I play hockey at 6:30am every Thursday and Friday. Other than being great exercise, I do it because the rink is literally 3 minutes away from home and I am now getting to the age where playing hockey at night until 12am doesn’t work with my schedule.
Man, I wish I could pull off this look.
This morning I got into my car, flipped on the radio and heard that Scott Weiland had died. This, of course, should not come as a shock. If anything, I’m surprised he lasted to 48. Did you know that news organizations and newspapers prepare and write obituaries well in advance of certain people dying? Maybe it’s a little macabre, but it totally makes sense – why scramble and run around when you know the odds? Be proactive, not reactive, right?
Pre-writing obits is not as obvious for businesses as it is for human beings, though. I suppose if you comb through enough blogs you’ll get all the prognostications you’ll ever need (and some you don’t need), but these things are harder to predict.
Which brings me to Yahoo. Ouch. I’ve had their pre-obituary written for about 7 years now. This is a company whose market value is $33.7 billion dollars. BILLION! Their CEO is foundering, although who can really blame her – she took on the role when it was already a dead-man-walking. I don’t blame her for Yahoo’s troubles, I question her decision-making in taking the role in the first place. Bad move. But she has twins, so we have that in common.
Anyway, back to the $33 billion. That’s a lot of cake. But take out the 15% stake in Alibaba (China) and Yahoo’s overall cash position, the company is a smoldering wreck. Alibaba’s market value is $32 billion! You do the math. I’m not going to over analyze it, but I know one thing, whoever takes on the CEO position at Yahoo is another person with bad decision-making traits.
Scott Weiland and Yahoo. See what I did there? Two entities who certainly require an obit before the actual death. Weiland got there first, but Yahoo is probably more deserving. This isn’t 1999.