He has repeated his rating on Yahoo! and said that the value of the company’s core operations is close to zero.
The analysis, released to basically says that Yahoo!, via its holding in China's Alibaba Group, is little more than an Asian holding company.
Carol Bartz, Yahoo! CEO, has been reported to be possibly touting the company's 39% investment in Alibaba to potential buyers. The business has in the past
This followed reports that the Chinese internet firm had rejected Yahoo!'s offer to sell it the stake back.
Dow Jones reported that the relationship between the two had been failing for months and followed Alibaba in criticising Yahoo! for (rightly) supporting Google's complaints about cyber attacks and censorship in China.
yesterday that Wang Shuai, marketing head of Taobao, the Chinese e-commerce group’s retail affiliate, suggested that Bartz would be "well advised to get her own house in order before seeking a seat on Alibaba’s board".
Add to that, the recent ridicule from David Wei, chief executive of Alibaba.com, the group’s listed flagship, who called . The relationship between the two suggests a mutual parting of the ways can not be far off. However, losing Alibaba would remove one of the last vestiges of value from the once mighty web player.
Yahoo! has a poor history with China. It retreated after failing to buy portal Sina.com and which was then used to convict internet users on censorship grounds.
All of this also puts a question mark over the future of Bartz.
someone has asked the question: "Is Carol Bartz in the process of being replaced?" An anonymous and insightful answer has also been provided.
"Yes. From what I understand serious conversations are being had about taking Yahoo! private (which is a good thing) and as part of that Carol would be fired, on this one the record speaks for itself:
"She has not articulated a coherent product or vision for the company. She wasted more than $120M on an ad campaign (no material impact on any user engagement metric).
"She promoted executives like Hillary Schneider after failing miserably with APT (Yahoo! ad exchange system).
"Yahoo! left between $500m to $1bn of value on the table as part of the search agreement with Microsoft (Carol made Hillary the POC for the Yahoo! deal team – lets just say that Microsoft had their way with the Yahoo! deal team).
"She used odd (my gentle way of saying they didn't work) PR tactics to recast Yahoo! in the tech and business community."
If she is going replacement. It is touting Chris Cox, Facebook's vice president of product.
Business Insider said: "Chris is a triple threat – an engineer who can build company-defining products, an operator who can recruit and manage good people, and a long-term strategic thinker."
an interesting and timely post suggesting a future merger between AOL and Yahoo!. It makes a lot of sense. The two are now very similar companies, but would a merger between the two once greats deliver anything but the chance to cut jobs and hold out a little longer against the might of Google, Facebook and others?
The two have put their hands up and admitted that their future lies in content. Yahoo! has Associated Content, its content farm, and its hyperlocal focus. That's very close to AOL with its Seed and Patch.com. Who wouldn't be surprised to see those two get together? They could present a powerful force in content.