Agree or disagree with the MSFT takeover of YHOO… Yang bunged it up royally. Publically stating that YHOO is worth $37/share even though it had recently been trading at -$19/share puts him on the hot seat. It’s a lose-lose for Yahoo.

The only winner here will be Carl Ichan.

Thre’s an old Indian proverb: “When elephants battle the grass suffers. In your story the employees of Yahoo are the grass.

Interesting view, I share some feeling for Yahoo but it really comes down to a leadership problem. Yahoo has an incredible presence, it’s much more user-friendly than google for common/non-techy people. Despite this edge, the senior leadership have dropped the ball and let shareholders suffer, so it’s a pity that MSFT and Carl have to come in for the yahoo rank and file folks but it’s also their fault too because they have the ability to influence senior management by their feedback and choices to stay or leave the business.

On the other hand, how rich did many of those same employees get on YHOO stock? I don’t feel terribly sorry for them. As Hyman Roth said in The Godfather II, “this is business we chose”.

I feel sorry for victims of natural disasters, not the employees of Yahoo, who even in the worst case are living quite well.

Nice post!
As I am now a “former” Yahoo, i empathize with my former colleagues.
It’s kind of sad to watch multi-millionaires and billionaires make one poor decision after another as they scheme to add more millions to their personal coffers, mean while, the people ACTUALLY doing meaningful work are herded like cattle and given a daily dose of BS that they all know not to believe.

Oh, I also forgot to mention that the Yahoo employees monitor everything that gets posted on this site as comments and if they approve of what you say, then, maybe then, (you might get lucky) and they will post it, otherwise, it never gets posted. They are crooks and they know who they are and what they have been doing.

We are actually doing ok. Silicon Valley and the Internet business re-invents itself every 18 months. Yes, this time around there is a bit more drama than usual, but internal morale is fine and it has let us throw caution to the wind in certain areas and pushed new products out faster than we might otherwise have done. In the trenches, that’s what drives us. Building cool things and getting them in front of our millions of users.

why i feel sorry for people who feel sorry for yahoo.
don’t underestimate yahoo’s power.

Thank you!

A Yahoo! Employee

Do You Yahoo?
http://www.yahoo.com

The company I currently work for has been taking over twice,once in 1990 again in 2000. During those times it was a depressing place to work and to come into every morning. I learned alot about people, who smile in your face and back stab at the same time, everyone was afraid of losing their jobs so almost everyone played tricks. In the end it is still only a job and you keep your resume updated.

Not sure if I feel better now that “some” people feel pity for us here at Yahoo! whilst this huge circus act drags on…such is big business, I guess.

All I can say is things have been very different these past couple of months, and I can’t say that it’s for the better.

Just give me my golden parachute and I’m outta here!

Yahoo was going out of business. Turmoil and sudden death is better than a long, slow decline into dementia and incontinence.

Ahhh! This kinda reminds me of the Google vs. YouTube battle…Right after Yahoo looses, there will be a crop of lawsuits pertaining to Yahoo in some way. Gates likes ruling the world. He thinks that color looks good on him.

That’s why I feel a certain advantage as a member of the younger generation of workers. My peers and I grew up knowing that our jobs are utterly ephemeral and can disappear on a whim. Thus, we form little, if any, emotional attachment to the places we work. They really are just jobs to us. We don’t get upset when our jobs disappear because we know there’s no reason to expect any kind of continuity. It’s people raised in a culture of trust and mutual respect that I feel really sorry for.

It really is lose-lose here. Microsoft’s eventual acquisition will allow it to compete in the market, but Yahoo is always a step behind Google anyway. Yahoo employees will be put in a terrible position, and Microsoft will have to go to great lengths to incorporate Yahoo into its ranks.

In short, Carl Icahn will win, and everyone else will be left off worse than they started. If you are looking for someone to blame, if you are an employee, shareholder, etc. it is him since he is going to make money in a situation where he has no business. No one should want to be near this deal based upon his history.

Bing, you are getting soft in your old-age. This is a dog-eat-dog World, everything else in Business is irrelevant.

Hey! I resent that comment… the one that says I’m getting soft in my old age. First of all, I have ALWAYS been soft. I’m a softie. I’m known as Mr. Softie, in fact, a moniker completely unrelated to my physique, I can assure you. And I most certainly am NOT in my old age. Just because today is actually my birthday, believe it or not doesn’t mean I’m sensitive about that, by the way. I’m in what they call the High Middle Ages, and it’s very nice here and far better than the alternative.

I would also add that anybody who gets too far away from the concerns of the people who work for a company is probably a bad manager. This has no implications for people like Carl Icahn, or anybody else in the MBA zeitgeist, but it does mean something to people who view organizations as human enterprises rather than machines that disgorge money to the lucky few.

Bing:

Perhaps one of the best pieces you’ve written …

Tim: RE
“That’s why I feel a certain advantage as a member of the younger generation of workers. My peers and I grew up knowing that our jobs are utterly ephemeral and can disappear on a whim.” etc

I once thought as you did. I was the bastard engineer from hell with mad skillz. I was a mercenary. I could go anywhere that paid phat loot.

Then I stuck around at a company I liked for a decade or so. I became “management.” Perhaps I got soft in my old age, but I formed attachments to the people I was in the trenches with.

It was a hard, hard thing to sit across the table from people with 25 years at that company, people who’d been in the workforce when I was but a schoolboy, and tell them that their jobs had been eliminated. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my career.

Someday you may find yourself having to do that too, if you live long enough.

I agree with you completely, Bing. Folks like Icahn, Pickens and their apparent wannabe, RG, are contemptible forms of life.

To further your point about a manager being in touch with employees and having a good business strategy, just looks at Koch Industries. An enormous private company, maybe the largest based on revenue, running off of a very intense and interactive management system: Market Based Management. They clearly understand that you must value your employees, and have built a firm out of the intellectual advantage that their firm has fostered.

Yahoo e-mail feels more intuitive than Google’s;
Yahoo search now finishes your search words for you – incredibly convenient.

That aside, we need to start a new country, one without a street called Wall Street. Just working people. We might grow more slowly, but with nobody skimming off the top, we just might, eventually, be loaded. Who’s with me?
– http://www.sawyerspeaks.wordpress.com

nice writing. good read. two types of people knock yahoo – those who do so to trade on the resulting stock movement, and those who don’t understand how much of that affects yahoo’s stock price. the latter underestimate yahoo. the former doesn’t care, but will just make money of such sheep. yahoo kicks ass, and it’ll pull through in a way that delivers value. people are naive to assume that yahoo held tough b/c they were stupid. they held tough b/c they were smart and understand the assets and potential they have.

Natural selection always seems to happen for both the company being acquired and the talent there. If the stupid end up driving the merged boat, the real talent jumps ship, the new combined entity eventually dies (after the deal-makers reap their tah).

Advice: Go where you are wanted and you cannot lose. Continously grow your skills. Keep in touch with your old buds and there’s a 50-50 chance you’ll end up colleagues again at a better place.

BTW I am in my upper mid century and it took me until I was 40 to really set myself free. The best bargaining unit is that of FREE WILL.

When we’re in control, we can’t wait to fire-up the burners in “HELL’S KITCHEN”; then slip into SATAN’S DINNING ROOM” to burn scented candles, imbibe in fine wine, and gourmet dinning.

After the EUPHORIC ENRAPTURE”, when we’re reeling in the down spiral, we lament for the “LAST RITES” enabling us to go to “HEAVEN”; knowing full well that all that’s left of the “APPLE” is the “CORE”.

“AND THE BEATING GOES ON AND THE BEATING GOES ON”!!!! Go “CHER”!!!

Happy birthday old boy!!!

Knock of early, grab a burger and send us another post. Something about flex work schedules etc. With the increased cost of commuting and the unnavoidable infestation of Gen Y, this topic is getting hot again.

Yang is an idiot! I’m glad I sold my Yahoo stock shortly after the MSFT offer because my “gut” told me Yang was going to be a fool and screw over the shareholders and his “little folks” employees.

nice writing. good read. two types of people knock yahoo – those who do so to trade on the resulting stock movement, and those who don’t understand how much of that affects yahoo’s stock price and listen to what they’re told. the latter underestimate yahoo. the former don’t care, but like to make money of sheep like the latter. behind the scenes yahoo remains (and is even more-so now) a dynamic power player with great assets, and it’ll pull through in a way that delivers value in the end. people are naive to assume that yahoo held tough b/c they were stupid. they held tough b/c they were smart and understand the assets and potential they have.

Yang and bovine have given themselves jewel-encrusted, platinum parachutes; why? They’ve destroyed more shareholder value in the past 3 plus years, but feel ‘entitled’ to the scorched earth policy. What has Yukwho accomplished in past 5 years? NOTHING, but sinking the stock to $19. No leadership, no vision, toooooo many staff, means RIPE for new OWNERSHIP and Yang and bovine on UNemployment – no corporate jets, no company credit card. GO CARL!!!

A note to those who have no faith in Yahoo! let me add that I actually spent time in the peer run help forums for Google Groups.

I don’t know much about HTML, Picasa and a lot of web candy I barely care about but I still have some wits and common sense after 29 years of computer use. I know computer purgatory when I see it. Lycos was that and I finally let my account die. Google is purgatory with selection.

Customer service has been next to non-existant for quite a while for nearly everything but You Tube and confused and frustrated bloggers, Picasa users, Google Earth, Usenet posters using the Google portal and groups owners would flood the help forums for Groups with the same trouble over and over or hope for answers to unrelated services.

If you have the same questions repeated endlessly, angry, abusive, childish trolls that wished death on the whole thing, a relative small number of peers trying answer them in earnest yet the search function is so bad that nobody can find previous answers easily and bring on the vicious circle, fatigue and depression over it all.

Google has just two staff members assigned to the forums and they rarely chime in and mostly to post a sticky. The most common troubles were related to owners losing control of their own groups, email lists/adding members in bulk, harassment from members against former members and the largest gripe of all-how can I get all this stuff to work when it won’t (they expect Google to do everything for them, anathema to somebody that started on a TRS-80 Model I and didn’t use a PC until 1986).

Peering this ship meant knowing it would sink or YOU would.

The spam on the Usenet groups cannot be filtered in the way most are accustomed to on the actual newsgroups and with the rapidly decreasing number of ISPs providing it, including one that has been owned by the parent of this blog’s website added to some dicey looking Usenet-only providers, Google Groups looks great until the truth sets in.

Google bought the Deja usenet archives and set up a portal in the hopes of creating a platform to add user-created groups that could be moderated and managed with a minimum of help needed. Users came in droves to get their first taste of a web they could create and learn from (and move to forums outside Google and that seems obvious).

When Google bought so many services that they wanted to make a complete experience at one spot, Groups users found themselves more enthusiastic than Google itself could be. The platform they inherited from Deja hindered things a lot and when the last Beta was made native all hell broke loose. The new Groups never worked well as the Beta and it was loathed! Google did not flinch however and tried to fix it on the fly. The nature of the current platform still does not seem to support adding functionalities and still appears crippled by the usenet section as Google wanted to keep both parts congruous and similar. It was down quite a lot also except for the help forums (separate so trouble could be reported).

I had to deal with people that were trying to manage very large groups–over 10,000 in more than one case, people who could not get their calendars out, organize their church or charity and plenty of manic bouncers that had been on Yahoogroups as well and would never be satisfied because they did not even know what they were using and did not care because Bill Gates said the internet was everything.

The internet isn’t run by Tinkerbell. It’s a router network of insane proportions for data. The young and uninformed know nothing of this and think it’s just an appliance to hook to a computer. I used an HP 3000 mini-mainframe in community college during the mid 80’s, remember how nice Windows 3.11 was and when my Word Perfect no longer was held back by DOS giving me some very creative options with graphios as well as text.

When internet service started up in my area in 1995 14.4 K was it. My friends all wanted to know if they could get PORN on that thing and I shrugged and told them them would be old and dead before it timed out and gave them another 404.

Yes, I have been through a lot of changes online. I still don’t get the impatience and lack of understanding people have with computers and online browsing. They want a television or refrigerator, not a fussy box to constantly set and reset. I’ve never seen it that way although I don’t even care to remember DOS to learn Linux…no thanks!

Yahoo rocks (specially if they could actually STOP the spam in our email box) as opposed to us just reporting it. Icahn sucks !

Yahoo will always be yahoo . Period

Part of the problem with this country is people think it’s a big deal to work on your birthday. Who wrote this article a ten year old?

As a long time Yahoo user, it disturbs me to think that my personal email address may die at some point. If MS acquires Y!, it will kill the company as we know it. The cultures are so different that all that will be left is the Y! name, assuming that MS decides to keep that. Then, if MS doesn’t acquire it, the vultures (Icahn, Pickens, et al) will tear Y! apart.
Our system has some great attributes when it comes to creating wealth and delivering goods and services efficiently. But it has a very high price in terms of killing off companies, even those which are growing and profitable, if they aren’t growing fast enough and generating enough profit. The fact that someone like Icahn, who will not build anything or deliver any value to the CUSTOMERS, can force a situation where he will walk away with $100’s of millions while leaving a previously viable company in shambles is a pretty major indictment of our system.