough - and Yahoo sufficiently troubled - that if she fails to reinvigorate the company she will surely get more chances.
from MediaFile:
Mayer can’t save Yahoo – because Yahoo can’t be saved
Yahoo eats CEOs. The perennially ailing company lures talented managers into the corner suite of its Silicon Valley headquarters, then it sucks their good reputations out of their veins and casts them aside. They inevitably pass through the revolving door an empty shell of their former selves.
Terry Semel, Jerry Yang, Carol Bartz, Scott Thompson. All took the CEO helm with visions of invigorating Yahoo into an Internet leader for the 21st century. Most became mired in Yahoo's stubbornly byzantine culture. And all probably collected their severance checks wishing to themselves they'd never heard of the company with its stupid hillbilly name and its superfluous punctuation mark.*
