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

How long things take..

[TechyImmigrant]

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.

Re:How long things take..

[roman_mir]

Marissa Mayer is not a good CEO, she maybe was a useful engineer at Google, but she is a horrendous CEO at Yahoo! When Yahoo! outbid FB by a few hundred million to buy Tumblr it was clear, there is no plan. But there was no plan from the beginning.

I'll explain. You come to a new company as a CEO, WHAT DO YOU DO? What do you do first? What would YOU do? You know what I would do (as a CEO)? I would immediately run an inventory of what I have in the company, what do I have to work with, who makes money in the company, who does not make money, what investments are out there, what products, services, people, holdings, cash is out there.

I would want a recount and fast.

Then, as a new CEO I would definitely concentrate on those parts of the company that actually make money because those parts have already done the HARD work of figuring out how this company makes money right now.

Mayer didn't pay attention to the content generating part of Yahoo!, which is the part that actually earns them revenues at all, she didn't give a shit that there is a part of the company that brings in over a billion dollars a year. A BILLION dollars a year and she didn't care to figure out how that's done and how to boost it before doing anything else that TAKES money, any new investments can only be done once you understand your cashflow and you know that you can actually withstand the spending that goes into the investment.

Marissa Mayer was not hired as an engineer to build products, she was hired as a CEO, as a director to direct, to create strategy for the company. Yes, that means coming up with product ideas as well, no, it does not mean coding (which is what she ended up doing herself in many cases), that's a waste of time for her. She should be looking at markets and clients and making sure that her current accounts don't fall off the face of the earth, instead she didn't pay any attention to her advertising income (she stood up her largest clients), her content generating income (didn't even notice them apparently).

The only saving grace for Yahoo! was their Alibaba 1Billion USD investment that brought them money and investors, who used Yahoo! to invest into Alibaba indirectly.

As to products, what products? The fucking piece of shit Yahoo! account that I have (from old days) is horrible on Firefox under Ubuntu 11.04 that I still run on my laptop.

Re:How long things take..

[tjb]

"no, it does not mean coding (which is what she ended up doing herself in many cases)"

Tell me you're exaggerating... if that's true, wow, she should have been fired on the spot by the board of directors. The CEO of a multi billion dollar company has lots of responsibilities, writing production code is NOT one of them. If she can't trust the engineering teams to do that, she should hire new engineers, not write the code herself.

Yeah, don't focus on products.

[serviscope_minor]

Sounds like a plan.

Products are for suckers.

They should focus on social clouds for wearable augmented reality drones.

Re:Yeah, don't focus on products.

[oodaloop]

They should focus on social clouds for wearable augmented reality drones.

I find your ideas intriguing, and would like to subscribe to your social media RSS news twitpic feed.

Re:Is Yahoo! still a thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Core business?

[LordLucless]

...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.

Re:Core business?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not anymore. Yahoo requires (yes, requires, no barely-visible option to skip) a cellphone number to sign up. Because putting your only-above-AOL-mail service behind a gate that requires giving personal information to a company infamous for shit security is a good idea, right?

Synergies through Mergers and Acquisitions

[aralin]

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 :)

it's not hard

[jetole]

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.

Is she a good manager or a PHB?

[Comrade Ogilvy]

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.

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: Bewitched?

[afgam28]

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.

Re:No, it isn't.

[LostMyBeaver]

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?

Re:That's not what happened at all

[popo]

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.