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Marissa Mayer On Turning Around Yahoo
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."
How did cutting telecommuting across the board and thus forcing many talented engineers to go elsewhere stop the brain drain?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
If the new mobile mail app is part of their big push, then they're in trouble.
That thing is DOG slow on a Nexus 5 (a quad core phone with 2gb RAM). I can't even imagine how crap it is on anything older. Every time they push it back on me, I have to go to settings->classic mail experience.
Not to mention the fact I have to use the browser version instead of their app due to mysterious random "oops your battery is dead" moments and the ridiculous number of permissions their app wants.
And can we talk about reliability? 50-50 whether the desktop site loads videos correctly, they seem to have 4 different commenting systems with the same backend (one of which never shows comments), and constant "oops, server error" issues. This last block I'm separating because the crapitude predates her, but Yahoo can't seem to code its way out of a wet paper bag.
I still use yahoo email as my I don't care what happens to it address. Spam filter works well so I haven't seen a need to change.
Once she took over they redid the my yahoo homepage and broke literally everything about it. The sports feed has mostly become functional again but the weather... my god the weather... completely and utterly useless. The widget on the homepage can't keep track of where I am or even what day of the week it is. Everything else is more likely to give you a gateway timeout or other error than actual information.
The only companies left standing after 20 years are those that use acquisitions to make up for the fact that successful innovation involves a lot of luck. Google, Microsoft, and Apple all use strategic acquisitions to enhance themselves. Do you think Google created Android, YouTube, and Google Maps/Earth? Do you think Microsoft created MS-DOS, Powerpoint, and Skype? Do you think Apple created iOS, OSX, and Final Cut Pro? All of those are final products that evolved from acquisitions. They are not home grown, yet they define massive parts of their corporate identities.
No, the answer seems to be that CEOs are incompetent, talk corporations into giving them huge pay packets (which is done with the help of other CEOs), and generally don't have a clue of what they should be doing.
The compensation of a CEO is not tied to performance, so they can be as idiotic as possible, ruin the company, and still have their huge payout.
Basically, CEOs have hoodwinked the world into believing they're extra special people with valuable skillsets, even when they don't.
Essentially being a CEO is a great scam, funded by the shareholders and the employees. Being a CEO has to be the easiest fucking job in the world .. because no matter the shit job you do you still make a huge sum of money, and people subsequently are willing to hire you in other companies on the assumption that, having been incompetent to be a CEO already, you're qualified for the job.
In my experience and observation, your average CEO is either a failed business person, or an engineer who got lucky in another company and now has an MBA ... they're just chimps who get paid vast sums of money if they win or lose.
And, of course, since the people who hire and fire CEOs are just as incompetent, and in on the scam, they will never decide to tie compensation to any meaningful level of results.
Cynically, I believe this is just a massive scam being perpetuated to make a bunch of assholes even richer, while not giving a crap what happens to the company or the stock price.
Me, I'd be an incompetent CEO for half the price ... and I'd probably do no better or worse, and then I'd get my severance package and retire.
A fucking drunk chimp could do as good of a job as most corporate CEOs. This is just another example.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
From a 1990 essay comes the insight
"The ability to get ahead in an organization is simply another talent, like the ability to play chess, paint pictures, do coronary bypass operations or pick pockets. There are some people who are extraordinarily good at manipulating- organizations to serve their own ends. The Russians, who have suffered under such people for centuries, have a name for them-- apparatchiks. It was an observer of apparatchiks who coined the maxim, 'The scum rises to the top.' "
http://bobshea.net/empire_of_t...
It is as insightful in its own way as "The Mythical Man-Month".
"When Google was a young company, she worked 130 hours per week and often slept at her desk." Ref: http://www.entrepreneur.com/ar...
With access to free showers, free laundry service, and free extra yummy food outside of regular working hours. I could also see myself never leaving my workplace and sleeping 130 hours a week.