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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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
You can't handle the truth.
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?