Why Were Apollo And Jim Lanzon Doomed At Yahoo?

Key Sentence:

• The world doesn’t need Yahoo. The recent “cheap” purchase of Apollo did not yield any value.
• Jim Lanzon’s idea of ​​changing the name to “focus on key areas already popular with consumers” doesn’t either.
• Eventually, Apollo would rip up Yahoo and sell it in pieces.

Assume that before taking a position, Apollo And Jim Lanzon Lanzone conducts an honest review and closely looks at the organization, roles, and personal risks.

Personal risk

In terms of personal risk, Lanzone may have concluded that it could be a reverse CEO. He influenced Tinder by updating his product. It was reasonable to assume that he believed he had the personal power to do this again.

Role risk

Role risk is relatively low. Risk arises when roles are not well defined, and others feel that their function and the part of the new manager overlap. There is no problem with Lanzone as CEO of Yahoo. It’s hard to believe that anyone else on this planet would want their role.

Organizational risk

This brings us to organizational risk. First, Lanzone must realize that the odds are against Yahoo’s success. I am betting on Yahoo Sports, of course.

1. Search. Yahoo was born as a search engine. The search war is Apollo And Jim Lanzon long over. Google wins. Yahoo had to go and sell it to Microsoft for $44.6 billion, which they offered in 2008.
2. Lost and undiscovered. Yahoo has never advocated anything since then, despite several attempts by the CEO. Terry Semel is trying to turn it into a media company. Carol Bartz tries to block her path to profitability. With a series of failed acquisitions, Marissa Meyer tries to be “mobile, social, native advertising, and social.” Neither Jerry Ian, on his temporary return, nor Scott Thompson had any influence in the five months before people realized he had “embellished” his autobiography.
3. The Yahoo brand is useless. Yahoo’s market cap peaked at $120 billion by the end of the century. It collapsed when the dot-com bubble burst and hovered between $20 billion and $50 billion, primarily equal to the value of its stake in Alibaba. Verizon bought some of its assets and discontinued the brand name in 2016 when it purchased part of the company’s “core online business.” Apollo recently paid $5 billion for this asset and the Yahoo name, in part because they saw Yahoo!’s 900 million subscribers’ worth.
4. Freemium is not a strategy. The problem is, these customers don’t value the Yahoo brand. They are there because of their laziness and because they don’t have to pay for the tools they use.

Procter & Gamble has developed a new and improved toilet cleaner. Consumers prefer its presentation over anything else in the market. But they don’t want to pay for it because other products do what is asked. Freemium is a test tool. It only works when people then see something else that’s worth paying for. And there is no proof of that.