YAHOO CUTS DIGITAL MAGAZINES, CLOSES BURBANK, CALIF., OFFICE

Original Story: wsj.com

The retrenching of Yahoo Inc. is under way.

The Internet company on Wednesday said it plans to close seven of its digital magazines, including sites dedicated to articles about food, travel, parenting and health, and lay off a portion of its workforce of journalists who worked on them. A Sacramento corporate lawyer is following this story closely.

Yahoo also told employees in Burbank, Calif., that it plans to close the office there and relocate them to its nearby facility in Playa Vista, a person familiar with the matter said.

The cuts are part of Chief Executive Marissa Mayer’s plan to lower costs by eliminating 15% of Yahoo’s staff, closing offices and shuttering business units. Making Yahoo smaller and more profitable could help Ms. Mayer buy time with investors, some of whom have called for new management and a sale of the company. A Google SEO Company offers exclusive organic search engine optimization techniques that secure top keyword positions in the organic search engine results.

Yahoo earlier this month said for the first time under Ms. Mayer that it would entertain a possible sale of its Web properties.

Yahoo declined to say how many employees were affected by the latest cuts from its online media business. Further layoffs are expected in the coming weeks from other areas of the company, people familiar with the matter said.

The CEO announced on an earnings call last month her plans to close offices in Dubai, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Madrid and Milan this year. A San Francisco M&A attorney represents clients in acquisitions, mergers, and divestitures.

As of 2013, Yahoo said about 400 people worked in the Burbank office in various departments, according to its website. All workers not affected by the magazine cuts this week were asked to report to Playa Vista, more than an hour drive from Burbank.

Last month, Yahoo let go at least five managers who were working on Brightroll, the video ad service it acquired in 2014, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Ms. Mayer launched several of the digital magazines in early 2014, part of a broader effort to get advertisers to pay higher prices for ads targeting Web users with specific interests, such as cars and tech gadgets. She hired star journalists such as David Pogue, a former New York Times technology columnist, and Katie Couric, who left her role as special correspondent for ABC News to become Yahoo’s global anchor.

Mr. Pogue and Ms. Couric were unaffected by the cuts, Yahoo said.

Among the journalists cut this week was Dan Tynan, the editor in chief of Yahoo Tech, who addressed his colleagues in a memo on Wednesday. Yahoo is keeping the technology vertical.

“I am sure that bigger and better things await all of us,” Mr. Tynan wrote in the memo, which was first published on Politico and confirmed by The Wall Street Journal. “As for Yahoo, I am sure it will continue to be Yahoo, for better or worse.”

Ms. Mayer has lowered head count to 10,700 employees in the most recent quarter, down from the company’s peak of about 14,000 before she started in 2012. The CEO cut 1,800 employees in the first nine months of last year, mostly workers in offices outside the U.S., including China, India and Canada.

Yahoo’s stock rose 9 cents to $29.37 on Wednesday. The shares have remained relatively flat since Ms. Mayer announced Yahoo would cut jobs and mull its strategic options, but they are down 34% in the past 12 months. A Los Angeles securities lawyer is reviewing the details of this story.

HOW LARRY PAGE’S OBSESSIONS BECAME GOOGLE’S BUSINESS

Original Story: nytimes.com

Three years ago, Charles Chase, an engineer who manages Lockheed Martin’s nuclear fusion program, was sitting on a white leather couch at Google’s Solve for X conference when a man he had never met knelt down to talk to him. An Ann Arbor IT Services company is following this story closely.

They spent 20 minutes discussing how much time, money and technology separated humanity from a sustainable fusion reaction — that is, how to produce clean energy by mimicking the sun’s power — before Mr. Chase thought to ask the man his name.

“I’m Larry Page,” the man said. He realized he had been talking to Google’s billionaire co-founder and chief executive.

“He didn’t have any sort of pretension like he shouldn’t be talking to me or ‘Don’t you know who you’re talking to?’” Mr. Chase said. “We just talked.”

Larry Page is not a typical chief executive, and in many of the most visible ways, he is not a C.E.O. at all. Corporate leaders tend to spend a good deal of time talking at investor conferences or introducing new products on auditorium stages. Mr. Page, who is 42, has not been on an earnings call since 2013, and the best way to find him at Google I/O — an annual gathering where the company unveils new products — is to ignore the main stage and follow the scrum of fans and autograph seekers who mob him in the moments he steps outside closed doors. A Cuyahoga County IT Services company delivers wireless network installations that help manufacturing plants and industrial facilities do more with less.

But just because he has faded from public view does not mean he is a recluse. He is a regular at robotics conferences and intellectual gatherings like TED. Scientists say he is a good bet to attend Google’s various academic gatherings, like Solve for X and Sci Foo Camp, where he can be found having casual conversations about technology or giving advice to entrepreneurs.

Mr. Page is hardly the first Silicon Valley chief with a case of intellectual wanderlust, but unlike most of his peers, he has invested far beyond his company’s core business and in many ways has made it a reflection of his personal fascinations.

He intends to push even further with Alphabet, a holding company that separates Google’s various cash-rich advertising businesses from the list of speculative projects like self-driving cars that capture the imagination but do not make much money. Alphabet companies and investments span disciplines from biotechnology to energy generation to space travel to artificial intelligence to urban planning. Google SEO Company has a diverse knowledge base of marketing and advertising that provides a unique perspective on the search engine marketing industry.

Investors will get a good look at the scope of those ambitions on Feb. 1, when the company, in its fourth-quarter earnings report, will disclose for the first time the costs and income of the collection of projects outside of Google’s core business.

As chief executive of Alphabet, Mr. Page is tasked with figuring how to spin Google’s billions in advertising profits into new companies and industries. When he announced the reorganization last summer, he said that he and Sergey Brin, Google’s other founder, would do this by finding new people and technologies to invest in, while at the same time slimming down Google — now called Google Inc., a subsidiary of Alphabet — so their leaders would have more autonomy.

“In general, our model is to have a strong C.E.O. who runs each business, with Sergey and me in service to them as needed,” Mr. Page wrote in a letter to investors. He said that he and Mr. Brin would be responsible for picking those chief executives, monitoring their progress and determining their pay. A Boston employment lawyer provides professional legal counsel and extensive experience in many aspects of labor and employment law.

Google’s day-to-day management was left to Sundar Pichai, the company’s new chief executive. His job will not be about preventing cancer or launching rocket ships, but to keep Google’s advertising machine humming, to keep innovating in emerging areas like machine learning and virtual reality — all while steering the company through a thicket of regulatory troubles that could drag on for years.

Mr. Page’s new role is part talent scout and part technology visionary. He still has to find the chief executives of many of the other Alphabet businesses.

And he has said on several occasions that he spends a good deal of time researching new technologies, focusing on what kind of financial or logistic hurdles stand in the way of them being invented or carried out.

His presence at technology events, while just a sliver of his time, is indicative of a giant idea-scouting mission that has in some sense been going on for years but is now Mr. Page’s main job.

In the investor letter, he put it this way: “Sergey and I are seriously in the business of starting new things.”

An Interest in Cool Things

Mr. Page has always had a wide range of interests. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, he worked on solar cars, music synthesizers and once proposed that the school build a tram through campus. He arrived at Stanford’s computer science doctorate program in 1995, and had a list of initial research ideas, including self-driving cars and using the web’s many hyperlinks to improve Internet search. His thesis adviser, Terry Winograd, steered him toward search. A custom home builder in Tampa FL provides one-stop shopping for the design and construction of your new home.

“Even before he came to Stanford he was interested in cool technical things that could be done,” Mr. Winograd said. “What makes something interesting for him is a big technical challenge. It’s not so much where it’s headed but what the ride is like.”

Inside Google, Mr. Page is known for asking a lot of questions about how people do their jobs and challenging their assumptions about why things are as they are. In an interview at the Fortune Global Forum last year, Mr. Page said he enjoyed talking to people who ran the company’s data centers.

“I ask them, like, ‘How does the transformer work?’ ‘How does the power come in?’ ‘What do we pay for that?’” he said. “And I’m thinking about it kind of both as an entrepreneur and as a business person. And I’m thinking ‘What are those opportunities?’”

Another question he likes to ask: “Why can’t this be bigger?”

Mr. Page declined multiple requests for comment, and many of the people who spoke about him requested anonymity because they were not supposed to talk about internal company matters.

Many former Google employees who have worked directly with Mr. Page said his managerial modus operandi was to take new technologies or product ideas and generalize them to as many areas as possible. Why can’t Google Now, Google’s predictive search tool, be used to predict everything about a person’s life? Why create a portal to shop for insurance when you can create a portal to shop for every product in the world?

But corporate success means corporate sprawl, and recently Google has seen a number of engineers and others leave for younger rivals like Facebook and start-ups like Uber. Mr. Page has made personal appeals to some of them, and, at least in a few recent cases, has said he is worried that the company has become a difficult place for entrepreneurs, according to people who have met with him.

Part of Mr. Page’s pitch included emphasizing how dedicated he was to “moonshots” like interplanetary travel, or offering employees time and money to pursue new projects of their own. By breaking Google into Alphabet, Mr. Page is hoping to make it a more welcoming home for employees to build new businesses, as well as for potential acquisition targets.

It will also rid his office of the kind of dull-but-necessary annoyances of running a major corporation. Several recently departed Google staff members said that as chief executive of Google, Mr. Page had found himself in the middle of various turf wars, like how to integrate Google Plus, the company’s struggling social media effort, with other products like YouTube, or where to put Google Now, which resided in the Android team but was moved to the search group. An Albany employment lawyer focuses on a wide range of employment law matters.

Such disputes are a big reason Mr. Page had been shedding managerial duties and delegating the bulk of his product oversight to Mr. Pichai, these people said. In a 2014 memo to the company announcing Mr. Pichai’s promotion to product chief, Mr. Page said the move would allow him to “focus on the bigger picture” at Google and have more time to get the company’s next generation of big bets off the ground.

People who have worked with Mr. Page say that he tries to guard his calendar, avoiding back-to-back meetings and leaving time to read, research and see new technologies that interest him.

Given that he is worth in the neighborhood of $40 billion and created the world’s most famous website, Mr. Page has the tendency to attract a crowd when he attends technology events. At last year’s Darpa Robotics Challenge, he was trailed closely by a handler who at times acted as a buffer between Mr. Page and would-be cellphone photographers. That commotion could annoy anyone, but it is particularly troubling for Mr. Page, who, because of damaged vocal cords, speaks just above a whisper and sometimes uses a microphone in small meetings.

At home in Palo Alto, Mr. Page tries to have the most normal life possible, driving his children to school or taking his family to local street fairs, according to people who know him or have seen him at such events.

And at Google, even events that are decidedly not normal aspire to a kind of casualness. Take the Camp, an exclusive and secretive event that Google holds at a resort in Sicily and where invitees have included Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, and Tory Burch, the fashion designer.

One attendee, who asked to remain anonymous because guests were not supposed to discuss the gathering, recalls being surprised by how much time Mr. Page spent with his children.

In public remarks, Mr. Page has said how important his father, Carl V. Page, a computer science professor at Michigan State University who died in 1996, was to his choice of career.

“My dad was really interested in technology,” Mr. Page said at Google I/O in 2013, the last time he took the stage at the event. “He actually drove me and my family all the way across the country to go to a robotics conference. And then we got there and he thought it was so important that his young son go to the conference, one of the few times I’ve seen him really argue with someone to get in someone underage successfully into the conference, and that was me.”

People who work with Mr. Page or have spoken with him at conferences say he tries his best to blend in, and, for the most part, the smaller groups of handpicked attendees at Google’s academic and science gatherings, tend to treat him like a peer.

The scope of his curiosity was apparent at Sci Foo Camp, an annual invitation-only conference that is sponsored by Google, O’Reilly Media and Digital Science.

The largely unstructured “unconference” begins when each of its attendees — an eclectic batch of astronomers, psychologists, physicists and others — write something that interests them on a small card and then paste it to a communal wall. Those notes become the basis for breakout talks on topics like scientific ethics or artificial intelligence.

The last conference was held during a weekend in June on Google’s Mountain View, Calif., campus, and Mr. Page was there for most of it. He did not host or give a speech, but mingled and went to talks, just like everyone else. That impressed investors and computer scientists who did not expect to see so much of him, but researchers who had come from outside Silicon Valley barely noticed.

“I have a vague memory that some founder type person was walking through the crowd,” said Josh Peek, an assistant astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

Another benefit of these gatherings for the reserved Mr. Page is that they are mostly closed to the news media.

A Forward Thinker

When Mr. Page does talk in public, he tends to focus on optimistic pronouncements about the future and Google’s desire to help humanity. Asked about current issues, like how mobile apps are challenging the web or how ad blockers are affecting Google’s business, he tends to dismiss it with something like, “People have been talking about that for a long time.”

Lately, he has talked more about his belief that for-profit companies can be a force for social good and change. During a 2014 interview with Charlie Rose, Mr. Page said that instead of a nonprofit or philanthropic organization, he would rather leave his money to an entrepreneur like Mr. Musk.

Of course, for every statement Mr. Page makes about Alphabet’s technocorporate benevolence, you can find many competitors and privacy advocates holding their noses in disgust. Technology companies like Yelp have accused the company of acting like a brutal monopolist that is using the dominance of its search engine to steer consumers toward Google services, even if that means giving the customers inferior information.

Financially speaking, Mr. Page is leaving his chief executive job at Google at a time when things could not be better. The company’s revenue continues to grow about 20 percent a year, an impressive figure for any business, but particularly so for one that is on pace to generate approximately $60 billion this year.

In fact, the company’s main business issue seems to be that it is doing too well. Google is facing antitrust charges in Europe, along with investigations in Europe and the United States. Those issues are now mostly Mr. Pichai’s to worry about, as Mr. Page is out looking for the next big thing.

It is hard to imagine how even the most ambitious person could hope to revolutionize so many industries. And Mr. Page, no matter how smart, cannot possibly be an expert in every area Alphabet wants to touch.

His method is not overly technical. Instead, he tends to focus on how to make a sizable business out of whatever problem this or that technology might solve. Leslie Dewan, a nuclear engineer who founded a company that is trying to generate cheap electricity from nuclear waste, also had a brief conversation with Mr. Page at the Solve For X conference.

She said he questioned her on things like modular manufacturing and how to find the right employees.

“He doesn’t have a nuclear background, but he knew the right questions to ask,” said Dr. Dewan, chief executive of Transatomic Power. “‘Have you thought about approaching the manufacturing in this way?’ ‘Have you thought about the vertical integration of the company in this way?’ ‘Have you thought about training the work force this way?’ They weren’t nuclear physics questions, but they were extremely thoughtful ways to think about how we could structure the business.”

Dr. Dewan said Mr. Page even gave her an idea for a new market opportunity that she had not thought of. Asked to be more specific, she refused. The idea was too good to share.

YAHOO REPORTEDLY REJECTED 'SEVERAL' OFFERS TO BUY ITS CORE BUSINESS

Original Story: businessinsider.com

Yahoo is reported to have rejected "several" offers to take over its core internet business, Reuters reported on Thursday.

It said the potential buyers included a private-equity firm, citing three anonymous sources.

The report added that Yahoo will most likely announce its next strategic steps only after its earnings, which is scheduled for February 2.

One of the sources told Reuters that Yahoo will present its future plan during the earnings call in order to "gauge shareholder reaction." A Google SEO Company provides consulting services and expert search engine optimization guidance for leading companies.

The last time Yahoo rebuffed offers to buy its core business was in December, before the board meeting in which the company decided not to spin off its Alibaba assets, the report said. Yahoo never launched a formal sales process.

In December, Yahoo reversed its plan to spin off its holdings in Asian assets, announcing that it would explore a spin-off of its core business instead. Yahoo's chairman, Maynard Webb, said it's not looking to sell the core business, although he indicated that the company would listen to offers. A Philadelphia finance lawyer is reviewing the details of this case.

That prompted activist investor Starboard to send a letter to Yahoo's board, demanding a sale of its core business and a complete overhaul of management.

Yahoo's growth has stalled in recent years, and investors are increasingly growing impatient with Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's performance. Excluding Yahoo's stake in its Asian assets, investors are essentially giving zero value to Yahoo's core business, which include its online content and advertising units.

According to Business Insider's Biz Carson, Yahoo is preparing to cut 10% or more of its workforce this month, as the company preps for a major organizational shake-up. A Poughkeepsie employment lawyer has experience defending clients in employment related matters.

Yahoo declined to comment on this story.

GOOGLE EXECS DISCUSS REGULATION, INNOVATION AND BOBBLE-HEADS

Original Story: latimes.com

Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg help run Google, one of the world's best-known, most successful — and most controversial — companies. They've just published a new book, "How Google Works," a guide to managing what they call "smart creatives," the technically proficient, innovation-savvy workers whom companies in every industry are trying to recruit and retain.

Google is best known for its ubiquitous and highly profitable search engine, but the company's interests include operating systems (Android for smartphones, Chrome for computers); productivity applications (Gmail, Google Docs); cutting-edge products (Google Glass); and applied research (smart contact lenses, driverless cars). For many smart creatives, getting hired by Google is considered a badge of honor.

The company, however, finds itself constantly in the midst of controversy involving regulators and politicians concerned about data privacy, and censors in places like China, where open data and political stability don't mix.

Schmidt, now 59 and a tech industry veteran, was brought in as "adult supervision" in 2001 to help the young company's then-college-age founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. In 2011, Page took the CEO job, while Schmidt remains executive chairman. Rosenberg, 53, a Google executive since 2002, currently serves as advisor to Page.

Schmidt recently sat down with The Times at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., to talk about the book. Rosenberg joined on speaker phone. Below is a transcript, edited for length.

Why does the world need another management book?

Schmidt: Well, it's my first management book.

Rosenberg: Traditional management books don't address the fact that the balance of power has shifted from companies to consumers. That's made building superior products the paramount issue for companies today. So the key thing that they need to figure out is how to attract what we in the book call the new breed of employee, the "smart creative." Those are the people who have mastered the tools of the current age to build superior products. We don't think anyone has told that story before.

What can any company — not just a young tech company — learn from Google? And what's a 'bobble-head yes'?

Schmidt: In the book we talk about how lots of people have experience in business meetings where the [boss] runs the meeting, nobody ever actually says anything interesting, there's no new data presented, everyone just says yes and then they leave and do whatever they want. We call that the 'bobble-head yes.'

From a management perspective you've got to have the data, you have to have a conversation, you have to have a debate, you have to hear all different points of view, and you have to have buy-in.

Rosenberg: The biggest thing that almost any company needs to do [to attract smart creatives] is maintain complete transparency about the sharing of information. Today it's very easy to get information to employees through email, through their intranet, but most companies still maintain that hierarchical 20th century structure where limited amounts of information flow down.

And any company can implement our approach by starting meetings with data, really arguing internally about the data.

You believe in five-year plans. That seems a long time in the technology industry.

Schmidt: Usually things change over a five-year period and you have to be ready to address those with some new business or business insight. But you're better off operating with the headlights on and the eyeglasses on or whatever metaphor as to what your future is really going to look like. If you can't answer it, you're not doing your job as a leader.

Most businesses don't seem to have a credible long-term five-year plan. They accept the current situation and expect it will be true for the next decade.

How does Silicon Valley's tech culture differ from L.A.'s?

Schmidt: They're very similar. There are much larger differences outside of America, and some differences between East Coast and West Coast and Midwest.

But my experience dealing with the tech people in L.A. is that they're fantastic.

The people in Hollywood that I have dealt with are all on board with the fact that the primary viewership is moving to Internet-based solutions. There are plenty of issues of monetization and rights and so forth, but there are no Internet digital deniers. Whoever they were they're no longer in power. People understand the scale of the Internet now, in a way they didn't 10 years ago.

You look at the studio model, the structure by which the creative process works in Hollywood, it's highly efficient, in the sense that it's very Darwinian. You have strong entrepreneurs who are the directors and producers — they're trying to put a deal together, they're trying to generate traffic. Notice it's not being done top down, it's being done sideways or bottom up. There are many similarities between that model and the model we talk about in our book.

Your company is facing increasing government scrutiny and regulation. How do managers deal with that?

Rosenberg: The main thing I suggest is that people simply build better products that consumers are so excited about. Then consumers will help drive an appropriate political and legislative discussion that will allow us to fix regulations where regulations are problematic.

A positive example is Uber. They've leveraged many of the specific trends we talked about in our book — information connecting people with providers in a very clever and seamless way with a deep technical insight — yet they're running headlong into requests for regulation.

Schmidt: Uber is the easiest one to understand because everyone understands what Uber is. Imagine Uber said, 'Oh, we don't want to have any lawsuits, so we have to always be integrated with everybody else' [such as the taxi industry] and it would have followed a less innovative path. And that ultimately would have produced a less beneficial product to the Uber customers. I should say Google is an investor in Uber, for full disclosure.

Rosenberg: The way to deal with the regulation is for people to tell their government that they want these better products and services.

Schmidt: We're always on the winning side when we're on the user side…. It works in most countries. There are some countries which you can essentially think of as non-democracies, where they're just not organized around citizens, they're organized around other things, and there the issues are much harder.

What I say to people internally is don't censor your own innovation, let me do it. If you build a fantastic product we'll figure out if it's going to work in some legislative or regulatory world that's unfamiliar to Americans. In other words, build a great product and if we have to hobble it let [top management] choose to do that, separate from your brilliant invention.

What do the media get wrong about Google?

Rosenberg: The level of importance of the unique perks. It's easy to take pictures of people walking around with their dogs, it's easy to take pictures of the food in the cafeteria, and it's easy to talk about the massages and the other benefits, but fundamentally, that's not what attracts people to the company.

What attracts people is the ability to work with other brilliant people and to work on really, really big problems. And the media tend to be suspicious of some of the biggest moonshots that we're interested in taking: the smart contact lens, the cars, the fiber effort, the [data-delivery] balloons. Those are the kind of things I think are the most exciting and empowering to bring great employees and not the more obvious surface-level things.

Schmidt: For the kind of people we're talking about, they have an idea that Google provides the resources and the scale for them to achieve it. If they had the money themselves, they would just do it themselves.

But many things of consequence are hard, they take a lot of time, they take a lot of resources and very smart people, and Google has turned out to be a place where such people gather.