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?

Comments

Missed the Boat by about 15 years

[Irate Engineer]

Yahoo missed the boat about 10 years ago. It can't even do web email properly anymore. I have a Yahoo throwaway account, and the system is so broken that I rarely check in on it. It's right up there with AOL; it shouldn't have survived Y2K, but somehow it is still here, twitching and gasping

Marissa Mayer may or may not be very capable, but it hardly matters. Trying to get Yahoo to compete in online services and products in this day and age, starting from where Yahoo stagnated in the late 1990s, ain't going to happen. Frankly I think the best use of her time would be to start folding up the tables and chairs, turn off the lights, close up shop and sell off the company.

Re:Missed the Boat by about 15 years

[DerekLyons]

Yahoo fantasy football is still about the best around. Same with their sports apps. They bought up Sportstacular and haven't ruined it (it's actually gotten quite better since the acquisition), so those are great.

Yep. And their Stock, business, and financial management pages are top notch too... (to the point where Google has finally given up even trying to compete). Then there's Flickr, which, despite a few missteps, is still the largest and best photographic community out there. Etc... etc...

Yahoo! maybe not be where the cool kids hang out, and it's hasn't been on the tech hipsters hot list for over a decade... but it's far from down and out.

Re:Core business?

[swb]

I thnk their core business WAS the web directory but that seemed to become irrelevent and less useful once Google came around. Their age and size has allowed them a certain amount of inertia with users who simply don't know or care for anything better.

I think there's some value in a high-quality curated web directory. Given what Wikipedia accomplishes with volunteers and no advertising, I would think that Yahoo could have come up with some way to basically pay people to browse the web and curate a directory given the money they have to spend.

Google search is better in some regards and use cases but in some ways, if it isn't on the first page of results it probably won't be useful, especially if you don't know what to search for or are looking for a class of information or type of web site.

But they seemed to have given up on that in favor of "web services" which they probably can't ever compete with. Their technology isn't competitive, they don't have any media clout and nothing unique to offer.

Re:Respect for Trying!

[kuzb]

She's worth 300 million. What exactly is she putting on the line again? If every single one of her enterprises failed tomorrow, she'd still be set for several lifetimes. Her risk is exactly zero.

Re: Is Yahoo! still a thing?

[Karlt1]

Why do people like to brag about their ignorance and pretend that it's insightful? Yahoo is the 5th most visited site in the U.S. according to Alexa. It's ahead of Wikipedia. Would you ask was Wikipedia still a thing?

Re:How long things take..

[phantomfive]

The CEO of a multi billion dollar company has lots of responsibilities, writing production code is NOT one of them.

And that is why I hope never to be CEO.

Re:This reads like a hit piece

[kamapuaa]

That's like the first the paragraphs, you should read the rest of the article. It's interesting and informative.

And is an interesting point that the stock market views yahoo as a negative three billion company with a thirty billion investment in Alibaba.