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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."
what value is there in yahoo??? I havent used anything by them (not including companies they bought out) in I cant tell you how long. I dont know anyone who uses their email (do they still have email? / chat apps???) their search???? I honestly dont even know what they do anymore (well, other than they have a female CEO, all the tech blogs love to talk about that fact)
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I work in an office where you can work at home. It's much, much better to work in the office. There's a lot of cross-talk, which makes our product(s) better.
That said, WFH is good when you need to get stuff done that's task-specific.
As a blanket policy WFH can work, but if everyone works from home then you have strong online collaboration tools. For a place the size of Yahoo WFH across the board is a "I don't feel like working" policy.
Yahoo was stagnating for years, so it's unclear what these people who were WFH were actually doing. If they were kicking out killer shit than the policy would be justifiable - but they weren't.
Well... maybe there's some kind of model in which you would actually look forward to seeing your colleagues in person.
Personally, I've done in both ways. When my partner and I sold our business to a company that was on the other side of the country, I no longer had a two hour a day commute, which was awesome. I also didn't have a team I saw in person every day, which I very quickly grew to miss. And I'm not the most sociable person in the world. I'm more than glad to spend a few days or even weeks working by myself. But as weeks stretched into months, with only emails, teleconferencing, and the occasional cross-country flight, I grew to hate telecommuting. It's great to be able to do it even a couple of days a week, but if I had the choice of woking in bathrobe in the spare bedroom ALL the time or spending two hours in the car EVERY day, I'd go with the commute.
If I were starting another company, I think one of my priorities would be to make being there fun, stimulating, and personally rewarding. I'd make it possible to telecommute, but if people began to see it as their primary mode of working I'd consider that a red flag.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
At some point, Yahoo will be parted out, sold, or rolled up. Any one of these options will lead to a nice payday for Meyer and Yahoo's biggest investors. That's what this is all about. The same thing happened at hp, and is happening now, at IBM. This is an old story in Silicon Valley - company comes out of the chute like gangbusters; low barriers to entry eventually lead to competition; the company falters; someone is brought in to "save" the company (and paid a LOT of money); the company is parted out or limps along for 10+ years while a succession of "in-people" make a pile of $$$ in options, perks, etc. etc.
flex time and telecommuting used to be part of the SV culture
Telecommuting was a nice experiment, but it doesn't work for people whose work is not easily quantified. Almost all SV firms have stopped the practice. About 20% of workers will get more done if they telecommute, since they have more time to work. Most other people show a decline in productivity, and for about 20% it declines to ZERO. These people get nothing done on their "home day". In theory, it may be possible to identify the people that are more productive, but that takes a lot of management effort, and causes resentment from people denied the privilege, since, obviously, the people that do NO work at home are the people that like telecommuting the most. Although it wasn't popular, Marissa was right to end the practice at Yahoo.
yes, silicon valley culture USED to be about the employees. I worked at SGI and I remember them allowing dogs into the offices, so that single folks who don't have anyone to watch over their pups can avoid having to kennel them during the day. we had hardwall offices, with doors (!) while managers had 'cubes'. it was the opposite of how most of the rest of the valley was, and it helped make sgi one of the best places to work at.
I also worked at sun. also had a hardwall office.
I was at fore systems (west coast) and many of us had offices with walls and doors.
now, the bad news. the last 10 or so years, I've seen a move to 'open offices' and so, you don't even get a cube anymore! ;( really really bad move, HR morans.
every place that had an open office, sucked. everyone felt that way but HR, who would never admit they made a mistake (like politicians, never admit you were wrong, sigh).
if someone gets sick, YOU get sick, too. isn't THAT nice??
plus, the new trend is to not hire f/t but only hire contractors. guess what: contractors don't get sick time off, so they HAVE to report in and make everyone else sick.
I have never been at yahoo, but it sounds like I would hate it there if I went.
as for their products, their email is the worst/slowest and loads the most CRAP when you give it permission. its also the most unfriendly html/js code to filter on (on purpose, no doubt). adblock has a harder time with yahoo content since they intentionally make every fucking variable name unique! ;( really unfriendly, which I'm sure they could care less about. obscurring the 'content' that gets downloaded via yahoo pages is part of what makes yahoo, well, 'a yahoo'.
taking away telecommuting - all the while, SHE has a private room next to her office for her little ones - that would be the most insulting thing to me if I was working there.
the sooner yahoo fails, the better. the whole internet would be better off without them, at this point.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
"... they hired someone who they thought would bring a lot of Google inside information to them, ..."
Marissa Meyer was demoted, according to an L.A. Times story that has now been deleted, but is available at another site.
Quote: "But when Page took over as CEO in April 2011, he did not make a spot for her on his senior leadership team. Instead, she took over the company's location and local products, fueling speculation she would leave Google."
Do you think someone can be CEO and take care of a baby at the same time?
Back in 2006, before she joined Yahoo, there were questions about how much she thinking she could do, considering her work habits: How I work.
Quote: "I do marathon e-mail catch-up sessions, sometimes on a Saturday or Sunday. I'll just sit down and do e-mail for ten to 14 hours straight. I almost always have the radio or my TV on."
Another, earlier quote: "I use Gmail for my personal e-mail -- 15 to 20 e-mails a day -- but on my work e-mail I get as many as 700 to 800 a day, so I need something really fast."