This is massive. Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer just resigned after the board approved a sale to US carrier, Verizon. Even more surprising than the deal and the Mayer stepping aside is the bizarre name change to Altaba. Its not a name that rolls off the tongue and going to be incredibly hard to think of Yahoo under than title.
The news comes as part of an 8-K filing with the Security and Exchange (SEC), required as Yahoo is a public company. The deal to Verizon is worth US$4.8 billion and will slice up parts of Yahoo including web properties like the still popular Yahoo.com, Mail, Sports and most importantly to me, Flickr.
While the bones of Yahoo to move to Verizon, the remainder is largely made up of its shares in Alibaba, essentially this is the end of Yahoo as we know it. What will Verizon do with the new web properties, well that’s anyone’s guess at this point. Despite the company’s relevance sliding off a cliff in recent years, Yahoo services are still used by millions, so there’ll be a keen eye on whether Verizon keeps the services running.
Take Flickr for example, millions of Flickr images are embedded around the web and if that was to be determined as a business they no longer wanted to continue, much of the web would break overnight.
With a background as an engineer at Google, Mayer has always been an impressive story for people to aspire to, to reach the CEO position at the top of one of the largest tech companies is impressive. Hopefully she can find a new gig soon.
Via Cnet