"She could have run off and been a startup founder and "CEO," but what kind of power is that, really? Running around Silicon Valley begging VCs for a handout; pitching weary journalists on another software product; building everything from the ground up and never knowing if people will actually use it. That’s not power, folks; that’s just working like a dog, and it’s a gamble at best, no matter who’s doing it."
Why would she have to beg for VC? She has $300 million. That's just working like a dog? The author just described that Mayer already does that. It's a gamble at best? We're talking about Yahoo here.
Mayer would NEVER have to beg for VC under any circumstances first of all. And second, you can easily swap out dealing with VC's for some things that can be worse: dealing with analysts 24/7, activist investors, board members, shareholders in general, public company regulations, and on and on.
His billion dollar marker is drastically high. He has been living in dotcom fantasy land for far too long.
There's no reason you can't raise $250k for 25% from an angel investor, to build a $10 or $20 million business. That's a helluva result to put it mildly. You know, building an actual business that produces actual profits, not vaporware built-to-flip companies that produce nothing and only exist in a tiny corner of the economy.
The stock market hasn't moved in real terms in 13 years or so. Interest rates are on the floor. Any investor outside the big VC game would kill for a 10 or 20 fold return over 10 or 20 years. There's a beautiful thing called dividends, which a successful business can pay to its owners. Dixon doesn't seem to know anything about that however, as his assumed scenarios require the big exit and ignore any other possibilities.
If you take $250k, and you build a $10 or $20 million valuation business, it's not difficult to kick off a very nice dividend to the investor that provides a stellar return on their capital. AND if you ever choose to sell, said investor also gets their big exit as well. You can also buy their stock back at the higher valuation and they get their exit that way. These types of results are common in the real economy, but not so common in the fantasy dotcom economy.
There has been talk about Google stealing Yahoo back away from Microsoft on an ad deal, so that would also be another reason. It could be worth hundreds of millions per year to land that deal with Yahoo. The legal hurdles are huge though.
There's enough prior art to demolish this easily. It won't even remotely hold up under legal scrutiny if it's ever used by Apple in a lawsuit. I think this is a complete non-issue.
I find the China Study and Dr. Esselstyn's work to be far more interesting in regards to the results of a diet rich in the consumption of animal cholesterol and animal protein.
There are two big evils in American lifestyles: hyper consumption of sugar, and lack of exercise.
Americans walk a fraction as much as their grandparents every day, and consume several times more sugar. Worse, we consume insane quantities of high fructose corn syrup and its variants.
In the 1970s the US Government massively subsidized corn crops, which led to the creation of high fructose corn syrup. It's no coincidence our obesity epidemic really exploded from roughly then forward.
The caves and small places of Earth say otherwise. So do the intense environments on Earth that we've found life in. It's at least as plausible that life can hang on, sheltered in the smallest of places, as it can anywhere else. Micro organics often don't mind if you put them in a small place, with little sunlight, high or low heat, high or low oxygen, etc.
The biggest problem would be if the changes Mars underwent were too fundamentally anti-life for anything to survive whether it was in a cave or anywhere else.
In my opinion, we're going to find out on Mars that there are forms of microbes that can hang on in sedentary 'ready' state for a billion years, in extreme environments, just waiting to jump back to activity. Most of Mars will be barren, but there will be small pockets of microbes (most likely in a sheltered cave, under ice, or similar) in a form of extreme suspended animation.
They can however get kick backs from open source integrators / specialists / consultants / etc. Companies ranging from IBM to Red Hat (a $10 billion corporation).
The notion that it inherently doesn't apply to open source is wrong. There are very large systems integrators in tech, and they don't care what software they install so long as their fees are big.
They're going to have to literally reinvent themselves. Not in the B.S. wishy-washy way they've proclaimed numerous times. But in the balls out risky reinvention where if you fail, the company potentially gets sold for peanuts. They're not going to get anywhere playing it safe at this point.
The smart phone market is still relatively wide open for new, not-yet-thought-of services. Yahoo could throw their focus strongly that direction and try to matter there, betting on the future.
Buying Netflix wouldn't be a terrible idea, they're cheap these days relatively speaking. They could bring a lot of cash to bear behind Netflix, which could be put to use beefing up their streaming selection.
There are a few potential acquisitions they could do to get pointed in the right direction in terms of products relevant to the future. Yelp and Foursquare for example. They need to be able to properly handle services they acquire however, and perhaps Mayer can do a better job of that than their previous leadership. They'd need to do something more like what Google did with YouTube.
Short of making a dramatic change, it's merely a game of milking old assets for cash and slowly fading away.
Apple is a once in a century example, good luck with that.
And besides, I didn't suggest nothing can be changed at Yahoo. I didn't say that at all.
I said it should be blown apart, and the stagnant 1990s products should go. Mayer should put her talents to work on a smaller core where growth can be achieved with new products.
Yahoo Finance? Yahoo Sports? Search? Yahoo Mail? 1998 era portals? There's no growth there. She might be able to revitalize energy into Flickr and adjust it to a smart phone world, that'd be one existing major product worth giving some attention to (for example).
Unless Mayer has something equivalent to the game changing PageRank approach to search, there's absolutely nothing she can do to improve Yahoo's search product. So what can she do with the existing product core exactly? Not much, stagnation is inherent to most of the product segments in question.
The real simple angle is: ok, what's the gorilla / whirlwind product that's going to revitalize Yahoo? Search? Not a chance. The content niche products like sports or finance? Nope. Web mail? Comeon. Classifieds & jobs? Nope, small potatoes. So what is it? To really grow a $20 billion company, you need to find billions in new profit. Mayer will only find that with new products. Unless you think she can take 1/4 of the search market back from Google or take a huge chunk of the rest of the web email market.
Yahoo needs a blue ocean change.
All the stagnant parts should be sold off for a huge amount of cash. And she should more or less start over and attack something new where Yahoo can own its segment and build a gorilla product with huge growth potential (instead of being 2nd or 3rd (etc) place in everything).
Also, Michael Dell returning to his company has been a solid turn around in regards to profitability and improvement in product quality, both of which had languished under the former chief. It doesn't show in the stock valuation because of substantial PE compression, but Michael Dell has taken the company from losing money briefly and having some accounting scandals, to a solid level of profitability in the last few years.
"She could have run off and been a startup founder and "CEO," but what kind of power is that, really? Running around Silicon Valley begging VCs for a handout; pitching weary journalists on another software product; building everything from the ground up and never knowing if people will actually use it. That’s not power, folks; that’s just working like a dog, and it’s a gamble at best, no matter who’s doing it."
Why would she have to beg for VC? She has $300 million. That's just working like a dog? The author just described that Mayer already does that. It's a gamble at best? We're talking about Yahoo here.
Mayer would NEVER have to beg for VC under any circumstances first of all. And second, you can easily swap out dealing with VC's for some things that can be worse: dealing with analysts 24/7, activist investors, board members, shareholders in general, public company regulations, and on and on.