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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.
Sounds like a plan.
Products are for suckers.
They should focus on social clouds for wearable augmented reality drones.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
You can post all day on Slashdot, but that isn't like putting your professional life on the line and giving it a go.
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.
To fold up the business, I'll say it again there's no future for Yahoo, it's amazing to me it's even around any longer.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
It's called the yNot.
Better known as 318230.
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!
...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
Has she even had enough time? Did they expect her to have a magic wand or twiddle her nose when she was hired? Short-term investors just need to pucker more.
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 can be done. Yahoo has the resources and man power to get there but micro managing was mentioned and that's a key problem right there. I have worked with micro managing managers and I have worked with well informed managers who keep abreast of things and is course I have worked with bad managers. Since I have begun managing myself I have seen great results and I DO NOT micro manage. The best managers I have ever had which have lead me to how I manage now are involved and aware and make key management decisions but they do not micro manage and that was key. I do not micro manage and I have seen steady and excellent growth in our business due to how I operate and how the best managers before me operated has lead me down that path. You take micro managers and they are persistent firm of stress in the workplace. They are invasive and cumbersome. On the other hand I have had managers that are the opposite end of the spectrum where they were not involved enough and/or didn't understand the decisions as best as they should have. They lead to very poor management decisions. A good manager not only knows what is best but knows where to ask and where to trust and speaking of trust you need to know your team well so that you can effectively trust their decisions.
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.
Just spin Tumblr back out and sell the rest to AOL.
It looks as if Marissa Mayer's micromanagement style might've backfired. For one, she probably killed moral for the people that enjoyed the perk of working from home. Her failure will be an ultimate win for Yahoo. Micromanagement NEVER works!
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?
If Yahoo wants to be relevant, they should show people like me how Yahoo matters. Right now, I can't think of any Yahoo products I use even once a year, and this is not new. It goes back years like this.
Possibly the only thing I "use" at all is email through my ISP: they outsourced it to Yahoomail, but I don't actually USE it; I have GMAIL POP it for me and never actually touch the Yahoo interface -which is an ancient address I never actually use so it's not like I even care really. If GMAIL didn't let me handle it, that account would sit for years untouched. Irrelevant.
Anyway, Yahoo, why should I care? How would my life be better if I used Yahoo stuff to do what I manage just fine without? I don't really see it. More importantly, I don't feel like I NEED Yahoo. And what Yahoo needs is people like me to feel like they MUST HAVE YAHOO, and that is exactly what I don't feel.
Shrug
Sig for hire.
yawho?
Unless the man in question is Putin or Chuck Norris there's little he could do for Yahoo!.
Yahoo may pass the total value of the Russian stock market soon, if trends continue. Only Chuck can save Yahoo now.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
Hmm... She's managed to gain the trust and support of enough people to get into the position she's in. She's managed to build one of the most prolific, wide spread news sources (though painfully littered with tabloid nonsense) on the Internet. She has also managed to get to the point which more traditional media channels are genuinely being replaced by her company.
What she hasn't figured out how to do yet is to capitalize on all of it. There is a lot of potential... which is based on what she has done... but I for example had no idea there were Yahoo mobile apps before this article. Of course, I don't know why I would install one, but it means that a core component of their network isn't functioning (marketing) and needs to be fixed.
So, you seem to think that everything she's done is based on her dick sucking skills. As such, I'm sure you've accomplished more than she has. After all, you wouldn't make such a comment unless you felt that her actual achievements in life were minimal compared to yours. So what have you done?
I would love to hear more about your point. There is merit to it... though it lacks a bit of depth in the writing.
I think the big problem is that many of the more technical users of the internet simply wrote off Yahoo and even teased people for using it. As a result, Marissa would probably have been better off re-branding it. Somehow, it's hard to take Yahoo seriously. I think the biggest problem I have with it at this time is that for every serious news article written by a journalist who actually performs research, there is three Kardashion or Hilton type articles which makes them unreadable. This of course might be their desired effect in the long term, but it makes it really hard for people like Slashdot readers to say to someone "You should really use Yahoo!" since we wouldn't use it ourselves. In fact, we're more likely to distrust it and steer people away from it.
And you are the Web, obviously.
Yes, Yahoo! has officially announced their music playing device called the "Yune".
It's going to come in 7 different shades of purple, and offer an interface based on Yahoo!'s homepage design -- squeezing over 270 links onto the device's homescreen.
Yahoo's CEO, Marissa Mayer apparently designed the Yune at home herself over the weekend using purple Play-Doh, and it will be officially unveiled by her in an upcoming Vogue photoshoot -- where she will be personally modeling the device along with this year's spring collection.
Most of the underlying technology for the Yune was purchased from now-defunct Palm, Inc. in a purchase rumored to be north of $720 Billion -- approved entirely by Mayer. Mayer has refused to comment on the purchase price, but promised that the investment would yield positive results sometime after her salary review with the board of directors.
The Yune will be in stores by next Christmas and as a special promotional offer to increase sales, the Yune is expected to come bundled with an iPhone.
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So the question people should be asking is *where* is yahoo still popular? Is it actually popular (and what services) in some countries/languages?
Any insights?
Well... aside from the vitriol..
We do know the following:
1) She actually did fire all of the senior management and replace them with puppets.
2) She did hire legions of publicists to promote Marissa.
3) She did spend quite a bit on acquisitions which were questionable.
4) It's not working out so well for Yahoo.
So I'm not sure what citations you're looking for. It's not exactly hearsay.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )