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Marissa Mayer On Turning Around Yahoo

Posted by samzenpus on from the steering-the-ship dept.

An anonymous reader writes For the 20th anniversary of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer discusses how she's trying to reinvent the company. In a wide-ranging interview, Mayer shares her vision for fixing the company's past mistakes, including a major investment in mobile and a new ad platform. Yet she's been dogged by critics who see her as an imperious micromanager, who criticize her $1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr, and who fault her for moving too slowly. The company's executives explain that the business could only return to health after she first halted Yahoo's brain drain and went big on mobile. As one Yahoo employee summarized Mayer's thinking: "First people, then apps."

4 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Re:serious question by Trepidity · · Score: 4, Informative

    From a monetary, stock-price perspective, at the moment the main value in Yahoo is that they own a significant stake in Alibaba, a huge Chinese conglomerate. Their stake in Alibaba at current prices is worth about $34 billion, and Yahoo's current market cap is ~$40 billion. Even assuming a discount on their Alibaba stake due to some overhead that would be involved in unwinding it, it still represents more than half of Yahoo's stock value.

    --
    10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
  2. Re:serious question by bhcompy · · Score: 4, Informative

    Number one sports website, number one fantasy sports website, well regarded finance site, Flickr and Tumblr are still going strong, Yahoo Mail is still near the top in active userbase, smart investments in foreign social/search companies, etc. They do pretty well for themselves, which is why they're still around

  3. Re:130 hour weeks and "people first"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Anyone who claims to work 130 hour weeks is quite simply a liar. There's no way that person is producing anything resembling 'work' for more than 18 hours per day, 7 days a week. She may have been in the office for that long, but she sure as hell wasn't working. What is it with this fetishism about long work weeks? What's next, claims about a 170 hour week?

  4. Re:130 hour weeks and "people first"? by eulernet · · Score: 5, Informative

    she was promoted pretty high in the food chain at Google

    She was dating Larry Page.
    http://gawker.com/214051/utter...
    http://www.businessinsider.com...

    She is very ambitious, thus she constantly self-promotes herself.
    Claiming to work 130 hours a week is part of this self-promotion.