Yahoo's earnings call on Tuesday was rough to read about even secondhand. Marissa Mayer announced the company is cutting about 15% of its workforce, something like 1,700 jobs, and closing five offices, Dubai, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Madrid among them. The board is also "exploring strategic alternatives" for the core business, which is the kind of phrase executives use when they mean "we might sell the thing" but arent ready to say it in a sentence a headline writer could use directly.
I want to be clear about what that phrase means because I dont think its neutral corporate throat-clearing. When a board says its evaluating strategic alternatives for the core business, it usually means one of a short list of options: sell it off in pieces, sell it whole to a private equity shop, or keep limping along under new leadership while everyone pretends option three was on the table the whole time. Given Yahoo's stake in Alibaba is worth more than the rest of the company combined at this point, my money's on somebody buying the search-and-mail business for parts and leaving the investment portfolio to fend for itself. Verizon's name keeps coming up in the rumor mill and honestly it fits the pattern of what Verizon has been doing with AOL.
None of this should surprise anyone whos been paying attention since, I dont know, 2012. But it still stings a little, and I want to explain why, because its not really about the company as it exists today.
I still have a Yahoo Mail address. Its from 2001. I got it in a computer lab in middle school because Hotmail felt too corporate even to twelve-year-old me, which in retrospect is a very funny thing to have believed. I dont check it anymore, obviously, its full of newsletter spam and one incredibly embarrassing chain email thread from 2004 I refuse to delete because deleting it feels like erasing evidence of who I was. My dad still uses his Yahoo address as his primary email though, and every time I try to get him to switch to Gmail he tells me Yahoo has "always worked fine" and I dont really have a comeback for that because its true, it has.
The thing that actually worries me today isnt the mail, its Flickr. I've had a paid Flickr Pro account for probably six years now and it is, without exaggeration, the best photo hosting product Ive ever used, better than anything Google or Apple has shipped. The interface has some rough edges and the mobile app can be sluggish, sure, but the community features and the way it handles full-resolution originals are genuinely unmatched. Every time Yahoo has a bad quarter I get a little knot in my stomach thinking about what happens to Flickr if the company gets carved up and sold to whoever wants the ad network and none of them want the photo site. Products dont usually die cleanly in an acquisition, they get starved of engineering resources for a year or two and then one day theres a blog post about "sunsetting."
Layoffs by themselves arent a moral failing, companies contract, teams get reorganized, thats life in this industry and Ive lived through a couple of rounds of it myself. What gets me is the trajectory. This isnt Yahoo's first restructuring under Mayer, its not even her second. Theres a version of this story where each round of cuts is supposed to be the one that stabilizes things, and by now Im not sure anyone, including people inside the company, actually believes that anymore.
I dont have a tidy prediction here. Maybe the core business gets sold and absorbed into something and keeps limping along under a different logo the way AOL still technically exists. Maybe it doesnt. What I do know is that a huge amount of the internet I grew up on ran through Yahoo at some point, GeoCities, Launch, the fantasy sports leagues my friends and I ran through Yahoo Sports for a decade. Watching a company that big shrink by 1,700 people in one announcement is one of those moments that makes the whole industry feel a lot less permanent than it usually pretends to be.