"You ate the food! no one made you eat the food! but you did, so now where's our $100 million dollars?"
Really if you want big $100 million dollar wins you had better make with big million dollar rewards for the people delivering. That is impossible because the management bureaucracy will soak that right up. Yahoo should focus on rewarding the right people through acquisitions and investments.
I keep looking at this comment and wondering who "the right people" are. Do you mean buying outside talent, by aqui-hiring? Or dumping a million dollars on random developers within the company?
I suggested acquisitions and investment in outside companies that are on track to create a $100 million product within six months but are maybe undervalued by the market. They need to look for situations where there aren't six layers of management to soak up all the rewards.
I've never heard of a company dumping millions of dollars on random developers and I don't think that's possible. They may dump millions of dollars on a VP, but by the time it "trickles down" through all the layers to the team it comes out as "you're lucky to have a job." So in almost all instances it's telling people to kill themselves to launch a $100 million dollar product in six months just so they can keep their jobs (with free food of course). Those people are going to take option 2, quit and go somewhere else, and the product will never launch.
The goal of $100 million isn't that Yahoo wants money. They want to be a sexy, ambitious, developer-oriented employer like Google. They want to experiment, and break things, and most importantly identify what is and isn't working. Rather than letting some cut-rate dev produce a middling Japanese Finance page for his whole career, they want a few impressive brands that will draw new, talented developers in. Free food is part of that branding as well.
Buying a promising startup and smothering it with their existing bureaucracy would only hurt their reputation at this point.
This is from anonymous on Quora and is basically my point,
"They are much stingier than you might think. The true award amounts are much smaller than they would like the world to believe. It varies substantially depending on the impact the team and the individual have had, and it can be anywhere from $20K to $100K, with the occasional $1M reportedly given to very senior employees (e.g. the team's director). The awards are typically paid as RSUs and vest over 4 or 5 years."
i.e. not much makes it past the layers of VPs, directors, and front-line managers (all of whom like money very much) to the people who actually made it happen.
Really if you want big $100 million dollar wins you had better make with big million dollar rewards for the people delivering. That is impossible because the management bureaucracy will soak that right up. Yahoo should focus on rewarding the right people through acquisitions and investments.