Chapter 667

Mark's first operation is the paper media and publishing business, which issues more than 64 magazines. Among the five best-selling magazines in the United States, Time Warner occupies four, namely time magazine, people, sports illustrated and fortune. In addition, other famous magazines include entertainment weekly, Fortune magazine, InStyle, etc.

Accounting for 24% of advertising revenue of consumer magazines in the United States

Time Warner, the world's second-largest publishing owner, is the predecessor of time group. They started in the publishing industry.

Now mark's business is actually the publishing business. In the current publishing business, in addition to several important magazines such as time magazine, fortune, people and sports illustrated, other 60 magazines and newspapers are on sale. At the same time, it is planned to lay off 30000 people, mainly from the publishing business, and some personnel have been laid off in other departments.

Time company, the predecessor of Time Warner, was founded in 1923 by two college students. At first, they published a Newsweek, and then founded other magazines about life, people and sports. As pioneers of magazine publishing, news reporting and photo news, they have played an indelible role in promoting the press and publishing industry in the 20th century.

After the merger of Warner Brothers, it became the largest media company. This publishing business is one of their seven businesses. Time Warner publishing group is one of the main subsidiaries of Time Warner and the largest publishing group in the world, which has evolved for decades.

Although in 2006, France's achette Book Group acquired part of the business of Time Warner book publishing group for us $537.5 million and established the American branch of achette book group, it was only part of the publishing business, mainly the publishing business of little brown. Like the current practice of almost one size fits all publishing business, the employees of the publishing business were angry.

Once they were one of the representatives of Time Warner, Time Warner was a company specializing in text and image, and time publishing group represented the word time. They were one of the pride of this group, but now they have become the part to be abandoned and reduced by the company.

As one of the seven major parts of Time Warner, this is basically one size fits all. Although several influential magazines have been retained, Time Warner's determination to withdraw from the publishing industry is beyond doubt. As the backbone of the media circle, paper media has become increasingly marginalized and become a sunset industry since the decline of the aura of the king.

Mark didn't spend much time on the board of directors. Mark just used a Pingguo tablet as a display: "we can find all the books you want to find here. This is the movable Library in your hand. As more works are digitized, handheld reading is the main way in the future, and the decline of paper books is inevitable."

And now the profits of the publishing industry are decreasing day by day. Unless it is those works that sell well, the profits of publishing a book are negligible, just to keep the balance of payments, which can be as low as poor compared with those high-profit industries.

Mark has been pursuing high efficiency and high profit, so he decided to withdraw from the publishing industry strategy and save and transfer a large amount of money to invest in other industries.

Many people can't believe it: "we are still profitable. Why did the company abandon us?"

An editor said dejectedly, "I joined the magazine after graduating from high school. I started from the code printing drama. My career has been here for 30 years. I don't have the courage to find a new job."

Although the management of Time Warner has adopted a three-year reduction of 30000 people, keeping the group's global employees at about 100000, and has also negotiated with the trade union and the municipal government, there is no agreement at all because of the huge differences between the two sides. Only half of the people in the publishing department have received the layoff notice, but they decided to unite to resist the brutal and cold-blooded behavior of the parent company.

The whole publishing department, from members of the company's board of directors to ordinary employees, United. In order to keep their jobs, they also decided to organize a general strike attended by 30000 people to protest against this cold-blooded and ruthless behavior, and mark was the object of their key criticism and protest.

There is no airtight wall in the world. It is no secret that mark has led the reform and layoffs of Time Warner. They hate this selfish and vicious guy. They describe mark as a cold-blooded and ruthless vampire. The vampire version of Lord Black is Mark's latest image.

If the strike takes place, Time Warner will be reprimanded by the government and criticized by public opinion, and will become a laughing stock of the society. With the stock market falling sharply, they have few choices in the face of this huge pressure.

As long as the momentum is raised, even if Time Warner stubbornly implements it, the government will force them to give in. Unless Time Warner goes bankrupt, the government has plenty of ways to clean them up.

When Mark received the news of the impending strike, he was organizing the management to study why Yahoo declined rapidly. They systematically summarized several points.

Yahoo from the beginning of the Internet myth to the end of its decline, people can't help but sigh. The reasons are as follows: first, the positioning is vague and the direction is lost. From the beginning, founders Yang Zhiyuan and David Philo did not have a distinctive personal color and did not form a soul role within Yahoo. Unlike other Internet giants, Yahoo has no clear values.

At first, Yahoo was essentially a content search company. But as it walked, Yahoo felt that it needed to master its own content, so it went towards portals and media companies. And constantly develop new business, out of control. For more than ten years, Yahoo has not found a suitable positioning, the new business system is getting weaker and weaker, and its development ability has not been enhanced.

The wrong way to bet on the future of search and content has made Yahoo lose the big picture. Then missed the content, community and mobile Internet, which completely ruined Yahoo, which had the opportunity to pull back the game.

The second is: the management is turbulent: the CEO changes continuously and the executives leave frequently. In fact, the frequent personnel transfer from top to bottom is not new to Yahoo. In addition to the collective departure of the board of directors, each turbulence is also accompanied by large-scale layoffs. In a previous Reuters article, it is written that Yahoo executives are very sad about the tragedy of their old owners living by selling their core assets today. They admit that as the company grew in size and bureaucracy flourished, Yahoo eventually lost its focus, laying the groundwork for its eventual decline.

According to statistics, Yahoo has changed seven CEOs in 21 years. The longest term of office of these seven people is six years, the shortest is only four months, and their development ideas and priorities are different. At the same time, it also set a record of replacing six CEOs in nine years. With CEOs constantly adjusting Yahoo's positioning, the enterprise's development was extremely unstable. It once experienced several different transformation plans, which did not help it get out of trouble, but became worse and worse.

The third is to pursue profits and sell patents. In the rapidly developing Internet industry, if you can't adapt to changes, you will be ruthlessly eliminated. However, Yahoo, which is at the forefront of the storm, did not focus on technological innovation. Yang Zhiyuan once correctly predicted that besides e-commerce, community, content, search and personalization are the four strategic cores of the Internet in the future, but Yahoo has not conquered any of them technically.

Commercialization is Yahoo's early specialty, but Yahoo's long-term pursuit of profit makes Yahoo lose big because of small things. In the agreements with Google and Microsoft, Yahoo values the main share of search advertising revenue, and gives up the more important core market, technical talents and more valuable user data in the search field.

Selling patents for survival is the winter shelter for almost all Oumi high-tech enterprises. In the past three years, Yahoo has sold or licensed more than $600 million in patents. In March last year, Yahoo chief financial officer Goldman said that Yahoo was trying to sell patents, real estate and other "non core assets" in the hope of bringing in $1 billion to $3 billion for the company.

Fourth, it missed a better opportunity to be acquired. Yahoo's market value has plummeted by nearly $80 billion in seven years. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wanted to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion, but Microsoft abandoned the acquisition plan after a higher bid of $57 billion. And at that time, Yahoo executives worried that once they were acquired, their power would be greatly limited, and finally rejected the deal. Considering Yahoo's difficulties since then, Microsoft is lucky.

Fifth, a large number of failed or mismanaged acquisitions at high prices

Yahoo has actually made many right investments and mergers and acquisitions, such as acquiring 40% of the equity of Yali, investing in Yahoo Japan, etc. However, Yahoo's M & A projects do not see effective merger reform. Most of them are mismanaged and often fall into a complete defeat in the end.

In 1999, Yahoo acquired websites with poor financial status with us $5.7 billion. In the same year, Yahoo acquired GeoCities (user produced content community), one of the websites with the highest traffic at that time, with us $3.6 billion. However, it gradually declined after being acquired. Later, the American version was officially closed;

In 2003, Overture, the inventor of the pay per click business, was acquired for $1.6 billion, but its advertising revenue still lags behind Google.

In 2005, Yahoo wantonly acquired Web 2.0 companies, such as Flickr, a photo community, delicious, a bookmarking tool provider, and the upcoming social calendar service;

Last May, Yahoo bought Tang bole, a blog platform, for $1.1 billion. At present, the valuation is less than $400 million, and in order to attract buyers, Yahoo is constantly reducing prices.

In this way, Yahoo, with vague positioning and internal turbulence, missed the tuyere of transformation wave after wave. The Internet giant who once created history did not expect to be killed by history. Facts have proved that industry leaders in a certain period can not become leaders in the next period. There are few companies such as Microsoft and Cisco. The defeat of Yahoo also seems to mean the curtain call of an era, just like American online.