Did she? Maybe I'm a bit more sceptical, but what did she actually achieve?
1. She failed at putting Yahoo back on the map. She spent billions on acquiring businesses that bring in close to no revenue. Maybe it's a great place to work, but if there's no money coming in, it won't stay great long.
2. She failed at financial engineering; she couldn't even get a tax free spinoff through.
I would've been happy to cut her some slack if she did one of these things right, and messed up the other one. Some people aren't meant to be product people and others just aren't financial engineers. But this is basically throwing in the towel.
Don't forget, this idea of a reverse spinoff didn't come from Marissa. It came from an activist investor, who are basically, master financial engineers.
I think you're being too harsh on the revenue side: they make a ton of money. They may not be growing that at the desired rate, or in the right markets, or be appearing to be innovative (or being actually innovative), but Y! has a ton of cash flow.
When Mayer took over, they had no ability to attract or retain any kind of tech talent. Now, they can do so at the same rate as any other ad company. That's a big change.
She didn't hit it out of the park, but she's delivered her shareholders a solid double.
She's throwing the company away she is currently CEO of.
The BABA stake had to be separated from Yahoo, but this is literally the worst possible way, aside from selling the shares + paying taxes, to achieve this.
What's so bad about it? The end result is the same as the original plan - one company with a stake in Alibaba, and another company with Yahoo's core businesses and the Yahoo Japan stake.
It's reminiscent of the endgame at HP, where the formerly profitable PC/printer division has been split off from Enterprise - possibly in an attempt to keep at least one afloat.
That's not proof of badness, but it does suggest desperation and lack of imagination.
It's completely different. Yahoo is not splitting up its core businesses.
They're taking a non-core asset (the Alibaba stake) that they can't sell without incurring a huge tax bill, and separating it from yahoo Core so that they can hand it over to Yahoo's shareholders (presumably in the hope that someone else - e.g. Alibaba - will step up to acquire it, thus unlocking the value for the shareholders), and re-focus on Yahoo's core businesses again.
There is a separate issue that the core of Yahoo is performing poorly, and that fact may well result in Yahoo Core being split up and sold off but it's important now to conflate the two issues.
They're looking for a buyer of the Yahoo spinoff, it's not going to stay independent. It will probably to be bought by vulture capital firms. Yahoo is basically dead.
I don't follow your logic. That's like saying the new manager for the department store managed to keep the roof of the store intact while losing everything under the roof.
It depends on the condition of the roof. If the manager manages to keep it up long enough to liquidate and get some value from the merchandise that would be lost in an imminent collapse, then that's a level of success.
1. She failed at putting Yahoo back on the map. She spent billions on acquiring businesses that bring in close to no revenue. Maybe it's a great place to work, but if there's no money coming in, it won't stay great long.
2. She failed at financial engineering; she couldn't even get a tax free spinoff through.
I would've been happy to cut her some slack if she did one of these things right, and messed up the other one. Some people aren't meant to be product people and others just aren't financial engineers. But this is basically throwing in the towel.
Don't forget, this idea of a reverse spinoff didn't come from Marissa. It came from an activist investor, who are basically, master financial engineers.