So Verizon is buying the heart of old Yahoo! I include the exclamation point because it was always there in the Yahoo! we knew back when the Internet was young. $4.83 billion in cash is a lot of cash, but for Verizon it’s a way of buying into the future while buying what to many of us seems to be the past. So let’s get the business part out of the way: Verizon can see Yahoo! as a bargain because Yahoo! has nearly always been more profitable on a gross margin basis than Verizon, a phone company. Even Yahoo! in decline will pull Verizon up. But that’s not why I’m writing […]
Is anyone at Yahoo! paying attention? Probably not.
Soylent Green — Now Made with More Women!
Soylent Green is the punchline of a bad joke told to me at the breakfast table by Channing, my 13 year-old son, but in a way it is fitting for this column about women executives in danger of being chewed-up by their corporate machines. And kudos to you if you caught the reference to Edward G. Robinson’s final film — about an over-populated world where people are recycled into cookies.
First up is Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, whom I’m told is rapidly losing the support of her hand-picked board. Mayer, who is expecting twins, will probably not be returning from her upcoming maternity leave and Wall Street has begun speculating about possible successors. […]
Why Yahoo is worth less than nothing
A reader pointed out to me today that Yahoo, minus its Alibaba and Yahoo Japan stakes plus cash, is now worth less than nothing according to Wall Street. This says a lot about Yahoo but even more about Wall Street, since the core company is still profitable if in decline. If I were a trader (I’m not) that would argue Yahoo is a buy since there’s likely to be a future point at which the company will be free of those other riches and even Wall Street will be forced to give the carcass a positive value.
But when I heard about the negative value story the first thing […]
One way (maybe the only way) Yahoo can succeed
Alibaba’s IPO has come and gone and with it Yahoo has lost the role of Alibaba proxy and its shares have begun to slide. Yahoo’s Wall Street honeymoon, if there ever was one, is over, leaving the company trying almost anything it can to avoid sliding into oblivion. Having covered Yahoo continuously since its founding 20 years ago it is clear Y! has little chance of managing its way out of this latest of many crises despite all the associated cash. But — if it will — Yahoo could invest its way to even greater success.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, thinking like Type A CEOs nearly always seem to think, wants to take some of the […]
