So in conclusion, someone bought up the scraps at rock-bottom prices just before a potential bankruptcy. Ouch.
I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise. They brought on a former Yahoo VP as CEO four years ago. As the article and one of the comments therein pointed out: it seems they didn't have much in the way of new technological or algorithmic advantages to build on and didn't have much in the way of direction-setting from the newly installed executive staff.
Not that it is a good idea of course, but I wonder if there are companies who pick CEOs randomly from new MBA graduates and pay them an extremely high salary with no stock options or other incentives.
I would be more interested to see the opposite: limited salary and extremely generous stock options, vesting at each time period in the future at a price that's the company's current price projected forward with the average expected stock market returns, plus some discount. (So the company needs to grow greater than the market for the CEO's options to have value)
That's the model of a lot of financial firms, it appears to lead to very short-term, high-risk strategies, and financial engineering to boost the share price at certain points in time
So in conclusion, someone bought up the scraps at rock-bottom prices just before a potential bankruptcy. Ouch.
I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise. They brought on a former Yahoo VP as CEO four years ago. As the article and one of the comments therein pointed out: it seems they didn't have much in the way of new technological or algorithmic advantages to build on and didn't have much in the way of direction-setting from the newly installed executive staff.