Mark's first business was the print media and publishing business, which published more than 64 magazines. Time Warner accounted for four of the five best-selling magazines in the United States, namely Time, People, Sports Illustrated and Fortune, in addition to other famous magazines such as Entertainment Weekly, Fortune Magazine, InStyle, etc.

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

The world's second-largest publishing owner, Time Warner's predecessor was Time Group, and they started in the publishing industry.

In addition to a few important magazines "Time", "Fortune", "People", and "Sports Illustrated", 60 other magazines and newspapers are for sale, and at the same time, it is planned to lay off 30,000 employees, mainly from the publishing business, and other departments have also laid off some personnel.

Time Warner's predecessor, Time Inc., was founded in 1923 by two college students who first published a weekly newsweek and then other magazines about life, people and sports. As pioneers of magazine publishing, news reporting, and photo journalism, they played an indelible role in promoting the press and publishing industry throughout the 20th century.

After the merger of Warner Bros., which became the largest media company, the publishing business was one of their seven major businesses, and Time Warner Publishing Group is one of the main subsidiaries of Time Warner and the largest publishing group in the world, which has evolved over the decades.

Although in 2006, the French Hachette Book Group acquired part of the business of Time Warner Book Publishing Group for 537.5 million US dollars and established the Hachette Book Group United States branch, but it was only a part of the publishing business, mainly the publishing business of Littler Brown, and the current practice of almost one-size-fits-all publishing business has angered the employees of the publishing business.

They used to be one of the representatives of Time Warner, which is the company that focuses on words and images, and the Times Publishing Group represents the word "Time", and they are one of the pride of the group, but now they are the part of the company that will be abandoned and reduced.

As one of the seven major parts of Time Warner, this is basically a one-size-fits-all approach, although it retains several influential magazines, but Time Warner's determination to withdraw from the publishing industry is unquestionable.

Mark didn't spend much time on the board, he just used a Pingguo tablet as a demonstration: "We can find all the books you want here, it's a mobile library in your hand, and as more works are digitized, palm reading is the main way of the future, and the decline of paper books is inevitable." ”

And now the profits of the publishing industry are dwindling, except for those works that sell big, the profit of publishing a book is negligible, just to keep the balance of payments, which can be less than those high-profit industries.

Marc's pursuit of high efficiency and high profits led him to decide to make a strategic retreat from the publishing industry, saving and diverting large sums of money to invest in other industries.

Many people are incredulous: "We are still profitable, why did the company abandon us." ”

An editor said frustratedly: "I joined the magazine after graduating from high school, and I started from typography and printing dramas, and my career has been here for 30 years, and I don't have the courage to find a new job." ”

Although Time Warner's management passed a three-year layoff of 30,000 people to keep the group's global workforce at around 100,000, and also negotiated with the union and the city government, because of the huge differences between the two sides, there was no agreement at all, and only half of the publishing department was notified of the layoffs, but they decided to unite to resist the brutal and cold-blooded behavior of the parent company.

The entire publishing department, from the members of the company's board of directors to the rank-and-file employees, united in order to save their jobs, they also decided to organize a general strike of 30,000 people to resist this cold-blooded and ruthless act, and Mark was the target of their criticism and protest.

There are no impermeable walls in this world, and it's no secret that Mark has led Time Warner's reforms and big layoffs, and they hate this selfish and vicious guy, and they describe Mark as a cold-blooded and ruthless vampire, and the vampire version of the Black Lord is Mark's latest image.

If the strike goes ahead, Time Warner will be the target of government reprimands, public opinion, and the laughing stock of society, followed by a sharp drop in the stock market, and in the face of this huge pressure, they have few options.

As long as the momentum is stirred, even if Time Warner is stubbornly enforced, the government will force them to back down, unless Time Warner goes bankrupt, otherwise the government has a way to clean them up.

When Mark received the news of the impending strike, he was organizing the management to study why Yahoo was declining so quickly, and they systematically summarized a few points.

Yahoo has gone from the beginning of the Internet myth to the end of its decline, which can't help but make people sigh. The reasons for this are probably as follows: First, the positioning is vague and the direction is lost, from the beginning, the founders Yang Zhiyuan and David Ferro did not have a distinct personal color, and did not form a soul role within Yahoo. Unlike other internet giants, Yahoo doesn't have clear values.

In the beginning, Yahoo was essentially a content search company. But as it walked, Yahoo felt that it had to rely on its own content, so it headed for portals and media companies. And constantly develop new business, out of control. For more than a decade, Yahoo has not found a suitable positioning, the new business system is getting weaker and weaker, and the development ability has not been enhanced.

Bet on the wrong way to search, the future of content, and Yahoo loses a big picture. Later, it missed the content, the community, and the mobile Internet, which made Yahoo, which had a chance to win back a game, completely bury itself.

The second is: management turmoil: CEOs are changing, senior executives are leaving, and in fact, frequent personnel changes from top to bottom are not new for Yahoo. In addition to the mass exodus of the board of directors, every turmoil has also been accompanied by large-scale layoffs, as previously written in a Reuters article: Yahoo's exodus executives are deeply saddened by the tragic situation of their old club today by selling off core assets. They admit that as the company grew larger and bureaucratic became more bureaucratic, Yahoo eventually lost focus, setting the stage for its eventual decline.

According to statistics, Yahoo has changed 7 CEOs in 21 years, and the longest tenure of these seven is six years, the short is only four months, and their development ideas and priorities are different. At the same time, it also set a record of replacing 6 CEOs in 9 years, and as the CEOs continued to adjust Yahoo's positioning, the company's development was extremely unstable, and it once experienced several different transformation plans, which did not help it get out of the predicament, but got worse and worse.

The third is to pursue profits and sell patents, because of small losses, in the fast-growing Internet industry, if you can't adapt to changes, you will be ruthlessly eliminated. However, Yahoo, which is on the cusp of the storm, has not made efforts to focus on technological innovation. Yang Zhiyuan once correctly predicted that in addition to e-commerce, community, content, search, and personalization are the four strategic cores of the future Internet, but Yahoo has not overcome any of them in technology.

Commercialization was Yahoo's specialty in the early days, but the long-term pursuit of profits has made Yahoo lose a lot of money. In the agreements with Google and Microsoft, Yahoo values the main share of search advertising revenue, and cedes the more important core market, technical talent and more valuable user data in the search field.

Selling patents to survive is almost the winter food and grass of almost all Omi high-tech enterprises. Over the past three years, Yahoo has sold or licensed more than $600 million in patents. In March last year, Yahoo's chief financial officer, Dan Goldman, said that Yahoo was looking for ways to sell patents, real estate and other "non-core assets" in the hope of bringing $1 billion to $3 billion to the company's income.

Fourth, it missed the best time to be acquired, and Yahoo's market value has plummeted by nearly $80 billion in seven years. Microsoft's CEO at the time, Steve Ballmer, wanted to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion, but Microsoft abandoned the acquisition after a higher bid of $57 billion. At that time, Yahoo's top management was worried that once it was acquired, its power would be greatly limited, and finally rejected the deal. Considering Yahoo's troubles since then, Microsoft is in good hands.

Fifth, a large number of high-priced failed or poorly managed acquisitions

Yahoo has actually made a lot of right investments and acquisitions, such as acquiring a 40% stake in Yali and investing in Yahoo Japan. But Yahoo's M&A projects have not seen effective merger reforms, and most of them have been mismanaged and often end up being outright failures.

In 1999, Yahoo acquired a financially unhealthy website for $5.7 billion, and in the same year, it acquired GeoCities, one of the most trafficked websites at the time, GeoCities (a user-generated content community), for $3.6 billion.

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

In 2005, Yahoo acquired EB 2.0 companies such as Flickr, a bookmarking tool provider, and Coming a social calendar service.

In May last year, Yahoo bought the blogging platform Tombole for $1.1 billion, which is currently valued at less than $400 million, and is constantly making price cuts to attract buyers.

In this way, Yahoo, with its vague positioning and internal turmoil, missed wave after wave of transformation, and the Internet giants that had made history did not expect to be killed by history in the end. It turns out that the industry leader of one period cannot become the leader of the next period, there are very few companies like Microsoft and Cisco, and the defeat of Yahoo also seems to mean the end of an era, just like the United States Online.