In the past year, several tech companies that once seem inviolable have fractured badly—Research in Motion and Nokia most notably. Yahoo, which yesterday announced a surprising and energetic choice of Marissa Mayer as its new CEO, is not in such dire straits, but only just. Its revenues have been on a multiyear secular decline, occasionally flowing, mostly ebbing; it lost the battle with Google as a search engine; and its content, while stellar, may be unable to support its current structure and identity. Mayer is a bold hire, and visions of another turnaround, that of Apple in the late 1990s, must surely be a dream. The question will be whether that dream has any chance of becoming real.
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Big business is making big news. Newsweek & The Daily Beast’s John Avlon and Zachary Karabell on JPMorgan’s multi-billion dollar mistake, why Facebook’s IPO was actually a huge success and the fallout resume padding that led to the demise of Yahoo’s CEO.
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The communications technologies of the past two decades are widely and rightly celebrated. The Internet, email, the proliferation of free or inexpensive software programs and apps that allow countless millions to access and organize their lives, and now the Androids and iPhones that are turning handheld devices into portable computers—all have captured attention, imagination, and sales.
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