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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

Didn't people used to complain about do-nothing managers looming over their pet projects and padding the payroll with their lackeys?

The investors aren't trying to fix Yahoo. By some estimates, the core business of Yahoo has a negative market value meaning they're not adding anything of value. Yahoo is a dying business and they don't really hold a competitive advantage in anything worthwhile. It may make sense to wind the company down and give back the capital and resources to more worthy ventures. Yahoo tried rebranding and hired a high profile CEO to no avail. It's nothing personal but if it were as easy as cutting a few projects, offering better perks and hiring good people, Yahoo would have done so already.

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>> "By some estimates, the core business of Yahoo has a negative market value..."

I dislike those estimates. Yahoo is the Nth highest-traffic site in the English speaking world, where N is probably < 100. It strains credulity to imagine that a site with that much traction truly has negative value.

Edit: [0] claims that Yahoo is the 6th most popular site on the web.

[0] http://www.alexa.com/topsites

According to Wikipedia, Yahoo!'s 2014 net income was $7.52 billion. Do they get income from their stake in Alibaba?

They sold a lot of shares during the alibaba IPO in 2014 : https://investor.yahoo.net/secfiling.cfm?filingid=1193125-14... .

> Yahoo is the Nth highest-traffic site in the English speaking world, where N is probably > 100.

That's true of most sites in the English speaking world. If you remove the fuzziness of "probably", its true of all but 100.

> It strains credulity to imagine that a site with that much traction truly has negative value.

That only makes a little bit of sense if you flip the > to be a <.

But even then, traffic is a cost driver; its only worth something if you have an effective way of monetize it. "We lose money on every transaction, but make up for it in volume" is as much of a fallacy with web sites where the transactions are "visits" as it is for any other type of interaction.

Generating value for shareholders is different from generating value. Yahoo may be a fantastic charitable enterprise, making products users like well enough.

not growing does not equal dying.

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