An ex-Yahoo's instructions for Microsoft
Commenter ex_yhoo_music writes a letter to Microsoft offering "helpful" tips on how to run its Yahoo acquisition.
Dear MSFT, as part of this takeover, please extend all takeover courtesies that Yahoo has traditionally extended to companies that it bought out. In other words, please do the best you can in ultimately creating the most fucked up experience that you can possibly imagine so that the rest of Yahoo knows how miserable an acquisition can be for an acquiree....
He continues:
I have a few examples of how you can realize this, as I have exemplary experience from Yahoo:
1) Put 20-25% of the proceeds from this takeover into an escrow account, "just in case you need to settle any legal issues". Tell Yahoo employees that they'll get this money back, but make sure you tax them for it as income ahead of time. Wait until the next year, and than get your lawyers to send off an obfuscated email informing employees that "sorry, due to increased legal expenses, you won't be getting shit back...And you're on your own to redo your taxes from last year". Don't screw ex-Musicmatch, ex-Overture, or any other ex-acquired company that Yahoo had already graciously extended this favor to.
2) Buy a competing company, like AOL while you're at it...Then pin each company against each other. Better yet, get a General Manager from AOL and have it oversee BOTH the AOL and Yahoo acquisition, ensuring the GM from AOL says "I will be impartial". While Yahoo may be ahead of AOL, make sure you put someone really incompetent from AOL at to oversee this effort.
3)In the pursuit of (2), when smart heads start to voluntarily leave because of the frustration, just ignore them. After all, they are the most capable people that can find positions anywhere else. Who needs them, right?
4)As the frustration mounts at the Yahoo side, and more people start to complain, do your best to try to retain your C-,D-,F+ employees that haven't left already because they are otherwise unemployable elsewhere. Offer them lots of "retention bonuses" every 6 months, piles of worthless stock options that better function as toilet paper, and RSUs that take 4+years to vest.
5)At the heat of the frustration, remove the General Manager from AOL, and find the most F- manager you can from what remains at to be previously Yahoo. Make that F- manager in charge of both former AOL and Yahoo operations.
6) Ignore the "natural" turnover that will happen at the AOL side of the house. You don't need all the "A" players that leave from the AOL side anyway.
7) As the frustration mounts at the AOL side, and more people start to complain, do your best to try to retain your C-,D-,F+ employees from the AOL side that haven't left already because they are otherwise unemployable elsewhere. Offer them lots of "retention bonuses" every 6 months, piles of worthless stock options that better function as toilet paper, and RSUs that take 4+years to vest.
8)Finally, with both sides completely unhappy, take AOL's offerings and declare that that is the new MSFT offerings moving forward. End-of-life all offerings from Yahoo that are similar. It doesn't matter that the Yahoo offerings might have been built better, or had more customers. Do the most illogical thing you can think of by end-of-life-ing the better products.
9) Then spend millions and millions of dollars trying to migrate customers from Yahoo to the AOL products. Spend R&D, engineering, product management $$$$ to make those AOL products up to what Yahoo products were THREE YEARS AGO, ensuring older Yahoo customers will have "improved features and experiences".
10)After shutting down all of Yahoo products, rather than canning the Yahoo employees, assign them to some other business unit that was completely unrelated to what they've done in the past, such as Hotmail.
