5 comments

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  JoeDuck

  1 年 ago

  I'm wondering how much politics played a roll vs employee performance in the layoff decisions. Horowitz's departure's got to hurt - his team was *so good* and one of the reasons I felt Yahoo had great potential. They still do of course, but it's getting harder by the day to realize that potential as people leave and the board seems more concerned about fending off MS than making Yahoo valuable.
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  mathewi

  1 年 ago

  I agree, Joe -- at some point enough creative people will have left
  that it could definitely affect what comes out of either the merged
  company or the standalone company (in the unlikely event it manages to
  fend off the takeover).
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  n00b

  1 年 ago

  Is there really any evidence that Microsoft wants the tech people at Yahoo? Maybe they just want to get some of their brands and do something with them before Yahoo can completely run any last bit of value into the ground?
  
  What have Yahoo's technologists managed to do other than shed their own marketshare and buy hyped Web 2.0 companies? I actually subscribed with my credit card to Yahoo's music service; too bad it didn't actually work and Yahoo thought the best approach was to refund my money rather than lift a finger to even inquire as to what kind of error I was getting.
  
  Maybe I just don't get why these people that Yahoo is letting go of (along with the ones leaving on their own) are suddenly hot properties, ones whose departure is decreasing the value of Yahoo and increasing the value of anyone who hires them. Yahoo's in a death spiral, largely due to technology, so where were these people to pull them out of it?
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  mathewi

  1 年 ago

  That's a fair point, er... n00b. There certainly aren't many signs of
  creativity coming out of Yahoo, so maybe some of those people who are
  leaving are no real loss -- but it's also possible that there's a lot
  of ability inside the company that hasn't been able to make an impact.
  Arguably they wouldn't have been able to do so under Microsoft
  either, so better they leave now, I suppose.
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  awilensky

  1 年 ago

  Brad Horowitz was the conscience of Yahoo's technical and product arm. He was poised to remake that company into a coherent whole, with all the pieces meshing, until the Semel Decker team burdened the organization with layer upon layer of inertia and useless content acquisitions that could have been better couched as partnerships.
  
  What a loss for Yahoo, a gain for Google.
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