achates

Yahoo CEO Bartz Has a Lot of Explaining to Do

It's not that I'm a loyalist, it's just that I tend to post when I think someone is being unfairly described. I sometimes defend people I don't like and don't approve of, if I think the criticism is wrong.

I never post about company negatives - that's for comment inside the company, not with bloggers. That could, I realize, make it appear that I am blindly supportive.

I enjoy working at Yahoo! - it's still full of smart people and is cooperative and supportive, at least at the level of the engineering community. It's not perfect, but a lot of the perception expressed in the blogosphere bears no relation to the reality I see around me.

CEO compensation, here and elsewhere, seems bizarre, but so does lots of other high-earner compensation (sports, entertainment, banks, the market,...). I assume this is a problem with that free market thing. The Compensation Committee presumably arrived at numbers it was willing to pay (because they thought it was to the company's benefit) and Carol was willing to take. We are advised by free marketists to assume that was a rational decision. Why should I be more affronted by the $150K for a financial advisor than about the rest of the package? It's just what they agreed to pay hert.

If you have things to complain about in her actual performance of her job, feel free. My complaint is with you picking on things that have nothing to do with her performance. People are entitled to be paid what their employer agreed to pay them and they're free to do what they like with their pay. That seems basic.

[NB - I work at Yahoo!, but I have never met Carol or any member of the Board and have no special insight into their compensation.]

Yahoo CEO Bartz Has a Lot of Explaining to Do

Jackson's riding this hobby horse for all he's worth, even though nobody else seems to think it's worth talking about.

If what she's doing works, and she does seem to be making some real progress, she's worth what they paid her and more. If it doesn't work, it's just another sorry example of a company paying too much.

In neither case is it her fault that the company agreed to pay her what they did. I want my CEO to be a good negotiator. I'd like to think CEOs are smart enough to know they need to diversify their personal investments as well as riding their company's stock. Since the bulk of her compensation depends on performance, would any reasonable money manager suggest she invest more?

Yahoo's New Search Interface? That's Bing to You

Though there are superficial similarities, I don't think they're any greater than the superficial similarities between Yahoo! search and Google search. Yahoo! won't be using any Microsoft search technology for a long time.

Quite a lot of the search experience happens in the front end, layered on top of (and modifying) the algorithmic results. Yahoo! should still be able to differentiate and innovate to offer things that Microsoft can't.

Ballmer: 'Nobody Gets' the Microsoft-Yahoo Deal

"a company thats not a leader in any" is simply not true - Y! is a dominant leader in e-mail, news, entertainment news, and in a number of its media properties (<gigaom.com/2009/07/16/...;).

Shares were run up over the last week on speculation that the deal would happen and that the deal would drive share prices up; the deal wan't what the speculators were hoping for, so they dumped. No mystery.

There are strong arguments for the deal, and the deal appears to be structured very carefully to support those arguments. It will be interesting to see how execution plays out.

Yahoo-Microsoft Deal: Long Term Merger Arbitrage?

The rest of the piece is, I think, just wrong on a bunch of points, but "Yahoo is finally embracing the fact that it is not a true tech firm or development shop." shows utterly no awareness of the level of technology involved in building and running a property on the scale of Yahoo!

Bing's Gains Are Coming from Yahoo's Hide

Oh, come on. The table you posted as support shows that the month-to-month shifts in both Yahoo and Microsoft are well within the typical month-to-month shifts over the last year. Looking at that chart, I'd say that AOL looks like a more likely source than Microsoft (much larger shift as a percentage of its total). Did you actually look at that chart?

Bing Could Ding Yahoo, Not Just Google

I really don't get the complaints about "the yahoo page" looking too much like a portal. Go to search.yahoo.com and you get a naked search box. But who ever goes to a page to search? That's what the search box in your browser tool bar is for...

Microsoft Still Courting Yahoo on Search

"Yahoo's reluctance to get bought out by Microsoft puzzles me."

Money isn't everything. There's a huge cultural difference, especially on the technical side. Yahoo is attached to open-source, a free, standards-driven web, etc. Microsoft, not so much. There definitely are engineers who would leave rather than work for Microsoft.

I think an approach that basically gave Yahoo! Microsoft's web properties in return for a share of the resulting company (i.e., Y! controls what it does and how it does it and M participates int he results) would be more successful than an approach that brings Y! into M...

Not that I can see much likely of Microsoft buying that idea.

Bank of America / Merrill Lynch Propose New Scenario for 'MicroHOO' Deal

I think this is more viable than most of the ideas I've seen (it's an idea I mentioned in a few places last spring, when Microsoft was trying to buy Yahoo). Yahoo may not be as successful on-line as Google, but it's way more successful than Microsoft has been. This approach avoids the issue of working for Microsoft, which is still a sticking point for a significant number of Yahoo engineers.

I doubt Microsoft would be willing to admit failure to the extent required to do it, though.

WSJ Says Carol Bartz to Be New Yahoo CEO - Is That a Good Thing?

In what sense does "served on the board of X with" imply "is an ally of" or "has close ties to"? That's the same kind of fuzzy thought that the Republicans got in trouble with. Yes, they are acquainted with each other, but if you're going to claim they're allies or closely tied, you'd better have more evidence than being members of the ssome other company's Board together.

Yahoo: Icahn Win Would Irrevocably Trigger Severance Plan

Saying the plan was intended to thwart Microsoft is an oversimplification. There was widespread fear that a Microsoft merger would lead to widespread layoffs as they dropped parts of the company they didn't want. As a result, people were leaving. So, the plan really was, at least in part, meant to help retain staff. Of course, making it less likely that Microsoft would acquire the company also made staff happier, so it was a double win.

Icahn, however, is bleeding crocodile tears about the plan. The likely cost (they presumably wouldn't fire everybody) would have been much smaller than the number Icahn uses all the time. Icahn's claim that people could just walk and qualify for the plan is just silly - the meaning of "good reason" is fairly narrowly defined.

On Yahoo/ Microsoft: Jerry Yang Should Be Fired

I suspect Jerry will be happy to find a new CEO in the near future - I don't think he particularly wanted to have that role.

People who think Yahoo should have sold are idiots who think the market fairly values things. It's gambling, folks - today people feel good about you tomorrow they think you're going down hill, a week from now they may think you're the smartest thing they ever saw. All that matters is where they think, today, you're going to get to.

Yahoo on its own has a lot more upside potential than Microsoft - the odds on Yahoo doubling or tripling its stock price are way higher than that kind of change in Microsoft's stock. Yahoo has been up before and it can certainly be up again. Selling it to the wreckers for salvage would have been idiotic if the leadership believes the company is turning around.