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Marissa Mayer's Reinvention of Yahoo! Stumbles
schnell writes The New York Times Magazine has an in-depth profile of Marissa Mayer's time at the helm of Yahoo!, detailing her bold plans to reinvent the company and spark a Jobs-ian turnaround through building great new products. But some investors are saying that her product focus (to the point of micromanaging) hasn't generated results, and that the company should give up on trying to create the next iPod, merge with AOL to cut costs and focus on the unglamorous core business that it has. Is it time for Yahoo! to "grow up" and set its sights lower?
People who don't make products have no clue how long it takes to make a product. Their attention span is always shorter. This is an example of someone complaining because their attention span is shorter than the development cycle.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I still use them. I've been using them since Yahoo started free email service. It's gotten a lot worst. Can't display emails when it's clicked due to javascript and loading issues. non-responsive mobile app where the latest information is not loaded even with full bars and full wifi and you drag down to update. Deleted emails still on display screen and can not display new emails, have to reload page. The so called new features just made things worst. trying to contact support is just near impossible and they don't get back to you. I'm slowly transferring my emails out of yahoo so it will only be marketing emails left going there.
...merge with AOL to cut costs and focus on the unglamorous core business that it has. Is it time for Yahoo! to "grow up" and set its sights lower?
What exactly is Yahoo's "core business"? Their webdirectory is defunct, search outsourced to Bing, and email largely been eaten by its competitors. I would have thought "settings its sights lower" would have involved winding up the company.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
If we only provide value through synergies resulting from M&A activity, we will eventually end up with one large company spanning the entire state and will have the perfect example of communism :)
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
It some ways, I think Mayer's is a great fit for the job. But in others, well, the NYTImes article painted a very unfavorable picture of her ability to hire or manage compensation policy. The other problem is that, as TFA article points out, the core Yahoo business has shrunk to a 5-10 billion dollar company in a mature industry and zero prospects for rapid growth. Yet she was hired wave a magic "reinvent" wand and return the company to 100 billion dollar glory -- that is not a problem with Mayer, but the Board.
yeah but for the C-level type A personality, money is just a yardstick. It's not the goal in and of itself.
If they're comparing her to Steve Jobs and expecting her to create Yahoo's iPod, then it may be worth pointing out that Jobs returned to Apple in 1996 and the iPod wasn't released until 2001. Two years is a long time but sometimes great products take even longer than that.
I would not call myself a fan of Meyer, and her use of her relationship with Page to screw over her contemporaries (read this book) has really left a bad taste in my mouth. However this article reads like a hit piece. It looks like some activist investors are trying to get her to do things she does not want to do (the article suggests returning the money back to shareholders and firing all the engineers). They are attacking her personally and that stinks.
She was loathed at Google. She was lazy. She kept crap office hours. She held the disdain of most engineers. And she was untouchable because of who she was sleeping with.
She was chosen for Yahoo **BECAUSE** of sexism, not despite it. She was chosen because: vagina. She was a young, blonde attractive woman who came from Google. That was solid gold in the mind of those who were seeking "change".
Anyone who had worked with her at Google knew that she would do exactly the following:
1) Fire senior management who posed a threat.
2) Firewall herself with "yes" people who supported her.
3) Go on a publicity rampage which focused more on "Marissa" than her company.
4) Spend like a drunken sailor on batshit crazy acquisitions with little ROI.
5) Avoid criticism by latching on to the "women's rights" agenda and deflecting criticism as being sexist.
And most importantly ...
6) Eventually fail, because failures always fail when the hype machine runs out.
To the white knight who said "give her time", the answer is no. This is business not a fucking pre-school. She blows. She's a crap CEO. She was, is and always will be an INCREDIBLY, PROFOUNDLY TALENTED social climber, and corporate animal. She's got mad, mad skills at navigating through the quagmire of corporate politics. If I could buy stock in Marissa I would. That having been said, I'm short YHOO. She's useless at running companies.