
According to several online news sources, the Yahoo-Verizon deal is a closed one, and Yahoo is no longer a standalone company, but part of the much larger Verizon family.
Former CEO Marissa Mayer, who’s poor judgement and lack of actual understanding of technology brought Yahoo close to annihilation, has also stepped down from her leadership position, leaving with a hefty benefits package of roughly 700 million dollars.
While her leaving the company is not a bad decision on the part of the new board of directors, potentially laying off about 2100 more employees, surely is. The company will also be renamed Altaba, though it’s highly questionable whether it’s just a play on words on “Alibaba” – in which Yahoo had a major stake, or will it actually just be a subsidiary of that.
While Yahoo’s former CEOs (several of them, in just a few years, including Marissa Mayer) have made terrible decisions because of which good programmers and engineers flocked to other tech giants, and also resulted in Yahoo loosing a really large chunk of the market and its userbase, it’s not clear at this point whether the new owners will or will not reactivate or reinstate services that made yahoo a great community to be part of.
Moving to more social-oriented services, like the aquiring of Flickr, and moving to the mobile-first paradigm was a smart move on the part of former CEO Marissa Mayer, but it has come too late, after the destruction of really social online estates, like the huge blogging community mybloglog.com was, to bring the sinking ship back to the surface.
And while about 8 years ago, Google wanted to pay the enormous sum of 44 billion dollars for Yahoo, and that deal didn’t close, now Yahoo was aquired for roughly just a tenth of that by Verizon.
Will Yahoo Altaba be a better company, with better, more user-oriented services then Yahoo was ? I guess we’ll have to see.
You can read more about the deal here