"same impact as turning around a struggling multi billion dollar business."
You make it sound like solving a complex problem in concurrency or memory management or compiler optimization or power management (that may directly and layer-indirectly affect millions of users, if not billions of devices) is "less impact" then a human-goal management problem of a company like Yahoo.
Perhaps you believe Mayer's difficult task of specifying the right color of purple for the Yahoo Mail was somehow high impact?
""one day before Yahoo Mail was set to release, she convened a meeting at Phish Food, a conference room in the executive building of Yahoo’s campus, to talk about the product’s color. For months, the team had settled on blue and gray. If users were going to read emails on their phones all day long, the thinking went, it was best to choose the most subtly contrasting hues. But now, Mayer explained, she wanted to change the colors to various shades of purple, which she believed better suited Yahoo’s brand.
According to one senior executive, Sharma’s body language changed the moment Mayer issued her request. He looked deflated. Altering the color of such an intricate product would require that members of his team spend all night adjusting colors in thousands of places. He slumped off and prepared to tell his staff the bad news.
Yahoo has still some good assets. But they are killing them left and right. If Yahoo wants to survive as company, not just as Alibaba stock asset, they need a CEO who understands the entertainment, portal, advertisement and search business - after all that's Yahoo. The dumbest decision was to kill their search engine in 2009. It had the second largest market share back then. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search ) At least the open sourced Hadoop and Traffic server survived.
Is she willing to take $1 pay and get rest of her compensation in stock options that expire 5 years from now?
How much is she willing to invest in Yahoo stock or stock futures by herself?
If I were in the Yahoo board, those would be my first questions. Best way to test her commitment and trust for her own strategy is to see how much she is willing to bet her own money on it.
I had a lot of faith in Mayer's turn around. Do I think she needs more time? Yes. Do I think she can do it in more time? I'm skeptical now. Will the board, that she created, try to keep her accountable like you're saying? I hope so.
I'm skeptical. It seems AOL/Armstrong really wanted to merge to become a new Yahoo. I'm curious on how Yahoo will pivot, with the time. FB, SnapChat, Instagram, Twitter, and Google are fighting for mobile ad revenue. It's my understanding that's how Yahoo is trying to reinvent itself. Might be too little, too late.
I had no faith at all in Mayer. Not because she isn't a good product manager.
Mainly because for a turnaround situation I would hire someone who was there before with a successful turnaround under h-- belt. Not someone without any turnaround knowledge (what to cut, high investor pressure, ...)
Yahoo reminds me a lot of Apple before Steve Jobs rejoined.
They don't need a turnaround artist like Gil Amelio they need an insanely great product person to bring back some innovation, creativity and attention to detail. Based on her experience and from what everyone says about her she should have been perfect. And I'm quite baffled why she's not managing to get any runs on the board.
No Yahoo is way beyond that. Sure Jobs is one way to turn a company around, sadly the supply of Jobs is limited. But there have been many successful turnarounds of - e.g. traditional - companies, which got profitable and growing again in the long run. Not every turnaround needs to end with the most valuable company on the planet. If you aim for a second Steve Jobs experience, this is lottery play and wishful thinking.
"Based on her experience and from what everyone says about her she should have been perfect."
Which either means: a.) She isn't that good as a product manager b.) Your theory is wrong. c.) Jobs turned Apple not around only on his vision but b/c he was able to kick everyone hard
Well it's clear that she was hired to be a product driven CEO not just a turnaround artist focused on the financial/operational parts of the business. And from day one she made it clear she was going to get involved in the product aspects e.g. changing Yahoo logo, fast tracking certain mobile products etc.
But then everything's kind of stalled. It's all a bit strange.
But Steve wasn't just a great product person, and it wasn't just a great product that turned Apple around. If you dig into the actual history, Steve significantly restructured Apple when he returned, killing licensing deals and products without a future, and refocusing the remaining product line before he set about creating a single new true innovation. And remember that Apple didn't really pick up steam until it capitalized on the iPod's traction years after Steve returned.
1997 Apple and 2016 Yahoo also exist in very different markets and very different landscapes, to the point that I'm not sure it's fair to say that Yahoo could even plausibly make an Apple-like turnaround happen without completely changing what it does. Apple's resurgence was as much about its great hardware as about its great software, and Yahoo doesn't really have either; it has services, which are a quite different beast these days.
But killing off unsuccessful products and focusing on implementing successful ones properly is what good product management is all about. And it seems to be what Yahoo is still lacking.
And services are products too. Apple iCloud is a product just like Flickr, Yahoo Home Page, Yahoo Mail etc.
I think we all agree Mr. jobs was a talented engineer, and knew innately that the average computer user needed simplicity, and someting slick. He succeeded.
I'm not sure what Yahoo even does these days. They do have money, especially if they cut more jobs, and bring in that money sitting in that Chinese company.
If I was in her shoes, I would put a lot of money into a wifi/cellular phone. Something like Rebublic wireless.
I noticed Google is trying to get into that market, but they only offer two phone choices, and are charging $30/month for essentially wifi voip, and $10 per gig for data.
I would love to see Yahoo get into this market. Get cell phone bills to under $10-$20 a month? It just seems like something they could do?
Someone is going to drastically reduce cell phone monthly bills? I would like to see Yahoo play a part in the future.
A lot of people think they need a lot of cell phone towers, but I have a weird feeling, most of that is marketing?
In my world, I'm usually have access to wifi. Yes, there are times I need access to a cell phone signal, but it's not as much as I thought.
I really feel in a few years, we will look back on our $80/month cell phone bills, and say, "I can't believe I paid those blood suckers that much money each month."
Whatever happens, I hope Yahoo survives. They never screwed me over. I only wish them, and Marissa the best! I can't recall the spelling of her last name--no disrespect.
> I would love to see Yahoo get into this market. Get cell phone bills to under $10-$20 a month? It just seems like something they could do?
Either you'd have to build a nationwide network (think at least tens of billions in capital expenditure upfront) or rent from existing providers (so they can essentially undercut you at any time or pull the rug from under you). Neither is easy.
I wish this was possible as well but the barriers for a newcomer are pretty bad. :(
That's the exact problem. Mayors is not Steve Jobs. I feel like she is asking for 3 more year for a turn around simply because Steve Jobs took that amount of time to do so. But turn arounds aren't measure in how long it takes. It takes time for sure but thats only a small part of the equation. She doesn't understand even if she copied everything Steve Job did, she will probably not succeed.
Mayer is a prime example of what happens when someone whose career should have peaked at COO becomes CEO. You see it all the time in sports when guys who are brilliant technical coordinators get moved to head coach and subsequently flounder.
There's more to being CEO (and head coach, to continue my analogy) than technical proficiency and strategic capability. There's a mix of requirements that are hard to quantify: human understanding, charm, charisma, empathy...character traits that are as much innate as learned.
I look at Mayer...she has very few of the "head coach" traits. Brilliant operator, excellent technician, all of the things you want in a coordinator. But not someone you want as head coach.
"I was destined to become CEO from CTO but decided COO and second in command is the best position for me."
I have a very good friend made exactly the same call. He just didn't feel he had the people skills to be the head guy...and given his slightly Aspergerish personality, he was right. So he now happily runs the company from the office of COO, as an absolutely brilliant technician, with a CEO who's smart enough to let him do so.
> There's more to being CEO (and head coach, to continue my analogy) than technical proficiency and strategic capability.
Eh, not that I totally disagree with you, but I dunno that that's really true. There are plenty of head coaches (and CEOs) who are just so technically proficient and/or excellent strategists that their lack of charm/empathy/charisma is a non-issue.
Belichick and Jim Harbaugh (say what you want, but he's successful by any sense of the word) are two examples of very successful head coaches who aren't well-known for being particularly charming or empathetic (one is an emotional brick wall and the other is a screaming psychopath).
There are CEOs who aren't particularly well-known for their people skills, but they're so good at strategy and execution that it really doesn't matter much. Anecdotally (from my tenure there), Bezos never gave/gives the impression of being particularly charismatic or charming. He's just really good at building the juggernaut that is Amazon.
I'm not saying those skills are unimportant and certainly people like Belichick are the exception, but it's entirely possible to just be so good at strategy that the rest doesn't really matter. Mayer just doesn't seem to be quite at that level.
I would really enjoy seeing Steve Ballmer take a break from his basketball career to be the CEO of Yahoo! Great idea! A part of me thinks he could actually turn the place around, and a part of me just thinks it would be hilarious.
I agree that there would be something deeply funny about seeing Steve Ballmer being his glorious and insane self, to then revive a company with so much potential.
It would be a fantastic and endearing final act for a truly larger-than-life character.
Bill Belichick and Jim Harbaugh inspire absolute confidence in their players. The teams buys in 100%. Subsequently you hear a lot of the "run through walls/gates of hell" sentiment from men they coach.
Conversely Marissa has failed to build that type of atmosphere and loyalty, referenced by the slew of departures as well as reports, both on the record and off, about the environment at Yahoo!
This is where the comparison breaks down of course: a football team is 80ish atheletes over which a head coach has personal influence over every member of the team, Yahoo! is a gargantuan corporation where Marissa's personal influence only directly affects a tiny percentage of the "team."
But...even if you don't directly interact with a coach or CEO, you either buy in to them as leaders or you do not. People do not buy in to Marissa, and I believe* that's what's at the core of why she is failing as CEO.
*believe = I can't empirically prove the statement so it's just unsubstantiated opinion and should only be given the value of that other thing that we all have.
I think "their belt" is now accepted as the gender neutral way of saying this (I for one wish we just invented another word rather than make grammar more confusing and less logical, but I guess the people who can influence languages don't think the I do).
My problem with her all along is that before Yahoo she literally has only ever had one job. And that job was part of the management structure with a successful company. While there she developed a reputation as a data-driven iterator, not a visionary leader who can create direction and focus. She inherited what others had already started, and figured out things to measure, then analyzed the measures very competently.
If you look at her tenure at Yahoo so far, this has all essentially played out and her lack of qualitative acumen has been the source of most of the news about yahoo since she's taken over. This is an incredibly expensive experiment and learning ground for her. At best she's gone through the ceremony of "bold and decisive leader", made some big acquisitions and started some big changes on key properties. But that's like adding ships to a fleet and telling others to change out their sails. She still hasn't pointed Yahoo to a distinct vector and it's just kept adrift since then.
I agree with many others that she would be much more effective as a COO type but lacks pretty much all the kinds of skills needed as the captain of a corporate ship.
I am not Marissa Meyers' biggest fan, but I feel I have to come to her defense here. She was employee #20 at Google. She didn't inherit anything, she helped build Google from the ground up.
There are a lot of reasons why Marissa is not a good CEO, but a history of riding on other people's coattails is not one of them.
I can clarify what I mean, and it's not that she's simply ridden on other's coattails. She operated on her own and fantastically competently in what she did there. However, AFAIK, she did not originate or lead the early direction or kickoff of any of the products she worked on at Google. These were all products with directions and ideas that others put in place.
She lead efforts to broaden the appeal and usability of all of these things once they already existed. This was not easy effort, or easy work. It has challenges and requires smart thinking like the other parts of product development. Simply figuring out what to measure can often require enormous creativity.
These are very different skillsets and very few people have the skills to cross the boundaries from initiate to grow to sustain. She seems to have good skills in the grow and sustain areas, but I'm not aware of her having ever started any major product from scratch.
If you look at what she's been doing at Yahoo this has carried through. She's tried to initiate changes to grow and change direction of existing products, and she's tried acquiring other existing products. But she hasn't kicked off a whole new class of "thing" at Yahoo from scratch.
I know comparisons to Jobs is being thrown around here, but I don't think that's fair. He was such an outlier that I don't think it's very instructive to make those comparisons. Mayer needs to be compared to other more "prosaic" CEOs. Even her Yahoo predecessors. Even her former Google bosses.
I'm pretty sure at this point that she hasn't been doing what's needed as a CEO of a large company. I'm not even sure she's brought much more to the table than her Yahoo predecessors.
Think about this, the biggest Yahoo news since she's taken over has been the possibility of a sale and revelation that the corporate portfolio is essentially worthless minus its investment stakes in other companies. This was true before she started and remains true today. She has had no effective change in Yahoo despite being there for a while.
What is Yahoo? It's a holding company that holds stakes in other companies and has a legacy media and internet arm that could be shut down tomorrow with almost no bottom-line impact to the company.
Here's an example strategy that she should be undertaking:
0) Yahoo! changes names to Y!
1) All Y! products are to be spun out as individual businesses with Y! as the majority shareholder. 49% of each company should be offered up in a near-term IPO.
2) Y! will spend raised cash on purchasing stakes in other companies a la Alibaba.
3) Y! will form a both a Startup investment arm with significant seed capital and a Startup accelerator called Y!-Combine. To help enable success, these companies (and other acquisitions) get access to Y!'s existing technology portfolio, server/compute infrastructure and advertising network.
4) Y! will start a technology R&D arm called Y!-Research that will research technologies it can add it its portfolio of startup and acquisition enabling technologies. Any technology reaching a significant enough maturity level will be evaluated for sale, spin-out or open sourced.
There. 4 steps that convert Yahoo from a whatever it is into a technology holding company with 4 continuous growth options and almost no headline grabbing layoffs needed. In fact she can start hiring all the people to make this possible today.
"In 2005 she became Vice President of Search Products and User Experience. Mayer held key roles in Google Search, Google Images, Google News, Google Maps, Google Books, Google Product Search, Google Toolbar, iGoogle, and Gmail"
We know she didn't originate any of those things because the folks who started those products are either well known, or they predate her role over them:
- Search has a pretty well known history.
- Maps was started by Lars and Jens Rasmussen in a different company that
google acquired in 2004.
- Books was started by Brin and Page
- Images was started because of an analysis of search data under Schmidt
- Google News was started by Krishna Bharat
- Google Product Search was by Craig Nevill-Manning
- Gmail was started by Rajen Sheth and Paul Buchheit
- No idea who started toolbar or iGoogle, but I'd bet an American dollar that it also wasn't Mayer.
> Let me know if you can think of any she did have founding interest in.
A good manager doesn't have to come up with the idea. Most of the great ideas come from the trenches -- or competitors, frankly (Adwords, meet Overture, Keyhole meet Terraserver and so on). A PM's job is to be an advocate and grow the best ones by finding the resources, trying and discarding ideas that don't work.
The PMs that suck are the ones who obsess over pushing their ideas above all others.
More like the board should ask for cash money and stock options back just to give her a chance, but the opportunity cost of leaving her on far exceeds anything she even has the capacity to pay back.
It's funny how people pretend that it's a sure thing that Yahoo can be saved. Saving Yahoo has always been more like a moonshot than a long shot and this was true way before they even hired Mayer. Sure, she has failed to do so (expected) but let's not pretend that there was much that she or anyone else could've done to save the company at this juncture. Her pivot to content failed but in many situations you don't know what will work until you try it. She had her shot, she failed and will probably be fired now but let's not pretend that there was much that she could do in the first place. Yahoo looks a lot like a lost cause.
Yahoo is one of the oldest Internet companies. It's the first portal / search engine that some of us used on a regular basis. So it has a place in our hearts.
It also pre-dates the era of gender hysteria and other assorted identity politics brought to tech by social justice warriors.
> It also pre-dates the era of gender hysteria and other assorted identity politics brought to tech by social justice warriors.
Sorry but this pretty much only exists in the minds of a niche group of disaffected, geeky men. The rest of the world has found more constructive ways to deal with the opposite sex and would find the idea we are living in an "era" of it frankly bizarre.
But you're right maybe in the last 20+ years of being in IT I am yet to experience these mythical social justice warriors trying to infiltrate and corrupt the industry. Will definitely keep an eye out for them.
I was rooting for her. So much so I bought gobs of Yahoo stock when Marissa got the job. The stock didn't do too bad but when it was apparent she wasn't able to save the company I sold it for a profit. Still hoping she can turn Yahoo around. It's a really iconic company.
Yahoo is one of the oldest and most important web companies around. It's always going to be newsworthy. And people are a bit critical of Mayer because she promised a lot and really hasn't delivered anything.
HN likes it when overpaid, over-hyped leaders fail in general, especially after doing massively unpopular and short-sighted things like killing work from home policies. If Mayer had actually done a good job at Yahoo and turned things around, HN would be propping her up as a hero. Instead, she proved her inexperience, inflexibility, and narrow focus make her a poor CEO for a company like Yahoo, and the board and media should never have propped her up as the harbinger of amazing female CEOs.
Remember how the media celebrated her appointment, focussing on her gender, as if the silver bullet of "gender diversity" will resolve the many problems we have in tech management. The media did this before she'd demonstrated any leadership or success.
For some who hold more interest in identity politics than technology, the mere appointment of a female CEO was success enough.
Yet, ironically, it is this politically-fueled attention to her gender that now resonates as we observe her failure. Let's hope it doesn't create damaging prejudices against other female leaders. If it does, I hope the real culprits are as obvious to other readers as they are to me.
We need to rein in the social justice warriors and stop tech being used as a vehicle for gender identity politics and virtue-signalling.
The media has hyped up Mayer and Elizabeth Holmes too much, so much so now that their companies are embroiled in difficulties they're still the first female CEO's I can think of, when there are better examples where the female CEO's track record has already been proven.
In my mind, to think of the corresponding female CEO to Steve Jobs, Holmes immediately comes to my mind, who leads a company with smoke and mirrors...
Historical sake, back in the early days Yahoo was king, it was Google before Google, the Google IPO wasn't until 2004, Yahoo went public in 1996. They were the biggest internet company for a decade.
For me, several years ago when the ISP technician finally setup my modem after spending hours doing do, the first site I visited in my life was www.yahoo.com :)
It was one of the first for me as well. They used to have a section where users could post their favorite sites. I would go through, just clicking and exploring, and eventually learning.
Her answers were very trump like "some things have gone well, some things haven't gone well, some things have grown faster than expected, some have gone slower"
"Have we made big bets? Yes we've made some big bets"
No real insight into changes that are coming up, just really empty answers.
The management, the talent may have infinite problems and might have contributed to Yahoo's demise but I don't think solving any of them would give it a magical upswing. There is no way it can get turnaround without nailing down a product that everyone wants. Frankly, I don't see that happening in near future, considering that all the previous efforts including acquisition of Tumblr haven't really contributed much.
Yahoo has already transitioned into being a niche advertising and media company. That's not necessarily a problem, but Yahoo still fancies itself as big tech player and that hasn't been the case for over a decade. It may make sense for Yahoo to try and become a better media and advertising company, but Marissa Mayer is surely not the best choice of CEO for that kind of company. I'm not even saying she's a bad CEO, just that she is not an appropriate choice for the kind of company that Yahoo has become. I don't see how 3 more years with her at the helm can result anything other than an extension of Yahoo's long skid into mediocrity.
I don't think Yahoo could ever make that transition without losing billions in market cap. I know that's what is happening right now but it is a tough call - make a last ditch try to be "genuine" tech company or kill everything to make business of whatever is possible. Considering that Yahoo still has tech talent and a tech executive as it's CEO, I can guess it will try to gamble on the former.
I'm just amazed that the Yahoo board hasn't fired her yet with her overall performance in the past four years. She's been paid handsomely and delivered very little.
One of their most valuable assets is Android Yahoo Mail app, that they are methodically killing: my mom (a loyal Yahoo user of 18+ years) says it has become too complicated (grouping conversations), with an unpredictable spam filter. Until recently it suffered from a serious memory leak (which was not fixed for years).
They already successfully killed the Android Yahoo Messenger app (remember when Yahoo Messenger was huge on desktop?). Ironically, WhatsApp founders are from Yahoo...
Yahoo mail has got much worse under her leadership.
Flickr has become unreliable and buggy under her leadership.
Personally I wouldn't pay her another dime.
> Marissa Mayer ... has a “three-year strategic plan” ... that entails building and improving the services people use on their mobile phones every day, such as search.
It's a good thing they killed their own search engine and tossed the majority of their mobile apps, then. And that it all happened under Mayer's leadership. Considering they've lost a lot of experience and market share in search and mobile, I'm sure they'll be well prepared for this.
To be fair, streamlining the app portfolio isn't a bad thing, as they had a bit of cruft. But she's had years to make these changes into a reality without success. It's hard to tell if she's asking for three more years in order to continue the same ineffective moves or to undo them.
Who knows? Maybe if she runs the ship far enough aground it'll grow legs.
Those women - Mayer, Meg Whitman, Angela Merkel, Christine Lagarde, Mary Barra, and let's not forget, Tim Cook, should all resign immediately.
They're bringing down companies and in some cases entire economies with their destructive policies. And yet they still rake in millions in compensation.
Makes you think there's something bigger going on.
I am sorry to say that Yahoo management doesn't have a clue about what its doing. Case in point : I used to be a avid fan of the show Community and was elated when Yahoo picked it up. However for Canadian viewers I learnt it was only available only certain days of the week. WTF? And don't event get me started on the streaming issue. They couldn't even get the basics of online video right.
> only available only certain days of the week. WTF?
Hilarious. Conways law in action. "organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations"
Maybe instead of beating up on MM, we could look at Yahoo the way we look at Twitter: Yahoo could be great if the world would let Yahoo be Yahoo.
But Yahoo being Yahoo would be a smaller company, with smaller, focused business, and happy customers. But it would have a smaller market cap, and today’s investors would take a massive haircut. So they keep plowing ahead trying to be a tech giant.
Because they bought tech giant shares, and it’s tech giant, or collapse until it’s sold for scrap. And MM has to parrot the “this is the road back to being a tech giant” line to keep the illusion alive.
I’m not sure that anyone can do any better given the “tech giant or nothing” circumstances.
Nice insight. Seems like there's a pattern here, in which high public visibility creates expectations which push a company out of its optimal mode of operation.
Much has been made about how the financialization of our economy is wrecking the public sector. But it seems like similarly, the credo of "the investor is always right" and "the board is law" is also harming the private sector.
This happens all the time when VCs fund companies that they had better stay away from. That said, Yahoo! had potential at the time and actually was a giant (the #1 website in the world for a very long time).
I think that is pretty true, and since most think Yahoo! has negative value relative to their Alibaba stake, it would be interesting if they simply sold their Alibaba stake and used the proceeds to buyout the stock holders and took the remains of Yahoo! private. That would give them the breathing room to re-imagine what they could be, just as Dell has.
I personally think that the other parts of Yahoo have negative value because they're part of Yahoo. If Mayer took a holding company approach, they could each spin out, IPO with 49% of their respective shares and suddenly be valued at something much larger. Overnight Yahoo (the holding company) would increase and raise cash purely through this change in organizational fiction.
I think that's true of the perception of yahoo among techies.
Among common users I don't know, but I suspect it's something like AOL.
re-imagining what yahoo could be would probably be a waste of resources, because I think the name has basically negative connotations as being either old, not useful, or just malignant in relation to its users.
Agree that beating up on MM serves no purpose. But what are you saying? They should slim down in every business sense of the word and focus on X. What is X?
That’s a great conversation to have. “Given that trying to be massive isn’t going to work no matter who’s in charge, is there something smaller that would actually be a great company? If so, what could it be?”
I actually thought MM had the right idea at first re: Yahoo! being a low-brow web entertainment portal. At one time Gweneth Paltrow was going to have her own lifestyle blog/website on Yahoo!. Even though anybody reading this comment or anyone we're close with probably wouldn't be interested in that there's a large number of US consumers who would be.
Either because of a personal bias or something else (we'll probably never know) she pulled a 180 and did things like buying the rights to every season of SNL (which was a favorite of her's growing up) and poached Katie Couric to run their news desk.
Having said all that, I don't know if I would anything different myself: If I'm bringing a tech giant back from the grave, I want to make it "sexy" again. I want the glory that comes with that. I don't want my company to be a mouthpiece for celebrities' personal brands
> Because they bought tech giant shares, and it’s tech giant, or collapse until it’s sold for scrap.
I was under the impression that investors essentially treated Yahoo as a proxy for Alibaba due to their holdings. I'm curious how much investors value Yahoo itself these days.
At one point Yahoo all together was worth less than the combined value of Yahoo Japan and Alibaba. So in those days Yahoo itself was valued as a net liability, I don't know today.
Yahoo being Yahoo means Yahoo driving revenue via bundling spyware, plus a dying fantasy sports site.
The Sun/Oracle Java JRE, Firefox, etc, Yahoo hasn't made money from anything other than tricking low-sophistication users into making Yahoo their home page by installing toolbars and changing browser settings, and they do this by paying to have installers of unrelated but necessary applications do the dirty work. This is all they have had as a business model for 10 years.
Yahoo should die, it's a scammy company surviving by doing things that would lead us to condemn anyone without the pedigreed name. They had dreams that the scammy stuff was just a way to keep the lights on while they restart their search efforts, or their technology driven products, but that's all just a dream, this company has been dead on the inside for 10 years.
137 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] threadYou make it sound like solving a complex problem in concurrency or memory management or compiler optimization or power management (that may directly and layer-indirectly affect millions of users, if not billions of devices) is "less impact" then a human-goal management problem of a company like Yahoo.
Perhaps you believe Mayer's difficult task of specifying the right color of purple for the Yahoo Mail was somehow high impact?
""one day before Yahoo Mail was set to release, she convened a meeting at Phish Food, a conference room in the executive building of Yahoo’s campus, to talk about the product’s color. For months, the team had settled on blue and gray. If users were going to read emails on their phones all day long, the thinking went, it was best to choose the most subtly contrasting hues. But now, Mayer explained, she wanted to change the colors to various shades of purple, which she believed better suited Yahoo’s brand.
According to one senior executive, Sharma’s body language changed the moment Mayer issued her request. He looked deflated. Altering the color of such an intricate product would require that members of his team spend all night adjusting colors in thousands of places. He slumped off and prepared to tell his staff the bad news.
""
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-whe...
For some reason I don't run the world.
How much is she willing to invest in Yahoo stock or stock futures by herself?
If I were in the Yahoo board, those would be my first questions. Best way to test her commitment and trust for her own strategy is to see how much she is willing to bet her own money on it.
This sounds familiar.
I'm skeptical. It seems AOL/Armstrong really wanted to merge to become a new Yahoo. I'm curious on how Yahoo will pivot, with the time. FB, SnapChat, Instagram, Twitter, and Google are fighting for mobile ad revenue. It's my understanding that's how Yahoo is trying to reinvent itself. Might be too little, too late.
Mainly because for a turnaround situation I would hire someone who was there before with a successful turnaround under h-- belt. Not someone without any turnaround knowledge (what to cut, high investor pressure, ...)
They don't need a turnaround artist like Gil Amelio they need an insanely great product person to bring back some innovation, creativity and attention to detail. Based on her experience and from what everyone says about her she should have been perfect. And I'm quite baffled why she's not managing to get any runs on the board.
"Based on her experience and from what everyone says about her she should have been perfect."
Which either means: a.) She isn't that good as a product manager b.) Your theory is wrong. c.) Jobs turned Apple not around only on his vision but b/c he was able to kick everyone hard
But then everything's kind of stalled. It's all a bit strange.
1997 Apple and 2016 Yahoo also exist in very different markets and very different landscapes, to the point that I'm not sure it's fair to say that Yahoo could even plausibly make an Apple-like turnaround happen without completely changing what it does. Apple's resurgence was as much about its great hardware as about its great software, and Yahoo doesn't really have either; it has services, which are a quite different beast these days.
And services are products too. Apple iCloud is a product just like Flickr, Yahoo Home Page, Yahoo Mail etc.
I'm not sure what Yahoo even does these days. They do have money, especially if they cut more jobs, and bring in that money sitting in that Chinese company.
If I was in her shoes, I would put a lot of money into a wifi/cellular phone. Something like Rebublic wireless.
I noticed Google is trying to get into that market, but they only offer two phone choices, and are charging $30/month for essentially wifi voip, and $10 per gig for data.
I would love to see Yahoo get into this market. Get cell phone bills to under $10-$20 a month? It just seems like something they could do?
Someone is going to drastically reduce cell phone monthly bills? I would like to see Yahoo play a part in the future. A lot of people think they need a lot of cell phone towers, but I have a weird feeling, most of that is marketing?
In my world, I'm usually have access to wifi. Yes, there are times I need access to a cell phone signal, but it's not as much as I thought.
I really feel in a few years, we will look back on our $80/month cell phone bills, and say, "I can't believe I paid those blood suckers that much money each month."
Whatever happens, I hope Yahoo survives. They never screwed me over. I only wish them, and Marissa the best! I can't recall the spelling of her last name--no disrespect.
Either you'd have to build a nationwide network (think at least tens of billions in capital expenditure upfront) or rent from existing providers (so they can essentially undercut you at any time or pull the rug from under you). Neither is easy.
I wish this was possible as well but the barriers for a newcomer are pretty bad. :(
Social justice warriors coming to correct you in 3.. 2.. 1..
There's more to being CEO (and head coach, to continue my analogy) than technical proficiency and strategic capability. There's a mix of requirements that are hard to quantify: human understanding, charm, charisma, empathy...character traits that are as much innate as learned.
I look at Mayer...she has very few of the "head coach" traits. Brilliant operator, excellent technician, all of the things you want in a coordinator. But not someone you want as head coach.
[EDIT] Typos/clarity.
I have a very good friend made exactly the same call. He just didn't feel he had the people skills to be the head guy...and given his slightly Aspergerish personality, he was right. So he now happily runs the company from the office of COO, as an absolutely brilliant technician, with a CEO who's smart enough to let him do so.
Eh, not that I totally disagree with you, but I dunno that that's really true. There are plenty of head coaches (and CEOs) who are just so technically proficient and/or excellent strategists that their lack of charm/empathy/charisma is a non-issue.
Belichick and Jim Harbaugh (say what you want, but he's successful by any sense of the word) are two examples of very successful head coaches who aren't well-known for being particularly charming or empathetic (one is an emotional brick wall and the other is a screaming psychopath).
There are CEOs who aren't particularly well-known for their people skills, but they're so good at strategy and execution that it really doesn't matter much. Anecdotally (from my tenure there), Bezos never gave/gives the impression of being particularly charismatic or charming. He's just really good at building the juggernaut that is Amazon.
I'm not saying those skills are unimportant and certainly people like Belichick are the exception, but it's entirely possible to just be so good at strategy that the rest doesn't really matter. Mayer just doesn't seem to be quite at that level.
Meyer appears to be a peacetime leader, not a crisis leader. Yahoo honestly needs a nutjob the likes of Steve Ballmer to survive.
It would be a fantastic and endearing final act for a truly larger-than-life character.
Conversely Marissa has failed to build that type of atmosphere and loyalty, referenced by the slew of departures as well as reports, both on the record and off, about the environment at Yahoo!
This is where the comparison breaks down of course: a football team is 80ish atheletes over which a head coach has personal influence over every member of the team, Yahoo! is a gargantuan corporation where Marissa's personal influence only directly affects a tiny percentage of the "team."
But...even if you don't directly interact with a coach or CEO, you either buy in to them as leaders or you do not. People do not buy in to Marissa, and I believe* that's what's at the core of why she is failing as CEO.
*believe = I can't empirically prove the statement so it's just unsubstantiated opinion and should only be given the value of that other thing that we all have.
If you look at her tenure at Yahoo so far, this has all essentially played out and her lack of qualitative acumen has been the source of most of the news about yahoo since she's taken over. This is an incredibly expensive experiment and learning ground for her. At best she's gone through the ceremony of "bold and decisive leader", made some big acquisitions and started some big changes on key properties. But that's like adding ships to a fleet and telling others to change out their sails. She still hasn't pointed Yahoo to a distinct vector and it's just kept adrift since then.
I agree with many others that she would be much more effective as a COO type but lacks pretty much all the kinds of skills needed as the captain of a corporate ship.
I am not Marissa Meyers' biggest fan, but I feel I have to come to her defense here. She was employee #20 at Google. She didn't inherit anything, she helped build Google from the ground up.
There are a lot of reasons why Marissa is not a good CEO, but a history of riding on other people's coattails is not one of them.
She lead efforts to broaden the appeal and usability of all of these things once they already existed. This was not easy effort, or easy work. It has challenges and requires smart thinking like the other parts of product development. Simply figuring out what to measure can often require enormous creativity.
These are very different skillsets and very few people have the skills to cross the boundaries from initiate to grow to sustain. She seems to have good skills in the grow and sustain areas, but I'm not aware of her having ever started any major product from scratch.
If you look at what she's been doing at Yahoo this has carried through. She's tried to initiate changes to grow and change direction of existing products, and she's tried acquiring other existing products. But she hasn't kicked off a whole new class of "thing" at Yahoo from scratch.
I know comparisons to Jobs is being thrown around here, but I don't think that's fair. He was such an outlier that I don't think it's very instructive to make those comparisons. Mayer needs to be compared to other more "prosaic" CEOs. Even her Yahoo predecessors. Even her former Google bosses.
I'm pretty sure at this point that she hasn't been doing what's needed as a CEO of a large company. I'm not even sure she's brought much more to the table than her Yahoo predecessors.
Think about this, the biggest Yahoo news since she's taken over has been the possibility of a sale and revelation that the corporate portfolio is essentially worthless minus its investment stakes in other companies. This was true before she started and remains true today. She has had no effective change in Yahoo despite being there for a while.
What is Yahoo? It's a holding company that holds stakes in other companies and has a legacy media and internet arm that could be shut down tomorrow with almost no bottom-line impact to the company.
Here's an example strategy that she should be undertaking:
0) Yahoo! changes names to Y!
1) All Y! products are to be spun out as individual businesses with Y! as the majority shareholder. 49% of each company should be offered up in a near-term IPO.
2) Y! will spend raised cash on purchasing stakes in other companies a la Alibaba.
3) Y! will form a both a Startup investment arm with significant seed capital and a Startup accelerator called Y!-Combine. To help enable success, these companies (and other acquisitions) get access to Y!'s existing technology portfolio, server/compute infrastructure and advertising network.
4) Y! will start a technology R&D arm called Y!-Research that will research technologies it can add it its portfolio of startup and acquisition enabling technologies. Any technology reaching a significant enough maturity level will be evaluated for sale, spin-out or open sourced.
There. 4 steps that convert Yahoo from a whatever it is into a technology holding company with 4 continuous growth options and almost no headline grabbing layoffs needed. In fact she can start hiring all the people to make this possible today.
And how would you know that?
short answer: By using google
long answer: It's pretty well known outside of Google what product groups she lead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer
"In 2005 she became Vice President of Search Products and User Experience. Mayer held key roles in Google Search, Google Images, Google News, Google Maps, Google Books, Google Product Search, Google Toolbar, iGoogle, and Gmail"
We know she didn't originate any of those things because the folks who started those products are either well known, or they predate her role over them:
- Search has a pretty well known history.
- Maps was started by Lars and Jens Rasmussen in a different company that google acquired in 2004.
- Books was started by Brin and Page
- Images was started because of an analysis of search data under Schmidt
- Google News was started by Krishna Bharat
- Google Product Search was by Craig Nevill-Manning
- Gmail was started by Rajen Sheth and Paul Buchheit
- No idea who started toolbar or iGoogle, but I'd bet an American dollar that it also wasn't Mayer.
Here's her Linkedin profile if that changes anything for you https://www.linkedin.com/in/marissamayer
Let me know if you can think of any she did have founding interest in.
This is made extra hard because she's only ever held one job in her career pre-Yahoo!
A good manager doesn't have to come up with the idea. Most of the great ideas come from the trenches -- or competitors, frankly (Adwords, meet Overture, Keyhole meet Terraserver and so on). A PM's job is to be an advocate and grow the best ones by finding the resources, trying and discarding ideas that don't work.
The PMs that suck are the ones who obsess over pushing their ideas above all others.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11013507
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11121796
Wonder why?
It also pre-dates the era of gender hysteria and other assorted identity politics brought to tech by social justice warriors.
Happier times.
Sorry but this pretty much only exists in the minds of a niche group of disaffected, geeky men. The rest of the world has found more constructive ways to deal with the opposite sex and would find the idea we are living in an "era" of it frankly bizarre.
This isn't about eras of men or women. It's nothing to do with how men and women interact. My point was about eras of identity politics around gender.
But you're right maybe in the last 20+ years of being in IT I am yet to experience these mythical social justice warriors trying to infiltrate and corrupt the industry. Will definitely keep an eye out for them.
Yahoo is one of the oldest and most important web companies around. It's always going to be newsworthy. And people are a bit critical of Mayer because she promised a lot and really hasn't delivered anything.
Remember how the media celebrated her appointment, focussing on her gender, as if the silver bullet of "gender diversity" will resolve the many problems we have in tech management. The media did this before she'd demonstrated any leadership or success.
For some who hold more interest in identity politics than technology, the mere appointment of a female CEO was success enough.
Yet, ironically, it is this politically-fueled attention to her gender that now resonates as we observe her failure. Let's hope it doesn't create damaging prejudices against other female leaders. If it does, I hope the real culprits are as obvious to other readers as they are to me.
We need to rein in the social justice warriors and stop tech being used as a vehicle for gender identity politics and virtue-signalling.
In my mind, to think of the corresponding female CEO to Steve Jobs, Holmes immediately comes to my mind, who leads a company with smoke and mirrors...
Milligrams?
What they need is a new product.
No real insight into changes that are coming up, just really empty answers.
I'm just amazed that the Yahoo board hasn't fired her yet with her overall performance in the past four years. She's been paid handsomely and delivered very little.
They already successfully killed the Android Yahoo Messenger app (remember when Yahoo Messenger was huge on desktop?). Ironically, WhatsApp founders are from Yahoo...
(I'm on mobile and don't see a way to link to a permanent URL, but the video is currently on the front page.)
It's a good thing they killed their own search engine and tossed the majority of their mobile apps, then. And that it all happened under Mayer's leadership. Considering they've lost a lot of experience and market share in search and mobile, I'm sure they'll be well prepared for this.
To be fair, streamlining the app portfolio isn't a bad thing, as they had a bit of cruft. But she's had years to make these changes into a reality without success. It's hard to tell if she's asking for three more years in order to continue the same ineffective moves or to undo them.
Who knows? Maybe if she runs the ship far enough aground it'll grow legs.
Those women - Mayer, Meg Whitman, Angela Merkel, Christine Lagarde, Mary Barra, and let's not forget, Tim Cook, should all resign immediately.
They're bringing down companies and in some cases entire economies with their destructive policies. And yet they still rake in millions in compensation.
Makes you think there's something bigger going on.
Hilarious. Conways law in action. "organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law
http://www.melconway.com/Home/Inventor.html
Appel's compiler book credits him with the invention, but Cooper and Torczon cite one earlier reference.
Edit: poking around that site reveals an article which seems like it deserves a thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11273710.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem#Proof_by_co...
https://twitter.com/agumonkey/status/708681730278989824
(all this after reading that prolog primer http://www.cpp.edu/~jrfisher/www/prolog_tutorial/pt_framer.h...)
found it pretty funny.
But Yahoo being Yahoo would be a smaller company, with smaller, focused business, and happy customers. But it would have a smaller market cap, and today’s investors would take a massive haircut. So they keep plowing ahead trying to be a tech giant.
Because they bought tech giant shares, and it’s tech giant, or collapse until it’s sold for scrap. And MM has to parrot the “this is the road back to being a tech giant” line to keep the illusion alive.
I’m not sure that anyone can do any better given the “tech giant or nothing” circumstances.
The problem is much worse. The owners of Yahoo don't even want a tech giant. They don't even want a company, they want to sell it as scrap.
That's a tough environment to work in when you are hired to run a company.
Among common users I don't know, but I suspect it's something like AOL.
re-imagining what yahoo could be would probably be a waste of resources, because I think the name has basically negative connotations as being either old, not useful, or just malignant in relation to its users.
Either because of a personal bias or something else (we'll probably never know) she pulled a 180 and did things like buying the rights to every season of SNL (which was a favorite of her's growing up) and poached Katie Couric to run their news desk.
Having said all that, I don't know if I would anything different myself: If I'm bringing a tech giant back from the grave, I want to make it "sexy" again. I want the glory that comes with that. I don't want my company to be a mouthpiece for celebrities' personal brands
Buffalo Wild Wings| Janet Jackson | Mega Millions | Type 2 Diabetes |
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...
I was under the impression that investors essentially treated Yahoo as a proxy for Alibaba due to their holdings. I'm curious how much investors value Yahoo itself these days.
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/10/is-yahoos-core-business-reall...
The Sun/Oracle Java JRE, Firefox, etc, Yahoo hasn't made money from anything other than tricking low-sophistication users into making Yahoo their home page by installing toolbars and changing browser settings, and they do this by paying to have installers of unrelated but necessary applications do the dirty work. This is all they have had as a business model for 10 years.
Yahoo should die, it's a scammy company surviving by doing things that would lead us to condemn anyone without the pedigreed name. They had dreams that the scammy stuff was just a way to keep the lights on while they restart their search efforts, or their technology driven products, but that's all just a dream, this company has been dead on the inside for 10 years.