Yahoo board to weigh future of company, Marissa Mayer, source says
“The board of Yahoo Inc is weighing a sale of its core Internet business when it meets this week, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters,” Amrutha Penumudi reports for Reuters by way of, apropos, Yahoo News. “The board’s meeting comes amid a broader debate about the future of the company and that of high-profile Chief Executive Marissa Mayer.”
“The Wall Street Journal first reported the possible sale of the Internet business late on Tuesday. People familiar with the matter told the newspaper the board was expected to also discuss during meetings from Wednesday through Friday whether to proceed with a plan to spin off more than $30 billion in shares of Alibaba Holding Group Ltd . The company could also pursue both options, the paper said,” Penumudi reports. “The news comes as Mayer faces growing pressure over the company’s performance.”
“Her arrival kicked off heightened expectations of a quick turnaround at Yahoo… Hopes of a comeback crumbled as Yahoo’s plan to push mobile, video, native and social media ads – a strategy Mayer introduced in 2014 under the acronym Mavens – failed to increase revenues as desktop search ads continued to decline,” Penumudi reports. “During Mayer’s 13-year tenure at Google, she led the Google Earth, Gmail and Google News teams and is credited with helping create the company’s celebrated search page.”
MacDailyNews Take: Mayer’s been hamstrung with the STUPID deal her predecessor Carol Bartz inked with Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer (two very confused former CEOs) to use Bing as the search component of Yahoo. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)Yahoo needed to develop and promote its own technology. If they had their own search, Yahoo would be in a position today to make a serious play to replace Google as the default search engine on the world’s most coveted platform and reap multiple billions of dollars from such a deal. Alas, they are not and, as a result, Mayer has been forced to tinker around the edges while trying to extricate Yahoo from the straightjacket into which her predecessor shackled the company.
The Bing deal has since been amended under Mayer and, reportedly, either party can now terminate the deal at any point in time as of October 1, 2016. Mayer should be given some more time to fully execute her plans in which a deal with Apple should — if she has any hope to be a long-term CEO — be the centerpiece, the engine that drives Yahoo back to major prominence.
All Yahoo should be focusing on now is displacing Google as Apple’s default Safari search engine on iOS devices.
