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Marissa Mayer's Reinvention of Yahoo! Stumbles

Posted by samzenpus on from the best-laid-plans dept.

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?

4 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. Missed the Boat by about 15 years by Irate+Engineer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --

    Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!

    Vote for Bernie in 2016!

    1. Re:Missed the Boat by about 15 years by DerekLyons · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  2. Re:Respect for Trying! by kuzb · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
  3. Re: Is Yahoo! still a thing? by Karlt1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?