Wow. I am speechless. There is probably no better person on earth to light a user- and product-focused fire under Yahoo. But the risk, the risk for her is just stunning. Huge props to her for making the leap from what must be a very comfortable Google and for the board for finding a stunning candidate to lead the revival of Yahoo.
(Edit: my definition of risk is lost time and missed opportunity. She's not going to suffer in compensation or reputation.)
I'm sorry but I find it so hilarious. I worked at Yahoo and Google both. I know both their cultures (and especially the culture at Yahoo after all the good engineers left). IMHO, she is status quo - no different than the horrible string of CEOs being hired by Yahoo. In fact, I will put a stake in the ground that she will not move the needle further than what Scott/Bartz did.
I just can't get over how hilarious this situation is.
The biggest factor is not Mayer herself, but again the "wrestling with a pig" factor mentioned in an excellent observation above. Yahoo! is not a sexy company.
Yes, I too am curious about your perspective. There are far too many posts claiming "Hey, I worked at X and Y!" without providing any sort of perspective whatsoever.
Backspace, you sound negative. Can you at least provide some information which makes you feel like she is not going to perform? Like her previous performance, because that would be an ok indicator in this case.
What risk? She's already achieved complete financial security from here time at Google. At Yahoo! she'll be taking the reins of a company that still attracts a massive userbase but is aching for someone with a fresh viewpoint on how to transform the company. Nothing buy potential IMO.
I'm not talking about money or reputation. The risk I see is time and opportunity. She could spend a maddening four years not moving the needle at Yahoo rather than another company or a startup of her own. Four years of punishing travel, endless meetings, unending Wall Street scrutiny. That risk.
Did you seriously just compare the CEO position at Yahoo to a _start-up_? To think the two are even in the same zip code, much less the same ballpark, is just, well it reflects a rather isolated viewpoint, put it that way. Yahoo is a $19B corporation.
Corrected. Poor phrasing on my part. I was suggesting a likely alternative for her would be starting a company, not that Yahoo is anything like a startup.
Oblig car metaphor: That's like saying hey, as an alternative to a free Lamborghini Aventador, you can have an old Pontiac Fiero chassis, and a Chevy 350 with a blown head gasket. If you're really lucky and amazing you might make something worth 1/10th what the Lamborghini is.
Except as CEO she would probably make enough to buy a new Lamborghini every week. People rarely talk about opportunity costs but if you can make more than 10 million a year spending 5 years building a company from scratch to see a 30 million exit is a Failure. And doing better than that is ridiculously rare.
I'm not sure the analogy stretches quite that far. Do you really care how many percent you own if you can drive it whenever you like and modify it however you please?
Car metaphors are tempting, but Yahoo vs. a startup is more like the difference between fixing up a rusty EOL aircraft carrier and building a sailboat.
The appropriate analogy would not be a free Lamborghini, but the chance to drive one (with 2 bad tires) for a while. Or, go buy/build your own car and own it.
I think it's a great move, and Google is probably in favor of it.
The flaw with this analogy isn't likening Yahoo! to a Lamborghini. It's saying that startups are all the same, regardless of who's starting them.
If Elon Musk and a new Stanford grad started brand new companies on the same day, would both companies be old busted cars with blown head gaskets?
Also, the metaphor is a bit flawed by likening the 17-year-old floundering company to a new sports car and a hypothetical new company as something that's already worthless because of wear and tear.
Not really a good metaphor. Steve Jobs, Tony Fadell, Elon Musk, Max Levchin, and many more entrepreneurs chose to start a second company rather than take a C level job somewhere else. A better analogy is whether to adapt an off the shelf piece of code to scratch your itch (often a reasonable choice) or to write your own from scratch, clean slate. The latter is much more risky, but that fits a certain personality.
Building a successful company is not a joke even if you have knowledge and connections. Users don't value what and whom you know.
At her level and for all she has done, getting to be the CEO of a billion dollar firm is actually a great deal.
Looking at it from other way around, Her career at Google might have probably come to a halt given the fact that Larry and Sergey are going to be there around for a long time to come. On the other hand, she could not be the CEO of a successful firm- Because such stints demand prior experience.
In short the change she got now is because, the company is currently a underdog. No big CEO who is already on a wave of success will take up that kind of a job. She needs the company because she gets to be the CEO and nobody else would offer her the same position.
All these people were Founders. Employee No. 19 <> Employee No. 1 <> Founder. Mayer was not a founder. It's probably easier to rationalize going from employee to CEO than founder to employee even if that employee happens to be CEO. Having said that, I realize most companies get acquired and most founders probably end up as employees anyway.
You would think that at Hacker News, car analogies would not be necessary, since I imagine there is a large proportion of users like myself who have no interest in cars, and have never owned nor intend to own one.
I have no idea how a Pontiac Fiero or a Chevy 350 compares to a Lamborghini Aventator without looking it up. All I know is that all three are probably luxury automobiles. I have even less of clue about what a head gasket might be.
On the other hand, if you tried to explain something to me by using a job at Google, Yahoo, and a start-up as analogies, it would definitely help make things more understandable.
Well, only the Lamborghini is a luxury car(unless you consider all cars a luxury but that would be a different discussion).
Otherwise, I fully agree with your point. I like cars and had no clue what, exactly, the Pontiac Fiero or the Chevy 350 were as I'm not American and those are American cars. Around here German(Mercedes, BMW, Audi, VW) and Japanese(Mazda, Subary, Toyota, ...) cars are much much more common.
Fiero: Pontiac's great experiment at making a European style sports car. A real _proper_ sports car: Mid-engined, rear wheel drive. Except, because most most of the parts were from other GM vehicles, it was mostly shite. Still - very popular with kit car/replicar builders because they made quite a few of them (~350,000) and they're cheap as donor cars.
Chevy 350: Basically a commodity engine. 5.7L pushrod V-8. Used in lots of GM vehicles from the late 60s through the early 90s. Camaros, Corvettes, Cadiallacs etc. Built tough, cheap, and there are a gazillion aftermarket parts available.
It's fairly unusual these days. Only thing you'll find with an engine that big is either a full-size SUV, a large truck, or a Corvette.
Plus, if you weren't here, you might not appreciate just how horrible the "EPA era" engines were. Much stricter emission controls + not having the technology to really meet it led to some really de-tuned engines. Wouldn't be unusual for a 5-6L engine in those days to only make 140-160HP stock.
I thought HN had a large preponderence of "engineers" (or at least they claim to be) I would have expected almost 100% of us sould have enough knowledge to understand the analogy.
Pontiac's and Chevy's are very American cars. Speaking as a European I can guess they're not as good as a Lamborghini but not with enough detail to make it a particularly useful comparison.
Wow, has HN been taken over by business types already?
Don't you think Mayer has enough capital, connections, reputation, experience, etc. that if she started a company to do what she wanted, how she wanted, it would be completely different from your average college-grad startup?
I mean, come on now. There's no comparing the two.
Agreed. I understand there's a hacker mentality here, but who would really pass up the CEO at an established behemoth like Yahoo to take the reigns of an unproven (or found) startup?
Me. I'm not qualified to be the CEO of Yahoo, so I would only be setting myself up for failure if I took the job. But running a smaller company limits the amount of harm I can do to myself and others while I learn the ropes.
The only reason to expect Mayer to do well as the CEO of Yahoo would be if her work at Google were similar to that job in some respect. I'm not sure it is.
True, but Yahoo! has made so many mistakes that she would have to really to screw up (like lie on your resume) for it to hurt her reputation. So that time and opportunity cost is unlikely to ever be a waste. If she fails, well Yahoo! was already a failure, if she succeeds, she's a perceived as savior. Either way, she's a contenter for ceo of any other major internet company going forward.
Actually, your metaphor and the pattern of ruining hopefuls fits a pattern from Greek Mythology. (Other tough guys try to capture/defeat/kill a fearsome monster, but Hercules shows he's an uber-stud by finally doing it)
I really don't understand why people are saying she won't get a reputation hit from this if she fails. Every other CEO trying to steer Yahoo right so far in recent history has a black eye and had to leave in relative disgrace. None of them had the superstar status that she has right now, but the fact is, none of them were allowed the conclusion "well, Yahoo was just too screwed up anyway". I'm not convinced that she'll be able to escape getting a black eye if she also fails. People are harsh on Yahoo CEOs. The deck is stacked against them in so many ways.
I think because people believe at this point it is taken that failing at Yahoo would hardly be surprising. For 2 reasons: 1) the company is in much worse shape (especially in reputation) than it was when previous CEOs failed to turned things around and 2) after a bunch of people try and fail the stigma of failing is likely to be reduced. Also here reputation is so positive that failing at a task many think is going to be hard not to fail at, won't likely turn those thinking well of her around.
Now she could fail in ways that are so bad that it does harm her reputation, certainly. I tend to agree with those that think as long as she doesn't fail for reasons that make her look really bad, her reputation won't suffer too much.
Also if Yahoo is marginally successful she may get an outsized boost - due to others failing to do even that.
Yahoo is one of those companies who has so many great properties that it will be easier than it seems to resurrect that company. They just needed a competent CEO.
And if she had stayed at Google, what would be the next step for her career-wise? She went from vice president of search products to overseeing location and local services. Now she's CEO. You don't think that'll motivate her?
I think it not surprising that she left Google to be a CEO somewhere, it was just surprising that she picked Yahoo. Another one of those VP -> CEO jumps that was interesting to watch was Ed Zander (Sun Micro -> Motorola).
What I was expecting was that she would leave and start some sort cross between 'solve a world issue' with 'easy accessibility' kinds of UI. At Google her strength was having a clear idea of how to speak to users through UX, The Yahoo gig can use that, certainly, but watching the succession of failures and missteps at Yahoo the issues aren't primarily UX or users, it seems like Yahoo is in a major identity crisis about what exactly it actually is.
When one of their recruiters was trying to convince me to join the pitch was this:
"Yahoo is the premier digital media company
Yahoo! delivers amazing personalized digital content and experiences, across devices and around the globe, to vast audiences. We provide engaging and innovative canvases for advertisers to connect with their target audiences using our unique blend of Science + Art + Scale."
To which my response was "Really?", if someone were to ask me what the "Premier digital media company" was I don't think I'd respond "Yahoo!"
I'd say the "premier digital media company" at the moment is Netflix. They have their problems and troubles, but they have enough brand recognition and enough good content (albeit produced by other people) to quality for that moniker.
Agreed. I would think you could make an argument for NetFlix (streaming/rentals), Apple (iTunes + players), or Amazon (streaming/rental/sales/player (book)) as being 'digital media' companies.
It may be that I think 'education/entertainment' more than I think 'discovery' when I think digital media. If Yahoo claimed to be the digital media discovery company that might be the starting point for a bigger vision.
What about YouTube? Or Zynga? Or Facebook for its photos?
I think when people hear the phrase "digital media", they think of it has traditional-media-delivered-digitally. But I think the internet enables entirely new variations of traditional media, tailor-made for our hypersocial, crowdsourced, and attentionless internet society.
And there's no problem with that, if they took their engineers and had them create new media distribution platforms or new efficient encodings or any other of the huge amount of highly technical things that can improve media distribution and consumption.
If she fails it will not hurt her reputation. Yahoo has already gone through so many CEOs. I think that if she can't turn around Yahoo, no one else will. After all, she is better qualified than the previous executives.
You overestimate the downside of a reputation hit. The business world loves failures, and in fact it promotes them as people experienced with problems.
One of the biggest things she's going to probably have to do is lay off thousands of people. The business world might love that, but the folks losing their jobs probably won't. Turnaround CEOs take a lot of flak.
Look at the previous CEOs of Yahoo. Even excluding Scott Thompson (who lied on his resume) NONE of them have even held executive positions, or done anything significant in the business world. It doesn't seem like people forgave them just because Yahoo is a horrible mess.
Yeah, since leaving. My point is that Yahoo is a career destroyer for its CEOs-none of them have held a significant position afterwards. Bartz even had a great track record before (and during!) her tenure at Yahoo, but that doesn't seem to have helped.
They haven't really had that many CEOs, and Mayer is young enough to weather anything that might happen. I can't imagine she isn't going into this without an upper hand, It's not like she was looking to jump ship (maybe she was) and Yahoo was the only company who would hire her.
"someone with a fresh viewpoint on how to transform the company"
Prior to joining google in 1999 as employee number 20 "Mayer worked at the UBS research lab (Ubilab) in Zurich, Switzerland, and at SRI International in Menlo Park, California" (wikipedia) for what appears to be only a few years. (She graduated high school in 1993, received a B.S. and and M.S. which must have taken at least 4 or 5 years afaik).
My guess is that she has a great deal of confidence, confidence built on the fact that she was an early google employee and she was able to ride the success of that opportunity. But her entire working career is basically google and I'm not sure she brings the depth of experience necessary to take on turning around the fortunes of Yahoo.
You may be right, but the "experienced" CEOs that preceded her have been a disaster. It is non-trivial to find someone with executive experience at this level; there just aren't that many companies that are this big in this industry (and hiring from outside the industry seems to have been a massive mistake in most of the instances where it has happened; somehow business people always think the business skills are the most important, and so they think a PepsiCo chief can run a tech company, but that never seems to pan out very well).
At the very least, Mayer has been part of a real leading tech organization that grew from nothing to everything in record time. That's experience that is also very difficult to replicate. And, the skills she's known for within Google are all product oriented, and that's where Yahoo has failed so miserably and Google has succeeded so fantastically.
and so they think a PepsiCo chief can run a tech company, but that never seems to pan out very well
For IBM, the decision to hire a non-technical and experienced CEO turned out OK. IBM turned around. But I'd agree that this is probably an exception to the rule.
I think the key here is fresh thinking and ability to get the political/operational/strategic stars aligned inside the organization to /cough/ execute. An experienced person may bring this to the table, and a lesser experienced person may bring this to the table. The key is whether it's brought to the table.
The other thing that I would be concerned about is her PR appeal. I have no idea who Google employee 19 or 21 is, and I have no idea what she actually did at Google, except that it sounded important. Yet I've heard of her, would probably recognize her in a news picture, and remember her name.
I've had the opportunity to work with people who were very good at personal public relations, and based on that experience, I'm skeptical. Constantly selling your public image means that you can't be wrong, which always results in revisionist history and oddball situations.
Hopefully I'm wrong -- Yahoo needs help, and she does have a good story.
I hope she doesn't regret it. I just read this article by Anne-Marie Slaughter, titled "Why Women can't have it all" and describing her experience mixing a high-power job with raising children (even with a supportive husband):
Actually, there is no risk at all (if you know what's behind the covers).
She is stagnating at Google. She had high ranking high influence positions at Google but over the years has been relegated to a position that has little visibility and control, mostly due to her non execution. This is a great opportunity for her to make some serious cash and be the "top dog" in a kennel of average dogs, rather than the opposite at Google.
Also, even if she crashes and burns at Yahoo, she will get many more opportunities simply due to the brand recognition she has due to her tenure at Google.
Could you explain more what you mean by non-execution? I don't travel in circles where I have context for something like that and it sounds interesting.
I had a CEO once who used to say "execute" a lot. I didn't really know what it meant either but it felt exciting when he said it. Sometimes I say it myself in the shower, when there's no-one within earshot.
True but you know Matt is anothger posibly trophy hire at soem stage he is acting way above his pay grade if my company asked me to represnt them to congress etc I would say "cool" but I want a board seat first :-)
I remember long ago hearing her push the notion that all design and interface decisions must be tested. I remember thinking that is just a recipe for non-execution with the goal of never being "wrong".
Marissa was an early employee at Google, she was employee 20 there and Google's first female hire - she's worth ~$300 Million, I doubt she's doing this for the money.
well, it's more like, she has $300 Million now, but her compensation going forward now, win or lose, will probably dwarf that of staying put at Google and personal portfolio growth for the next few years. She's not doing it for the money, but her personal wealth only stands a huge boost.
Definitely unexpected that she would show up at Yahoo but not unexpected that she would leave Google. The re-org was kind of a slap in the face and everyone pretty much knew it. But taking this role was not what I would have expected. If Microsoft really is trying to sell its Bing unit she might be able to make a search company out of it again. Or at least a company with a native search product to power its other properties.
Actually I don't think the risk is all that high. If the sinking ship still sinks, then oh well. But, however small the chance, she manages to turn things around...
Respectfully what risk does she have? She has a tremendous history with Google, even if Yahoo tanks with her at the helm, she could probably continue in at least a Senior Vice President position with almost any other company of her choosing.
Not to mention she is more-then-likely financially taken-care of. At that point, 'risk' is almost negligible. It's all just 'more possibilities' for Mrs. Mayer.
I think it's a risk too. She's shown that she can excel in a small company undergoing hyper growth.
In this case she's presenting herself as a turnaround expert. I'm surprised she didn't sign on with a pre-IPO darling like Twitter or Facebook long ago.
I don't think there's a lot of reputation risk for her, here... I'm pretty sure that if Yahoo continues it's current course, the majority reaction will be "Well, Yahoo was a sinking ship anyway, there's not a lot she could have done" but if Yahoo makes a comeback she'll be hailed as a miracle worker.
For proof of this, see Marc Andreessen's comments in TechCrunch[1]:
Andreessen also said he's "super-happy" for Mayer, because she's ready to step into a CEO role at a major tech company.
But can she actually turn Yahoo around? Andressen declined to offer any suggestions for areas that the company should pursue, and he also cautioned that it's hard to think of many Web companies that succeeded in turning themselves around.
"On the other hand, it's hard to overestimate how screwed Apple was in 1997," Andreessen said. "Tech comapnies can in fact be turned around. The problem is, there aren't a lot of Steve Jobs characters running around."
Basically, if she makes it, she's "a Steve Jobs character" and if not, well, it's hard to turn tech companies around.
Don't be so sure. Nokia was a sinking ship before Elop joined and now he's wearing most of the blame. Sure, he could have hitched Nokia's wagon to Android instead. But given that Google own competitor Motorola and are selling the killer Nexus 7 at no margin, they aren't exactly an ideal partner either.
All you need to do is look at how the tech press/community is ALREADY talking about this. See the quote from Andreessen[1] that I already talked about or, alternatively, another TechCrunch article that just got published:
What a time for Marissa Mayer to take control at Yahoo. She'll need all the smarts she can lay her hands on to revive an ailing Yahoo.[2]
It's already being set up so that the expectation is "she'll probably fail, because ANYONE will fail" but if she succeeds she's a miracle worker or "a Steve Jobs character".
Elop scrapped everything Nokia had dumped years of R&D into and turned the company into Microsoft's (Elop's former employer) puppet. Nokia could have made an instant comeback if they had just built a few semi-decent Android phones, but they are now locked in to Windows. Elop's case is atypical.
As someone who has been underwhelmed by Ms. Mayer since her early days at Google, I think this is just another desperate attempt to save the ailing Yahoo. It will fail, and she'll be out in less than a year.
She's a showboat, IMHO. This is based on personal observation and insider info. She's quick to yell about how great she is, but you don't see a lot of unbiased people talking about her contributions to technology or to Google. She has her own publicist; not from Google, mind you, this is the Marissa Mayer publicist. She apparently enjoyed keeping people lined up waiting for an appointment with her for hours. To summarize, there are a lot of signs of weak character, no signs of great leadership, and no signs of greatness at all. Yahoo's board wanted her, obviously, for the name Google. They will be disappointed.
Is it possible that Yahoo is just too far gone to be helped? Her head must be filled with dozens of ideas for changing the corporate culture there, but would any of us honestly believe anything could save Yahoo at this point?
Look at it from this angle: if she succeeds, she could be wildly successful (Steve Jobs return-style).
If she fails, could anyone fault her?
I see no outsized downsides for her here - she either succeeds or Yahoo continues to fail. For Yahoo, this is a high-profile CEO who, if the board gives enough maneuvering space, might prevent the free-fall and establish a stable flight.
It can always be saved. They have a reasonably competent group of employees, a nice patent portfolio (recently cross-licensed with FB), and a recognizable brand that is still in heavy (albeit declining) use today. Even the more geeky crowd is becoming bearish on Google, so I think it's the perfect opportunity to reinvent the brand. What it should/could become is anybody's guess, but it will have to be a big change to correct their current course. It's always possible.
There's another way to look at it. With $1bn of net income in 2011, Yahoo! can clearly turn a profit.
Could any of us here on HN forge a great, long term business from a profit stream of hundreds of millions of dollars? I'm sure quite a few could, and Meyer surely stands a good chance.
Even if she has to turn the organization upside down, make major branding changes, or fire key staff, Yahoo! has the resources, at least, to change for the better. It has just lacked the willpower, till now hopefully.
Can someone explain how she is able to do this? Set aside the boldness of the move, but if anyone ever should be put on some kind of "garden leave" or some kind of non-compete it would be a person moving from a prominent position in Google to become CEO of Yahoo?
Anyway, that aside. One thing that I hope that comes from this, is bringing some of the same Google-quality-developer-friendly-ethos to Yahoo. Dispite consuming several Yahoo services, I'm always disappointed at how slow they release changes... and if there is one thing that Yahoo needs it's changes..
---------
[] June 16th, "Marrissa Meyer Makes Move to Yahoo",
[] June 20th, Yahoo switches from Bing to Google Search.
[] July 21th, Bing sees enormous drop in QPM.
Coup of the century? Who would of thought, should this actually happen, it would be the best possible outcome. Sacrificing the queen to totally dominate the search market even further.
Assuming that you work in California, no, the non-complete clause is rendered unenforceable. (Under Application Group, Inc. v. Hunter Group, Inc., California law trumps a choice of law clause with respect to a non-compete clause.) If you live in CA and commute to Nevada/Oregon/Arizona/some other state, then my understanding is that the law of the state where you actually work would apply.
Disclaimer: IANAL and this post does not constitute legal advice of any kind.
Sure, there isn't really an enforceable non-compete in California, its one of the things that makes Silicon Valley, well Silicon Valley. Second there is a sort of hubris around 'the best revenge is beating them at their own game.' I know of at least two founder/co-founder pairs that split over different ideas about how the vision should go and rather than try to sue the other out of existence, the sense of invulnerability or desire for competition gives rise to a sort of 'bring it on if you got it' mentality.
Even if non-competes are enforceable, sometimes it will make more sense for a company to let an employee go straightaway anyway, rather than having them hang around twiddling their thumbs with no motivation.
True, Where California's statutes affect innovation is in the case where you're trying to raise money. In a state that enforces non-compete agreements you have a harder time if your new venture competes with the place you just left. That is because there is a risk that if you're successful you will be sued by your original employer and shut down. This is not true in California so it is nominally easier to raise funds.
How enforceable are they in other states? I know in the UK there have been a few test cases which seem to have resulted in the interpretation that you can only enforce one if it would otherwise be detrimental to the ex-employer (e.g. starting a new business or taking your contacts with you), otherwise people would find it difficult to move jobs within an industry because you'd almost always be going to a company who could be classed as a competitor.
I thought for sure Mayer was a Google lifer. It's sort of like when someone like leaves a great college coaching gig to go to the pros. That doesn't mean Google isn't prime time, but rather just the idea that you have a comfortable situation for yourself that you can ride out or you can move somewhere else and make things much harder for yourself. She is clearly a driven individual and extremely talented so I think she will be successful at Yahoo.
For upper level executives as soon as you resign you're escorted out the door by security and you're not allowed to touch anything. The level of access you had was so high that they don't want you learning anything more about the company's plans and want you out asap.
I've been around some companies where any IT worker who gives 2 week notice is escorted immediately out of the building. It is not unusual for 2 weeks to not be needed or wanted.
Or Yahoo 360. What? It never launched?
Well, she could do it on Yahoo Mash. Huh? Got shut down?
Or she could post a link on Yahoo Buzz. What's that? Also dead?
Crud, maybe she could post it to facebook.
California is an "at will" state so she's under no obligation to give Google any notice if she intends to quit, just as Google doesn't have to give her any notice if they intend to get rid of her.
I find it so childish, when company escorts an executive out. If CEO have been looking for a job, then all needed files have been copied long time ago. CEO knows it. Company knows it. yet they cannot resist the stupid ritual. giggling.
It's not childish, it's just being responsible. This is generally done for any employee with access to highly sensitive data. They're not going to do any more work for you; why take any risk that they'll do anything damaging after the moment when they tell you they're leaving?
Also, once they've resigned, they're no longer an employee, so for a lot of companies (Google included) they may not be allowed in the sensitive office areas, anyway.
Asking a non-employee to leave the premises of a business isn't treating them like a "potential criminal". If you find a random visitor wandering around your office, you may ask them to leave. It's not a "shitty" thing to do as long as it's done politely.
Let's keep in mind this is also someone who is leaving voluntarily, not being laid off. They are picking their moment when they become a non-employee.
It seems a lot like closing the barn door after the horses have left. If they were going to do anything damaging, why wouldn't they do it after they've decided they're leaving but before they tell you they're leaving? After all, they control when they tell you.
I think that particular practice is security theater - it's so the employer can say "We take all possible precautions", regardless of whether the possible precautions are effective.
There's been a real state change. The individual has gone from an employee - with contractual obligations to the employer in terms of intellectual property, etc. - to a non-employee who may not have those same obligations. There are also issues of liability and safety - as a non-employee, they may no longer be covered by your insurance, depending on the type of workplace.
Is it mostly for form? Probably, but there's a reason it's considered the right process. It's not done for "theater", it's done because sometimes these things end up in court later on.
Usually when you resign, there's an "effective MM/DD/YYYY" clause in your resignation letter. Until that date, you're still an employee, and still bound by any contractual obligations as such.
There's no particular reason for that effective date to be "now" vs. "two weeks from now". I've certainly had coworkers that announced their intention to resign 2 weeks or a month before their actual departure (actually, the one time I've quit a job, I think I stayed for a couple weeks afterwards wrapping up my project & transferring knowledge). The difference is only that in one case, the employee is intending to resign but you don't know about it, but in the other, the employee is intending to resign but you do know about it.
If you've read the news reports, this was an immediate resignation. At least in California, there's no obligation to give notice on a resignation. It's a courtesy, but in the case of some senior positions, or when you're going to a competitor, a company isn't going to want you to work two more weeks anyway.
Right, but now we've circled back to the original point, which is that when you do give notice, it makes no sense for the company to insist that you leave immediately and escort you out, as you were in control of when you gave notice. If you wanted to do any damage, you would've just done it and then gave notice.
So what, you just let them hang around the office for while? Maybe poach a few employees? It might not prevent any damage that's already occurred, but there's no reason to allow more damage.
Work out an end-date with them that will allow for a comfortable transition & knowledge transfer. Perhaps that's "immediately" if someone else can take over their job, or if they're not interested in staying and helping you. Perhaps it's "2 weeks from now." But generally assume good faith, because if they wanted to screw you, they would've already done so.
Trying to think of explanations for this. First thing that comes to mind is a Dilbert cartoon where the new CEO takes over to run the company into the ground. While Yahoo's news, shopping, maps and search traffic is probably only a fraction of Google's it's still worth something. Why not install an insider at Yahoo and slowly help the traffic move over?
Yahoo's roots were actually in a rejection of engineering.
For years their primary product was their human-curated directory of Web sites. It was popular because the quality of results returned by the algorithmic search engines of the time (HotBot, Lycos, AltaVista, etc. -- you young 'uns in the crowd may need to look them up) were so poor that you had better odds of finding what you were looking for in Yahoo's directory. The directory left out vast numbers of sites, of course -- that was the cost of trying to manually maintain an index of the Web as it exploded in size. Human curators couldn't keep up with that growth; only software could. But Yahoo bet that software would never be as good as humans at finding the site you were looking for.
Then Google came along and built software that could index the whole web and return relevant results from it, and that knocked the bottom right out of Yahoo's manual-curation approach.
I worked at Yahoo 2003-2005, and back then I used to tell everyone who would listen that a big part of the problem was that the engineering team at Yahoo believed that Yahoo was a technology company, while the product team treated it as a media company.
It was an ongoing tension while Yahoo was still desperately clinging to the fantasy of regaining the search leadership, or at least stopping Google in its tracks - search was to a large extent Yahoo engineering's claim to legitimacy for the idea of a tech focused Yahoo.
Without it, what was left were mainly support functions for a massive content operation, but with a team still to a large extent seeing itself as the core of the company.
Yahoo wasted tremendous amounts trying to do technology for the sake of being a tech company rather than to support revenues; a lot of little fiefdoms in engineering were allowed to exist seemingly because it looked internally like Yahoo was building an impressive technology base, while it often instead was creating tensions in the business and costing ridiculous amounts.
It was quite clear that the only way she could move up and grow would be to either start a new company, and what would that be that after Google, or leading another huge company. Great choice, I am rooting for her, and for Yahoo.
I've always admired her, she seems to be very smart and has her finger on the pulse on what the Internet is all about, so if anyone can turn Yahoo around it's her.
I sincerely hope she has the intestinal fortitude to do WHATEVER it takes to revitalize Yahoo. The first thing I would do is get rid of the entire board of directors, they need a complete reboot as well.
Yes. But if an incoming CEO has a lot of political capital, they can try and demand that certain board members leave as a condition of taking the job. It's unusual, and takes an unusual person to pull it off, but it happens. (For example, this is what happened when Steve Jobs was made interim CEO of Apple.)
Mayer is a big coup for Yahoo, and the investors may back her if she wants to clean house with the board, but I wouldn't necessarily expect it to happen; it's unclear if Mayer really sees the board as part of the problem, and as Mayer is coming from outside of the organization, she may lack the close ties to other Yahoo execs that would be necessary to pull such a move off.
Thank you for the positive attitude. Most comments here are focused on how much of a challenge this is for her and why would she leave security for something that could possibly become bigger. Well, maybe she wants something bigger in life. Can that be possible?
Do you really believe that? I mean, of all the potential candidates out there, she has the best pedigree?
I think the negative commentary stems from there. You think this is a coup. To me, it's sort of a ho-hum, predictable hiring. Yahoo! needs an overhaul as a business, and to do so they hired someone with SV name power.
I 100% believe that she has the best pedigree of any person out there.
Think about it, who would you have as CEO of Yahoo? John Chambers? Larry Ellison? The CEO of Hulu? Mark Hurd? Jerry Yang? Tim Cook?
I think Mayer is better qualified than anyone else that is available because she is an expert on the space. When she joined Google, the mainstream Internet was less than 5 years old. Her entire career has been built on the Internet. If she went to any large company like IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Cisco, EMC, you name it, I would think it wouldn't be a good fit, because she wouldn't be an expert on the space.
Mayer has been with Google since practically the beginning, and as an executive, she has participated in the decisions and actions required to create and maintain a world-class engineering organization. As well, being an early employee and not just surviving but thriving, I'd be willing to bet that Mayer has done more as an engineer than most engineers at Yahoo, except maybe Filo, so that gives her incredible technical legitimacy. So, yes, I believe she is extremely qualified to run a company like Yahoo.
You can't just stick a "turnaround expert" in the shoes of Yahoo CEO and expect a great result. You need someone that understands the space, and can make the tough and right decisions that can put Yahoo back on track. Everyone that they've chosen as CEO since Yang just felt like they were trying to salvage as much of Yahoo as possible, and sell it to some other company or PE fund, and give up. By choosing Mayer, it means they are serious about trying to put Yahoo back on the right path again, and not just selling it off. I'm pretty sure this will motivate the current troops at Yahoo.
The only other interesting choice for CEO might be Reed Hastings, but he's taken already. The Yahoo board could have elected to try to acquire Netflix and put Hastings as CEO of the combined company, which would have been interesting. I still prefer the choice of Mayer though, because it shows a lot of guts, both on the part of Yahoo and Mayer.
>"I think Mayer is better qualified than anyone else that is available because she is an expert on the space. When she joined Google, the mainstream Internet was less than 5 years old. "
You do know there's a world of business outside the Valley, right? I'm not implying that she wouldn't be a good fit and very capable at many jobs or positions. But Yahoo!'s days are becoming numbered. When I think about what she could have possibly experienced at Google versus what Yahoo! needs as a company (which is a corporate and strategic overhaul), I can't understand where she'd have obtained anything remotely like "turn-around" expertise. Yahoo! is going to require some outside-the-box thinking, and this hiring is about as inside-the-box as it could be (along with every other name you mentioned would have been).
But this is just one man's opinion. I hope she can pull it off; it'd be a great story.
>"You can't just stick a "turnaround expert" in the shoes of Yahoo CEO and expect a great result. You need someone that understands the space"
Why can't you? What exactly is Yahoo!'s "space"? Of all the poor decisions made by Yahoo! of late, why do you trust that this was suddenly a stroke of genius?
This might be a stupid question, but are there any amazing turnaround stories in the world of large tech companies? If not, is that due to the relative youth of the sector, or something fundamental? I can think of a ton of companies that have faltered, but really none that have made a dramatic turnaround.
Apple is a good example. Keep in mind that Apple was "turned around" by one of the founders. That's an example of re-aligning the company with it's original vision rather than altering the vision. I think the latter is much harder but I've never tried.
Don't feel stupid! It doesn't happen very often, really. Certainly the examples are few and far between. Turnarounds can happen, they just usually don't.
Intuit hit a period of relative stagnation that Brad Smith has been working to plow through for a while, a period of change marked by the acquisition of Mint and an expansion in the online product suite
SanDisk went in the relative dumper following the memory glut in ~2009 but seems to have been recovering under Mehrotra for about a year now
And a great turn around (and around) story is Seagate, who tanked, went private around 2000, came out and soared mid-2000 and is sort of tanking again even under chairman Stephen Luczo's leadership
Apple from the mid-1990's to present. CEO John Sculley had been instructed in 1993 to sell the company (unsuccessfully, to AT&T, IBM, etc.), before getting fired. He refers to the time as Apple's "near-death experience." In 1997, Steve Jobs returned to the company via NeXT and Microsoft invested a severely needed $150 million. Without those two events happening, it is highly possible that Apple would not still exist today (let alone being the most valued technology company in the world). That's about as radical of turnaround as possible.
Also, Michael Dell returning to his company has been a solid turn around in regards to profitability and improvement in product quality, both of which had languished under the former chief. It doesn't show in the stock valuation because of substantial PE compression, but Michael Dell has taken the company from losing money briefly and having some accounting scandals, to a solid level of profitability in the last few years.
Bit borderline on being a 'tech' company by modern standards (though historically it's about as tech as it gets), General Electric under Jack Welch. He pulled off a Jobsian effort in the 80s. GE went from $27bn revenues to $130bn under his watch and a market cap of $14bn up to $410bn.
As I recall most of that was due to the US economy turning around and picking up defense contracts. I think it would be impossible to not make money in that situation.
I think there is a big difference between "impossible to not make money in that situation" and growing revenues by 100B under your leadership. A lot of companies in that era did not grow revenues by 100 billion dollars.
This will play out much like Armstrong at AOL. Lots of flailing around, another attempt at altering Yahoo's trajectory, and ultimately a further devalued company (not specifically because of anything Mayer will do, but because there's nothing that can stop Yahoo's erosion).
At some point the conclusion needs to be reached that the core of Yahoo is the problem. The products that generate the bulk of their sales are at best stagnant with no growth left, and at worst are slowly collapsing. Once that's properly digested, the company then needs to be blown apart and liquidated to the highest bidders.
Maybe there's a smaller core that could be focused on as a source of innovation and growth, but it's definitely not what makes up the bulk of Yahoo's $20 billion market value. If the goal is to generate shareholder value, Mayer should focus on getting her hands around an engine of growth that she can really add value to; a smaller Yahoo where she can drive a few growth products (assuming those can be found first). So much of what Yahoo does is maintaining a flat-lined late 1990s group of products.
Good advice. So according to you nothing can be changed at Yahoo! no matter who comes in. Apple was in a similar situation not long ago and I am sure there were people like you commenting similarly. I am not saying Marissa is similar to Steve Jobs but at least she has the credibility and qualification to make things work. Why comment when you have nothing to add?
Steve Jobs executed the single greatest turnaround in corporate history, at the company he founded, from which he had been fired ten years before. Betting on a similar result (or even something 10-20% as good) is really no different than expecting to draw an inside straight at the poker table. Sure, it can happen, but it's very unlikely.
Apple is a once in a century example, good luck with that.
And besides, I didn't suggest nothing can be changed at Yahoo. I didn't say that at all.
I said it should be blown apart, and the stagnant 1990s products should go. Mayer should put her talents to work on a smaller core where growth can be achieved with new products.
Yahoo Finance? Yahoo Sports? Search? Yahoo Mail? 1998 era portals? There's no growth there. She might be able to revitalize energy into Flickr and adjust it to a smart phone world, that'd be one existing major product worth giving some attention to (for example).
Unless Mayer has something equivalent to the game changing PageRank approach to search, there's absolutely nothing she can do to improve Yahoo's search product. So what can she do with the existing product core exactly? Not much, stagnation is inherent to most of the product segments in question.
The real simple angle is: ok, what's the gorilla / whirlwind product that's going to revitalize Yahoo? Search? Not a chance. The content niche products like sports or finance? Nope. Web mail? Comeon. Classifieds & jobs? Nope, small potatoes. So what is it? To really grow a $20 billion company, you need to find billions in new profit. Mayer will only find that with new products. Unless you think she can take 1/4 of the search market back from Google or take a huge chunk of the rest of the web email market.
Yahoo needs a blue ocean change.
All the stagnant parts should be sold off for a huge amount of cash. And she should more or less start over and attack something new where Yahoo can own its segment and build a gorilla product with huge growth potential (instead of being 2nd or 3rd (etc) place in everything).
They've only stayed somewhat relevant the past decade due to partnerships and these legacy sorts of services. I agree 100% with this. But what are they to do? They aren't Amazon. Try and buy Netflix and battle it out with all the other digital entertainment services?
They're going to have to literally reinvent themselves. Not in the B.S. wishy-washy way they've proclaimed numerous times. But in the balls out risky reinvention where if you fail, the company potentially gets sold for peanuts. They're not going to get anywhere playing it safe at this point.
The smart phone market is still relatively wide open for new, not-yet-thought-of services. Yahoo could throw their focus strongly that direction and try to matter there, betting on the future.
Buying Netflix wouldn't be a terrible idea, they're cheap these days relatively speaking. They could bring a lot of cash to bear behind Netflix, which could be put to use beefing up their streaming selection.
There are a few potential acquisitions they could do to get pointed in the right direction in terms of products relevant to the future. Yelp and Foursquare for example. They need to be able to properly handle services they acquire however, and perhaps Mayer can do a better job of that than their previous leadership. They'd need to do something more like what Google did with YouTube.
Short of making a dramatic change, it's merely a game of milking old assets for cash and slowly fading away.
Well that would certainly cover the 'risk everything to turn it around' idea posited above. I don't think anyone thinks FB didn't overpay for Instagram, it seemed like a desperate move, but then again they were flush with cash and it might be a great value compared to building their own.
There was a time, not that long ago, where Yahoo! was in a bad situation. Their search engine was terrible, portals were dying and they were losing mindshare like you read about. The thing is, at the same time they were doing REALLY interesting R&D work (Yahoo! Pipes, YUI, etc).
The impression I get is that in the last few years between the cuts, layoffs and good people just leaving they have virtually no talent left to resussitate the company.
Am I wrong in thinking this? Where is all of this awesome new stuff going to come from?
Note that Jobs didn't turn around Apple alone. He had built an entire separate company with a strong team and a strong technology. That was vital to the turnaround. In some ways, Apple didn't acquire Next; Next ate Apple from within. Aided, of course, by Jobs knowing the company and its markets inside and out.
And that wasn't enough; 3 years later they got their new OS out, but they were still a small player in their markets.
It was something like 4 years from takeover until they released the iPod, and circa 7 years before the stock really started to take off.
Even Yahoo can survive long enough for Mayer to find some new multi-billion idea, I'm not sure whether key shareholders or the board will give her enough rope to make significant changes.
I think the problem at Yahoo has traditionally been too much of a focus on superstar CEOs, and Mayer isn't much different. What Mayer really needs to do is remove some of the focus from her and put it onto the people on the front lines doing the work.
Armstrong is a sales guy. Marissa is a product person. Yahoo has the budget and bandwidth to incubate great products. I wouldn't count her out based on a sales guy trying to turn around an ad sales business.
Apple derives more than 80% of their revenue (and probably 90%+ of their market cap) from product categories that didn't even exist in 1999.
Yahoo needs to reinvent itself. They have a $19 billion market cap, billions in revenue, a brand with household name recognition all over the World and tens of thousands of employees to do it. It can certainly be done. I don't know that Mayer will do it or that it will ever be done with Yahoo - but to look at their current sources of income and define that as their future is shortsighted. Unfortunately, thats exactly how their investors look at it and it's a big part of the reason why they are in this mess in the first place.
Yahoo! and AOL are a classic examples of The Innovator's Dilemma. They can't separate themselves from the immediate needs of their customers to look at the patterns of what's next. They'll never take the leap of faith to do something completely new because they're not in a place where their culture and SOP allow it. The products that made them initially successful can't possibly carry them into the future. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
This is just brilliant news for Yahoo. Much as they have become a figure of ridicule in Silicon Valley, I have hoped year after year to see a Yahoo resurgence. This is finally a real chance at a turnaround.
Of course now we have to see if potential acquirers (particularly those going up against Google) suddenly see Yahoo as a much better target if they can get Mayer in the deal. (MS, FB, I'm looking at you!)
When does Yahoo's contract with Microsoft for the search engine expire? 2014? I think she will quickly switch to Google search engine after that. And there goes half of Bing's market share.
I wouldn't bother. They are so far behind both Bing and Google that trying to play catch up in the search game is simply a lost cause.
They have significant traffic and brand loyalty for certain services (finance, sports, etc). They need to focus on that, not chase a game they lost ages ago (search).
Just because they've "lost" search doesn't mean they can't make money off of it. Opera "lost" the browser market a long time ago and is still making money.
I'm not sure that's the analogy she would have used to wow the Board. Yahoo has a totally different audience that spends a lot of time on their site consuming content in a very different way than say Google or Bing. The opportunities for them to monetize them are very different but no less exciting. Yahoo has just struggled with a) determining which ones are strategic, b) enhancing those ones and c) creating a smoother experience between those. Sounds like a role for a very solid product manager to me.
This. IMO Yahoo's days as a technology company have long since ended (if they ever really existed in the first place). They have never been a heavily algorithms-based company like Google is.
IMO Yahoo's best bet is to reinvent themselves as a world-class product company, and rent the relevant tech stack from someone who can actually do a good job of it.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 1510 ms ] thread(Edit: my definition of risk is lost time and missed opportunity. She's not going to suffer in compensation or reputation.)
I just can't get over how hilarious this situation is.
What about their cultures make this situation hilarious, and how come you're convinced that Mayer won't make a difference?
What risk? She's already achieved complete financial security from here time at Google. At Yahoo! she'll be taking the reins of a company that still attracts a massive userbase but is aching for someone with a fresh viewpoint on how to transform the company. Nothing buy potential IMO.
Oblig car metaphor: That's like saying hey, as an alternative to a free Lamborghini Aventador, you can have an old Pontiac Fiero chassis, and a Chevy 350 with a blown head gasket. If you're really lucky and amazing you might make something worth 1/10th what the Lamborghini is.
So you can dredge it up, and perhaps restore it to it's original glory...or you can go out and build your own, new dream car from scratch.
Either way it's going to be a TON of work to get to a truly valuable (and fun to drive) vehicle...
I think it's a great move, and Google is probably in favor of it.
If Elon Musk and a new Stanford grad started brand new companies on the same day, would both companies be old busted cars with blown head gaskets?
Also, the metaphor is a bit flawed by likening the 17-year-old floundering company to a new sports car and a hypothetical new company as something that's already worthless because of wear and tear.
Building a successful company is not a joke even if you have knowledge and connections. Users don't value what and whom you know.
At her level and for all she has done, getting to be the CEO of a billion dollar firm is actually a great deal.
Looking at it from other way around, Her career at Google might have probably come to a halt given the fact that Larry and Sergey are going to be there around for a long time to come. On the other hand, she could not be the CEO of a successful firm- Because such stints demand prior experience.
In short the change she got now is because, the company is currently a underdog. No big CEO who is already on a wave of success will take up that kind of a job. She needs the company because she gets to be the CEO and nobody else would offer her the same position.
In many ways this is a no brainer.
Please spare us the silly abbreviations.
I have no idea how a Pontiac Fiero or a Chevy 350 compares to a Lamborghini Aventator without looking it up. All I know is that all three are probably luxury automobiles. I have even less of clue about what a head gasket might be.
On the other hand, if you tried to explain something to me by using a job at Google, Yahoo, and a start-up as analogies, it would definitely help make things more understandable.
Otherwise, I fully agree with your point. I like cars and had no clue what, exactly, the Pontiac Fiero or the Chevy 350 were as I'm not American and those are American cars. Around here German(Mercedes, BMW, Audi, VW) and Japanese(Mazda, Subary, Toyota, ...) cars are much much more common.
Chevy 350: Basically a commodity engine. 5.7L pushrod V-8. Used in lots of GM vehicles from the late 60s through the early 90s. Camaros, Corvettes, Cadiallacs etc. Built tough, cheap, and there are a gazillion aftermarket parts available.
Unless you were going for a race car or something it's quite uncommon to have a 5.7L engine in anything but an American car.
Plus, if you weren't here, you might not appreciate just how horrible the "EPA era" engines were. Much stricter emission controls + not having the technology to really meet it led to some really de-tuned engines. Wouldn't be unusual for a 5-6L engine in those days to only make 140-160HP stock.
Don't you think Mayer has enough capital, connections, reputation, experience, etc. that if she started a company to do what she wanted, how she wanted, it would be completely different from your average college-grad startup?
I mean, come on now. There's no comparing the two.
The only reason to expect Mayer to do well as the CEO of Yahoo would be if her work at Google were similar to that job in some respect. I'm not sure it is.
If you wrestle with a pig, both of you get dirty, and the pig enjoys it.
Meyer's a superstar right now. Yahoo's had an anti-Midas touch on several people who've attempted to steer it right.
So Yahoo's now the Erymanthian boar?
Time to divert Los Gatos Creek and the Guadalupe River. But I think the stench is stronger than them.
Now she could fail in ways that are so bad that it does harm her reputation, certainly. I tend to agree with those that think as long as she doesn't fail for reasons that make her look really bad, her reputation won't suffer too much.
Also if Yahoo is marginally successful she may get an outsized boost - due to others failing to do even that.
I think Mayer is the right choice.
What I was expecting was that she would leave and start some sort cross between 'solve a world issue' with 'easy accessibility' kinds of UI. At Google her strength was having a clear idea of how to speak to users through UX, The Yahoo gig can use that, certainly, but watching the succession of failures and missteps at Yahoo the issues aren't primarily UX or users, it seems like Yahoo is in a major identity crisis about what exactly it actually is.
When one of their recruiters was trying to convince me to join the pitch was this:
"Yahoo is the premier digital media company
Yahoo! delivers amazing personalized digital content and experiences, across devices and around the globe, to vast audiences. We provide engaging and innovative canvases for advertisers to connect with their target audiences using our unique blend of Science + Art + Scale."
To which my response was "Really?", if someone were to ask me what the "Premier digital media company" was I don't think I'd respond "Yahoo!"
Hence my surprise.
It may be that I think 'education/entertainment' more than I think 'discovery' when I think digital media. If Yahoo claimed to be the digital media discovery company that might be the starting point for a bigger vision.
I think when people hear the phrase "digital media", they think of it has traditional-media-delivered-digitally. But I think the internet enables entirely new variations of traditional media, tailor-made for our hypersocial, crowdsourced, and attentionless internet society.
They are a company filled with brilliant engineers (who give us things like Hadoop), yet they only want to be a media company.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslows_hierarchy_of_needs
And possibly who to poach from google.
Prior to joining google in 1999 as employee number 20 "Mayer worked at the UBS research lab (Ubilab) in Zurich, Switzerland, and at SRI International in Menlo Park, California" (wikipedia) for what appears to be only a few years. (She graduated high school in 1993, received a B.S. and and M.S. which must have taken at least 4 or 5 years afaik).
My guess is that she has a great deal of confidence, confidence built on the fact that she was an early google employee and she was able to ride the success of that opportunity. But her entire working career is basically google and I'm not sure she brings the depth of experience necessary to take on turning around the fortunes of Yahoo.
At the very least, Mayer has been part of a real leading tech organization that grew from nothing to everything in record time. That's experience that is also very difficult to replicate. And, the skills she's known for within Google are all product oriented, and that's where Yahoo has failed so miserably and Google has succeeded so fantastically.
For IBM, the decision to hire a non-technical and experienced CEO turned out OK. IBM turned around. But I'd agree that this is probably an exception to the rule.
I think the key here is fresh thinking and ability to get the political/operational/strategic stars aligned inside the organization to /cough/ execute. An experienced person may bring this to the table, and a lesser experienced person may bring this to the table. The key is whether it's brought to the table.
I've had the opportunity to work with people who were very good at personal public relations, and based on that experience, I'm skeptical. Constantly selling your public image means that you can't be wrong, which always results in revisionist history and oddball situations.
Hopefully I'm wrong -- Yahoo needs help, and she does have a good story.
http://postcards.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/07/16/mayer-yaho...
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-wome...
She is stagnating at Google. She had high ranking high influence positions at Google but over the years has been relegated to a position that has little visibility and control, mostly due to her non execution. This is a great opportunity for her to make some serious cash and be the "top dog" in a kennel of average dogs, rather than the opposite at Google.
Also, even if she crashes and burns at Yahoo, she will get many more opportunities simply due to the brand recognition she has due to her tenure at Google.
I remember long ago hearing her push the notion that all design and interface decisions must be tested. I remember thinking that is just a recipe for non-execution with the goal of never being "wrong".
Not to mention she is more-then-likely financially taken-care of. At that point, 'risk' is almost negligible. It's all just 'more possibilities' for Mrs. Mayer.
In this case she's presenting herself as a turnaround expert. I'm surprised she didn't sign on with a pre-IPO darling like Twitter or Facebook long ago.
Are you serious? Have you seen what's happened to Yahoo's CEOs since ... ever?
Andreessen also said he's "super-happy" for Mayer, because she's ready to step into a CEO role at a major tech company.
But can she actually turn Yahoo around? Andressen declined to offer any suggestions for areas that the company should pursue, and he also cautioned that it's hard to think of many Web companies that succeeded in turning themselves around.
"On the other hand, it's hard to overestimate how screwed Apple was in 1997," Andreessen said. "Tech comapnies can in fact be turned around. The problem is, there aren't a lot of Steve Jobs characters running around."
Basically, if she makes it, she's "a Steve Jobs character" and if not, well, it's hard to turn tech companies around.
[1]: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/16/marc-andreessen-marissa-may...
What a time for Marissa Mayer to take control at Yahoo. She'll need all the smarts she can lay her hands on to revive an ailing Yahoo.[2]
It's already being set up so that the expectation is "she'll probably fail, because ANYONE will fail" but if she succeeds she's a miracle worker or "a Steve Jobs character".
[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4252945
[2]: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/16/yahoos-neglected-global-lab...
I agree, I think Elop made bad decisions which were massively swayed by Elop's attachment to Microsoft.
If she fails, could anyone fault her?
I see no outsized downsides for her here - she either succeeds or Yahoo continues to fail. For Yahoo, this is a high-profile CEO who, if the board gives enough maneuvering space, might prevent the free-fall and establish a stable flight.
Could any of us here on HN forge a great, long term business from a profit stream of hundreds of millions of dollars? I'm sure quite a few could, and Meyer surely stands a good chance.
Even if she has to turn the organization upside down, make major branding changes, or fire key staff, Yahoo! has the resources, at least, to change for the better. It has just lacked the willpower, till now hopefully.
Anyway, that aside. One thing that I hope that comes from this, is bringing some of the same Google-quality-developer-friendly-ethos to Yahoo. Dispite consuming several Yahoo services, I'm always disappointed at how slow they release changes... and if there is one thing that Yahoo needs it's changes..
---------
[] June 16th, "Marrissa Meyer Makes Move to Yahoo",
[] June 20th, Yahoo switches from Bing to Google Search.
[] July 21th, Bing sees enormous drop in QPM.
Coup of the century? Who would of thought, should this actually happen, it would be the best possible outcome. Sacrificing the queen to totally dominate the search market even further.
Disclaimer: IANAL and this post does not constitute legal advice of any kind.
(Couldn't help myself :-)
Psst: It's July.
For upper level executives as soon as you resign you're escorted out the door by security and you're not allowed to touch anything. The level of access you had was so high that they don't want you learning anything more about the company's plans and want you out asap.
I doubt anyone cared that she resigned by phone.
(my opinion)
In most cases 2 weeks is a professional curtesy.
Also, once they've resigned, they're no longer an employee, so for a lot of companies (Google included) they may not be allowed in the sensitive office areas, anyway.
Let's keep in mind this is also someone who is leaving voluntarily, not being laid off. They are picking their moment when they become a non-employee.
I think that particular practice is security theater - it's so the employer can say "We take all possible precautions", regardless of whether the possible precautions are effective.
Is it mostly for form? Probably, but there's a reason it's considered the right process. It's not done for "theater", it's done because sometimes these things end up in court later on.
There's no particular reason for that effective date to be "now" vs. "two weeks from now". I've certainly had coworkers that announced their intention to resign 2 weeks or a month before their actual departure (actually, the one time I've quit a job, I think I stayed for a couple weeks afterwards wrapping up my project & transferring knowledge). The difference is only that in one case, the employee is intending to resign but you don't know about it, but in the other, the employee is intending to resign but you do know about it.
http://blog.phanfare.com/2009/07/its-official-yahoo-is-a-med...
For years their primary product was their human-curated directory of Web sites. It was popular because the quality of results returned by the algorithmic search engines of the time (HotBot, Lycos, AltaVista, etc. -- you young 'uns in the crowd may need to look them up) were so poor that you had better odds of finding what you were looking for in Yahoo's directory. The directory left out vast numbers of sites, of course -- that was the cost of trying to manually maintain an index of the Web as it exploded in size. Human curators couldn't keep up with that growth; only software could. But Yahoo bet that software would never be as good as humans at finding the site you were looking for.
Then Google came along and built software that could index the whole web and return relevant results from it, and that knocked the bottom right out of Yahoo's manual-curation approach.
It was an ongoing tension while Yahoo was still desperately clinging to the fantasy of regaining the search leadership, or at least stopping Google in its tracks - search was to a large extent Yahoo engineering's claim to legitimacy for the idea of a tech focused Yahoo.
Without it, what was left were mainly support functions for a massive content operation, but with a team still to a large extent seeing itself as the core of the company.
Yahoo wasted tremendous amounts trying to do technology for the sake of being a tech company rather than to support revenues; a lot of little fiefdoms in engineering were allowed to exist seemingly because it looked internally like Yahoo was building an impressive technology base, while it often instead was creating tensions in the business and costing ridiculous amounts.
I've always admired her, she seems to be very smart and has her finger on the pulse on what the Internet is all about, so if anyone can turn Yahoo around it's her.
I sincerely hope she has the intestinal fortitude to do WHATEVER it takes to revitalize Yahoo. The first thing I would do is get rid of the entire board of directors, they need a complete reboot as well.
Mayer is a big coup for Yahoo, and the investors may back her if she wants to clean house with the board, but I wouldn't necessarily expect it to happen; it's unclear if Mayer really sees the board as part of the problem, and as Mayer is coming from outside of the organization, she may lack the close ties to other Yahoo execs that would be necessary to pull such a move off.
Do you really believe that? I mean, of all the potential candidates out there, she has the best pedigree?
I think the negative commentary stems from there. You think this is a coup. To me, it's sort of a ho-hum, predictable hiring. Yahoo! needs an overhaul as a business, and to do so they hired someone with SV name power.
Think about it, who would you have as CEO of Yahoo? John Chambers? Larry Ellison? The CEO of Hulu? Mark Hurd? Jerry Yang? Tim Cook?
I think Mayer is better qualified than anyone else that is available because she is an expert on the space. When she joined Google, the mainstream Internet was less than 5 years old. Her entire career has been built on the Internet. If she went to any large company like IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Cisco, EMC, you name it, I would think it wouldn't be a good fit, because she wouldn't be an expert on the space.
Mayer has been with Google since practically the beginning, and as an executive, she has participated in the decisions and actions required to create and maintain a world-class engineering organization. As well, being an early employee and not just surviving but thriving, I'd be willing to bet that Mayer has done more as an engineer than most engineers at Yahoo, except maybe Filo, so that gives her incredible technical legitimacy. So, yes, I believe she is extremely qualified to run a company like Yahoo.
You can't just stick a "turnaround expert" in the shoes of Yahoo CEO and expect a great result. You need someone that understands the space, and can make the tough and right decisions that can put Yahoo back on track. Everyone that they've chosen as CEO since Yang just felt like they were trying to salvage as much of Yahoo as possible, and sell it to some other company or PE fund, and give up. By choosing Mayer, it means they are serious about trying to put Yahoo back on the right path again, and not just selling it off. I'm pretty sure this will motivate the current troops at Yahoo.
The only other interesting choice for CEO might be Reed Hastings, but he's taken already. The Yahoo board could have elected to try to acquire Netflix and put Hastings as CEO of the combined company, which would have been interesting. I still prefer the choice of Mayer though, because it shows a lot of guts, both on the part of Yahoo and Mayer.
really? any evidence for this? (not snark, genuinely curious) I've never heard of Marissa Mayer as a top 1% engineer (vs a 'strong' manager)
You do know there's a world of business outside the Valley, right? I'm not implying that she wouldn't be a good fit and very capable at many jobs or positions. But Yahoo!'s days are becoming numbered. When I think about what she could have possibly experienced at Google versus what Yahoo! needs as a company (which is a corporate and strategic overhaul), I can't understand where she'd have obtained anything remotely like "turn-around" expertise. Yahoo! is going to require some outside-the-box thinking, and this hiring is about as inside-the-box as it could be (along with every other name you mentioned would have been).
But this is just one man's opinion. I hope she can pull it off; it'd be a great story.
>"You can't just stick a "turnaround expert" in the shoes of Yahoo CEO and expect a great result. You need someone that understands the space"
Why can't you? What exactly is Yahoo!'s "space"? Of all the poor decisions made by Yahoo! of late, why do you trust that this was suddenly a stroke of genius?
This is where they were the year Jobs returned, remember: http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/gadgetlab/wired+cover.jpg
http://www.amazon.com/Elephants-Dance-Inside-Historic-Turnar...
SanDisk went in the relative dumper following the memory glut in ~2009 but seems to have been recovering under Mehrotra for about a year now
And a great turn around (and around) story is Seagate, who tanked, went private around 2000, came out and soared mid-2000 and is sort of tanking again even under chairman Stephen Luczo's leadership
"How Lou Gerstner Got IBM To Dance" http://www.forbes.com/2002/11/11/cx_ld_1112gerstner.html
Also, Michael Dell returning to his company has been a solid turn around in regards to profitability and improvement in product quality, both of which had languished under the former chief. It doesn't show in the stock valuation because of substantial PE compression, but Michael Dell has taken the company from losing money briefly and having some accounting scandals, to a solid level of profitability in the last few years.
At some point the conclusion needs to be reached that the core of Yahoo is the problem. The products that generate the bulk of their sales are at best stagnant with no growth left, and at worst are slowly collapsing. Once that's properly digested, the company then needs to be blown apart and liquidated to the highest bidders.
Maybe there's a smaller core that could be focused on as a source of innovation and growth, but it's definitely not what makes up the bulk of Yahoo's $20 billion market value. If the goal is to generate shareholder value, Mayer should focus on getting her hands around an engine of growth that she can really add value to; a smaller Yahoo where she can drive a few growth products (assuming those can be found first). So much of what Yahoo does is maintaining a flat-lined late 1990s group of products.
Best of luck to Mayer and Yahoo, though.
And besides, I didn't suggest nothing can be changed at Yahoo. I didn't say that at all.
I said it should be blown apart, and the stagnant 1990s products should go. Mayer should put her talents to work on a smaller core where growth can be achieved with new products.
Yahoo Finance? Yahoo Sports? Search? Yahoo Mail? 1998 era portals? There's no growth there. She might be able to revitalize energy into Flickr and adjust it to a smart phone world, that'd be one existing major product worth giving some attention to (for example).
Unless Mayer has something equivalent to the game changing PageRank approach to search, there's absolutely nothing she can do to improve Yahoo's search product. So what can she do with the existing product core exactly? Not much, stagnation is inherent to most of the product segments in question.
The real simple angle is: ok, what's the gorilla / whirlwind product that's going to revitalize Yahoo? Search? Not a chance. The content niche products like sports or finance? Nope. Web mail? Comeon. Classifieds & jobs? Nope, small potatoes. So what is it? To really grow a $20 billion company, you need to find billions in new profit. Mayer will only find that with new products. Unless you think she can take 1/4 of the search market back from Google or take a huge chunk of the rest of the web email market.
Yahoo needs a blue ocean change.
All the stagnant parts should be sold off for a huge amount of cash. And she should more or less start over and attack something new where Yahoo can own its segment and build a gorilla product with huge growth potential (instead of being 2nd or 3rd (etc) place in everything).
The smart phone market is still relatively wide open for new, not-yet-thought-of services. Yahoo could throw their focus strongly that direction and try to matter there, betting on the future.
Buying Netflix wouldn't be a terrible idea, they're cheap these days relatively speaking. They could bring a lot of cash to bear behind Netflix, which could be put to use beefing up their streaming selection.
There are a few potential acquisitions they could do to get pointed in the right direction in terms of products relevant to the future. Yelp and Foursquare for example. They need to be able to properly handle services they acquire however, and perhaps Mayer can do a better job of that than their previous leadership. They'd need to do something more like what Google did with YouTube.
Short of making a dramatic change, it's merely a game of milking old assets for cash and slowly fading away.
The impression I get is that in the last few years between the cuts, layoffs and good people just leaving they have virtually no talent left to resussitate the company.
Am I wrong in thinking this? Where is all of this awesome new stuff going to come from?
And that wasn't enough; 3 years later they got their new OS out, but they were still a small player in their markets.
It was something like 4 years from takeover until they released the iPod, and circa 7 years before the stock really started to take off.
Even Yahoo can survive long enough for Mayer to find some new multi-billion idea, I'm not sure whether key shareholders or the board will give her enough rope to make significant changes.
Yahoo needs to reinvent itself. They have a $19 billion market cap, billions in revenue, a brand with household name recognition all over the World and tens of thousands of employees to do it. It can certainly be done. I don't know that Mayer will do it or that it will ever be done with Yahoo - but to look at their current sources of income and define that as their future is shortsighted. Unfortunately, thats exactly how their investors look at it and it's a big part of the reason why they are in this mess in the first place.
That must have been an interesting call (to Larry?) to make...
Of course now we have to see if potential acquirers (particularly those going up against Google) suddenly see Yahoo as a much better target if they can get Mayer in the deal. (MS, FB, I'm looking at you!)
There's a possibility this is a coup by Google - if Yahoo defects to Google search engine it's nearly checkmate for Bing.
Remember, Melissa and Page were once a thang: http://gawker.com/152210/editorial-googles-power-couple
Regardless, I wish the best for Yahoo and Marissa. It would be good to have a strong Yahoo back in the scene - lots of incredible talent there.
I wonder what it would be like to become CEO of a company who has outsourced their whole search and advertising stack to Bing.
Will Yahoo! start caring about search or ads again?
They have significant traffic and brand loyalty for certain services (finance, sports, etc). They need to focus on that, not chase a game they lost ages ago (search).
IMO Yahoo's best bet is to reinvent themselves as a world-class product company, and rent the relevant tech stack from someone who can actually do a good job of it.