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."

Comments

Brain drain

[afidel]

How did cutting telecommuting across the board and thus forcing many talented engineers to go elsewhere stop the brain drain?

Re:Brain drain

[rrohbeck]

I'm sure it saved a lot on salaries and packages.

Re:Brain drain

[bhcompy]

Brain drain wasn't about engineers, it was about culture. They want the Silicon Valley culture of being in-office tied-to-desk slaves. They got it.

Re:Brain drain

[Crypto Cavedweller]

Is there a scintilla of objective evidence that it did? Self-serving statements from the suits does not count.

Re:Brain drain

[LifesABeach]

Beats me, I always considered H1B brains to be like tampons; maybe she came up short day and while digging in the champagne bucket, she got her next Epiphany?

Re:Brain drain

[OrangeTide]

flex time and telecommuting used to be part of the SV culture, and tied to the desk slave was the old fashioned way to run an office back East.

Everything old is new again I suppose.

Re:Brain drain

[hey!]

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.

Re:Brain drain

[Trepidity]

When was that part of SV culture? Even if you go back to the old-school SV firms, they were pretty negative on telecommuting, and ran regular offices. What era and kind of company do you have in mind? If you go back to the '60s-'90s even, Silicon Valley companies like Intel, Sun, Apple, SGI, Oracle, etc. required regular office time. You could certainly shift your schedule at many of them (e.g. come in at 10am, not 8am, as long as you stay late too), but you couldn't work from home, or get away with less than 40+ hours in the office (often 50+).

Re:Brain drain

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

 

Re:Brain drain

[MechaStreisand]

It seems like a good compromise might be to allow telecommuting three days a week: tuesday, wednesday, and thursday, and have mondays and fridays be in the office. That way you still get to interact with your team, and talk to the people you need to talk to, but you are spared 60% of the time and expense of commuting, and all the in-office distractions on those days.

Re:Brain drain

[TheGratefulNet]

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.

Re:Brain drain

[Anonymous Coward]

Why can't I spout unsourced "facts" and get 5 karma?

Re:Brain drain

[OrangeTide]

Out of all the SV companies I've worked at, the main thing they have in common is they want to do things differently than everyone else. It seems like some wanted cubes only, others want engineers in offices and managers in cubes. Some companies bend over backwards for employees, and other companies bluntly tell employees that if they aren't already happy they should leave.

(if someone insists on my citing sources, I might be willing to do that privately, but not publicly)

Re:Brain drain

[TheGratefulNet]

I'm not seeing much choice, anymore. the last few years of interviews (off and on) have shown me that the bay area is swallowing the 'open office' idea, hook line and sinker.

my last gig was at cisco and they are converting (slowly but surely) to an all OO environment. and again, no one I talked to, there, was a tiny bit happy about it. they all talked about working from home (cisco still allows that) or just plain leaving.

make no mistake, companies do this to save money, save space and they don't care at all about your happiness! they at least acted like they did, years ago, but they don't even try that anymore. they know we all know what their plan is.

being a tech worker is really starting to suck. its becoming like factory work, many decades ago. churn and burn.

Re:Brain drain

[TheGratefulNet]

I worked at both sun and sgi (that you mentioned in your list) and neither one required us to be at our desks. I was telecommuting about 99% of the time (even though my office was about 10mi from where I live, all my co-workers were 'remote' and all our meetings were on the phone, so there was no real reason to 'be' there). I stayed there 5 years and had a great time, did good work and enjoyed being at sun. well, up until oracle bought them and all hell broke loose...

at sgi, same kind of deal; I was allowed to work from home as-needed and sgi was a 'very online' company back in the 90's. before it was trendy, in fact.

so, not sure which bay area you worked at, but I've been here over 25 years and I know what the silicon valley culture is all about. and it used to be pretty open and flexible. it was the 'california way' (I moved from boston, so I knew the east coast 'uptight' way as well as the more relaxed calif way.)

Re:Brain drain

[TheGratefulNet]

so, what level of manager are you?

first line, middle mgmt or maybe c-level?

you are clearly not a working stiff like most of us, here...

Re:Brain drain

[Noah Haders]

flex time and telecommuting used to be part of the SV culture

Although it wasn't popular, Marissa was right to end the practice at Yahoo.

I STRONGLY believe that the greatest benefits of having a fantastic team is when everybody is in the same office and have all sorts of serendipitous interactions. Things that can't be scheduled on an outlook calendar. it doesn't happen when people sit at home in their underwear doing skype chats.

Re:Brain drain

[OrangeTide]

I'm not seeing much choice, anymore. the last few years of interviews (off and on) have shown me that the bay area is swallowing the 'open office' idea, hook line and sinker.

I agree that's the trend in the valley these days.

When I was at Cisco 10 years ago most of my BU (MCEBU) had tall cubes. It was pretty reasonable, but I'm not surprised that Cisco is moving to more open plans.
My current employeer gives me a long bench with 3 ft partitions between my neighbors, a hallway and another bench is immeidately behind me. If don't have my chair pushed up close to my desk people will trip over the legs of my chair.

Re:Brain drain

[rtb61]

However if you have no idea about what you are doing and were previously able to hide your incompetence behind others, getting everyone back in the office is the best way to steal their ideas and claim them as your own. All they managed to do was lose a lot of their most expensive staff, so with lower revenues there are still better returns, OK, in the short run but in the long, a sure route to collapse.

Jumping into mobile and claiming it as a significant improvement is really stupidly lame ie it is obvious software to hardware adoption, ow wow, differently formatted web pages, what will they think of next.

Lets be honest they hired someone who they thought would bring a lot of google inside information to them, to give them a competitive advantage, only to find a peripheral type who just simply claimed other peoples efforts as their own.

Re:Brain drain

[stephanruby]

so, what level of manager are you?
first line, middle mgmt or maybe c-level?
you are clearly not a working stiff like most of us, here...

That is correct. He's probably speaking from personal experience.

Managers are usually the least productive telecommuters I know.

Re: Brain drain

[Anonymous Coward]

How'd that work out for SGI?

People benefit from telecommuting, but some also abuse the shit out of it. I'll let you guess which was more likey before Mayer went to Yahoo.

Re:Brain drain

[Paradise Pete]

and for about 20% it declines to ZERO.

To be fair, about 20% of an in-office staff also tends to be completely unproductive.

Re:Brain drain

[Xest]

"Telecommuting was a nice experiment, but it doesn't work for people whose work is not easily quantified."

And who are those people? I've always quantified my home working staff's work based on results. Have they got done what I've expected them to do in the time I expect them to be able to do it? It's not really rocket science.

"In theory, it may be possible to identify the people that are more productive, but that takes a lot of management effort"

Yes, it's so effortful to determine who is and isn't pulling their weight. Honestly, please don't become a manager. Ever. If you can't even begin to understand how you might gauge which of your staff are effective and not calling such understanding merely "theory" then you're really not cut out for such a role. If you've any experience managing people then it's fairly easy to see who does and doesn't get done what they need to do. Dealing with the problem is often the hard part, because you can often be hamstrung by company or national policies on the issue depending on who you work for and where you live.

"since, obviously, the people that do NO work at home are the people that like telecommuting the most."

Yes obviously. Thank you for the wealth of proof you provided for your assertion.

"Although it wasn't popular, Marissa was right to end the practice at Yahoo."

Yes, if by right you mean she found it easier to lose talent than actually do a job of managing any real or perceived problem. The problem is there are as equally unproductive amounts of people as your pulled out of thin air numbers in the office too. Unproductive people are unproductive, it doesn't matter where you make them turn up for work. It doesn't fix the root problem- they're unproductive because they're not motivated, and they're not motivated for any number of reasons- unhappy with compensation package, being managed by a hopeless manager that demotivates people, being repeatedly given the most boring work, being forced to do things not in their contract that they don't want to do, not being given a fair shot at career progression or training and so on and so forth. If you don't fix the root issues your people will still be entirely demotivated and unproductive. Some of these things are your fault as a leader and you can fix, others you can do little about- someone has to do the boring work and the best you can do is help them move on.

Meyer's actual claimed reason for getting rid of it was because she wanted people in the office bouncing ideas off of people to try and spur on innovation. I agree with this to a degree, I think during product conception phase this is absolutely right, but the problem is this whole bouncing ideas off each other open plan office mindset falls apart when it's time to stop coming up with ideas and start implementing them. Once those ideas have formed a product, and you've got down on paper what your bounds for this product are, and you need to start planning and building it, people need a few days a week to actually get on and do that in the environment they're most comfortable in where they're not going to be repeatedly distracted. For some people this is the office, some this is the local cafe, some it's in the park, and for others it's at home.

And that's why Meyer's blanket ban was bad. There's no question she'll have lost some talent doing it as she did. But when you claim your goal is to stem the flow of talent out of the company, then such blanket actions are doomed to fail. It's short sighted lazy management that makes great headlines, whilst shedding you real actual talent, and doing nothing to stem any apparent company wide problem of poor motivation. Even if she has got more people into the office coming up with more ideas, she's not enabling an environment that ever lets all her people put those ideas into practice- the only ones that will be productive are those who can be productive in an office environment, which isn't even close to the whole of the human race, maybe like you I'll make up a percentage, I'l

Re:Brain drain

[LaurenCates]

I believe there can be a balance to this.

My belief that Mayer was right IN THE SHORT TERM to curtail telecommuting policies.

If your office is in serious need of re-vamping, then you are correct, there needs to be some storming-forming-norming going on that can't be done via people on phones all the time.

Especially if people believe, as I do, bonding is built over social interaction, such as talking about the game, or people's kids, or the weather, or a game of golf, or going out and smoking cigarettes. Telecommuting is not conducive to any of that, and for better or worse, networking is best done in person.

That said: in the long term telecommuting should be re-instated for a lot of reasons: flexible hours, care of family members, de-stressing commutes, and yes, being able to get away from social interactions in order to get some actual work done.

I admired Mayer for her initial stance on the subject, as she took some harsh criticism for it, but I admit I haven't followed up on it. I hope she re-instated it.

Re:Brain drain

[towermac]

You've nailed it - make the office a fun place to be. Make it so people look forward to spending a quarter of their lives there.

I've worked at places where beer starts appearing in people's hands around 4:30 - 5 o'clock. That was not only a fun place to work, but more productive than it would appear.

Example: I'm still standing around, not working, drinking and gabbing around 5:30, and there is a design group still working to make a morning deadline. Of course the proofer/print server goes haywire, and normally, they would wait until morning to get the printer fixed. But I'm there and can easily fix it with beer in hand; that one little incident saving the company several man-hours of productivity.

Oh, and damn those people that want to insist that I get overtime for every moment I spend at the office after hours.

Re:Brain drain

[tehcyder]

flex time and telecommuting used to be part of the SV culture

Although it wasn't popular, Marissa was right to end the practice at Yahoo.

I STRONGLY believe that the greatest benefits of having a fantastic team is when everybody is in the same office and have all sorts of serendipitous interactions. Things that can't be scheduled on an outlook calendar. it doesn't happen when people sit at home in their underwear doing skype chats.

And I STRONGLY believe that anyone who unironically uses the word "team" when they're not on a football pitch is a person I dona't want to work for.

Re:Brain drain

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Isn't that what posting AC is for?

Re:Brain drain

[tehcyder]

The problem is there are as equally unproductive amounts of people as your pulled out of thin air numbers in the office too.

Some of the lazy bastards even take time to read and post on internet forums while they're supposed to be working in the office. Un-fucking-believable...

Re:Brain drain

[tehcyder]

It seems like a good compromise might be to allow telecommuting three days a week: tuesday, wednesday, and thursday, and have mondays and fridays be in the office. That way you still get to interact with your team, and talk to the people you need to talk to, but you are spared 60% of the time and expense of commuting, and all the in-office distractions on those days.

Um, for most people it's on Mondays and Fridays that you want to be "telecommuting". You get a nice long weekend that way, ifyouknowwhatimean.

Re:Brain drain

[tehcyder]

Oh, and damn those people that want to insist that I get overtime for every moment I spend at the office after hours.

Yeah, I really hate getting paid for the work I do too. If it wasn't for my wife and kids needing to eat now and then, I'd probably pay just to be allowed to come into the office.

Re:Brain drain

[TheGratefulNet]

so few projects are REALLY collaborations, that old horse gets trotted out far too often.

in my 25+ years in software, I don't know of any single time that I've collaborated, NEEDING or even benefiting from an open office with all the noise and distractions it brings.

if we want to brainstorm, we go into a conf room, whiteboard, take notes and then go back and do our brainwork.

if you talk to me, I get annoyed. I'm deep in concentration. each time you bug me, you break my concentration.

what's so hard to GET about this?

anyone who supports OO is looking for a party at work, not doing real work. I'm 100% convinced about that. the reason every HR says that OO is 'great' is that 'new/young employees think it makes the work environment more like a dorm, which they relate to'. yeah, that gives the real reason right there; youngsters want that dorm feel. us old neckbeards just want to work in peace and not be distracted by every stupid thing someone wants to spout up about. socializing is needed, but go do that at the water cooler or break room. leave the work area QUIET, please!

Re:Brain drain

[ErichTheRed]

Especially if people believe, as I do, bonding is built over social interaction, such as talking about the game, or people's kids, or the weather, or a game of golf, or going out and smoking cigarettes. Telecommuting is not conducive to any of that, and for better or worse, networking is best done in person.

Not everyone feels that way, and for a lot of people, especially in tech, it's unnecessary overhead. I hate having to pretend I care about someone's personal life or what happened in sports over the weekend. I do it because it's necessary to succeed in the rah-rah team building world you describe. I would never force anyone I manage to spend time in the office if they could get their work done efficiently at home and preferred things that way. If you're good, and perform excellent work, you don't need to "network" your way to success...that's for people with people skills and not much else. It's like advertising -- advertisers would never have to advertise a product if it could stand on its own merits.

That said telecommuting requires a different level of discipline than the office. I'm sure there are tons of people who abuse it. There are probably also tons of people who use it to provide the flexibility they need. Not being locked into traffic for an hour or more every day is a huge savings in many ways, including your sanity. Being able to disappear for an hour to do an errand during the day, then making it up at night, really helps...as long as you make up the hour later! But tying people to desks or meeting rooms just because networking doesn't really fly in the technology world.

Re:Brain drain

[dmaul99]

I have first hand experience in this so let me tell you why: because at big companies like Yahoo, 9 out of 10 of full-time telecommuters are unproductive. It's impossible to really coordinate with them. They're never available when you need them. They're always out shuttling their kids or whatever they do. They're not the heroic always-on rock stars like startups have. In other words, it's a privilege that is abused. Yahoo forcing people to come in to work to you know, work, is a good and clever way to get rid of those unproductive people. Right or wrong, doesn't matter, but I reckon the productivity is up over there.

Re:Brain drain

[doccus]

No more brains to drain.. silly ;-)

Re:Brain drain

[HornWumpus]

For at least 10% having zero productivity would be a major improvement. Mostly middle managers and suck ups looking to get into management.

Re:Brain drain

[Xest]

I was thinking the same whilst I was both reading and posting in this thread.

It did cross my mind that whilst the GP was complaining about home workers being unproductive that he was quite probably sat in an office himself being, well, unproductive :)

Re:Brain drain

[hey!]

Everyone likes getting paid. And all things being equal, everyone likes getting paid *more*.

But one thing I've noticed is that the people who are most dissatisfied with their current pay also happen to be the most dissatisfied with their working conditions overall, particularly how they feel treated. The feeling seems to be that if they ought to get more pay to put up with this shit.

Now I wouldn't suggest to any employer, particularly in tech, to economize by offering low salaries. You want to attract and retain the best people you can. But this suggests to me that many employers would do themselves a favor by paying a little more attention to worker happiness. If you're paying people approaching (or even more than) $100,000, there's bound to be a lot more cost effective ways to goose worker morale than handing out raises they'll perceive as significant.

But oddly many employers seem to think paying someone's salary is a license for handing out indignities. This doesn't even qualify as penny wise pound foolish.

Re:Brain drain

[MechaStreisand]

That's another way. I was thinking that if the Monday and Friday was in the office, you'd be more likely to get work done on those days than if those were the at home days. But, whatever.

Criticism

[MightyMartian]

Perhaps what should dog her is the fact that thus far, she has failed utterly. Not that I blame her. She was handed a steaming pile of shit, so the odds were always low.

Yahoo has about as much reason to exist as Blackberry. Both are dinosaurs of a previous age.

Re:Criticism

[ZipK]

Yahoo has about as much reason to exist as Blackberry.

Yahoo has a tactile, physical keyboard that many of us miss dearly in the iPhone age?

Re:Criticism

[OrangeTide]

Both are dinosaurs of a previous age.

Apple must be three or four ages old. They ended up outlasting Sun, Palm, Nokia and soon HP. They might even outlast Microsoft.

Re:Criticism

[rockout]

Your definition of "many" isn't a big enough number to be a viable source of income for keeping a smartphone manufacturer alive.

Re:Criticism

[ZipK]

Your definition of "many" isn't a big enough number to be a viable source of income for keeping a smartphone manufacturer alive.

Actually the problem is more with the value of "miss," than it is with "many." Many of us miss the keyboard, but not enough to give up all the other features and apps ecosystem of a modern smartphone.

Re:Criticism

[tehcyder]

all the other features and apps ecosystem of a modern smartphone

Porn in your pocket when you go for a dump at work is the killer app of the Smartphone, as far as I can see.

Apart from that, everything else is easier with a reasonable sized laptop.

serious question

[ganjadude]

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)

Re:serious question

[Trepidity]

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.

Re:serious question

[Leuf]

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.

Re:serious question

[bhcompy]

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

Re:serious question

[ganjadude]

thanks for that information. but other than the mail, none of that is anything they did. they bought out other companies. I mean thats great for them, flickr is a good platform, im sure tumblr as well. but buying a company and innovating are 2 different things.

I thought they were down low on the post on life support, I cant think of anyone who I know who goes out of their way to use any of yahoos products. ill have to check out the fantasy sports they are using.

Re:serious question

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Then call a spade a spade. Yahoo is an investment firm. Nothing more.

The rest of that piddly shit that used to form a company is nothing more than a tax write off to help fund the real purpose.

Re:serious question

[phantomfive]

I thought they were down low on the post on life support, I cant think of anyone who I know who goes out of their way to use any of yahoos products.

A clear example of selection bias: people who surround you are like you.

Re:serious question

[g01d4]

Their Groups website has been useful for long tail applications where users can get help and exchange information. One advantage is the single website with the same UI. It's convenient to leave open/scroll through the latest updates from a few groups on the same page.

Alas some of the vendors/developers are setting up their own forums, so you now you've got to go to each website, login and deal with each UI. More effort so it's easier to skip. Too bad Yahoo's not put more effort into it.

Re:serious question

[bhcompy]

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.

Re:serious question

[ganjadude]

i get it, you cant be a good large company without buying your competitors. it does make sense. and yes I am aware of the scenarios you provided.

The difference IMO is that those companies while they acquire, they still innovate. I am ignorant of yahoo post 2004 or so but i havent seen any real innovation from them, even on their acquisitions. Years ago i used to LOVE yahoo games. simple layout, easy to get in. Sometime though it seemed that the yahoo home page turned into its own geocities page. too much clutter it was very hard to actually find anything you wanted and i havent really been back since

I would love to see yahoo keep going for another 20 years, but i dont want to see them pull a radio shack either

Re:serious question

[TheGratefulNet]

excuse me??? spam filter works on yahoo?

ha!

I get nothing BUT 'indian tv' and 'indian flix' and other stupid spam. uhm, I'm not indian and don't speak the language, don't know the people and actually, don't even watch (broadcast) tv anymore. marking them as spam never stops them. clearly its spam but yahoo won't stop them from appearing in my yahoo inbox. I've given up on yahoo mail and only check it a few times a year. (it takes about that long to load those stupid web pages, too, even with adblock!)

Re:serious question

[TheGratefulNet]

not sure about flickr 'going strong'. I joined flickr when it first came out and most of the people I 'knew' back then are no longer active on flickr and their updates have stopped years ago.

each time flickr changes their site, it breaks stuff, features get dropped that were useful and stupid things get added that are of NO value at all.

I did have a paid membership to flickr but I had that just 1 year, flickr started to suck and I let the paid thing lapse. now, I post a few photos a year instead of the dozens per month that I used to post.

(and no, I have not gone to FB or the other sites. I don't have a FB account and never will.) flickr was my only 'social networking' site, if you can call it that, but all my friends have gotton fed up with yahoo and left!

Re:serious question

[Grishnakh]

thanks for that information. but other than the mail, none of that is anything they did. they bought out other companies. I mean thats great for them, flickr is a good platform, im sure tumblr as well. but buying a company and innovating are 2 different things.

Most big companies are like this.

Look at Microsoft, their history is full of purchases: Powerpoint, Hotmail, Visio, Dynamics, Skype, Nokia, Bungie,

Re:serious question

[ganjadude]

have gone from Zero to a Billion dollar ad business under Mayer.

so they are an ad company now. ok

Re:serious question

[Dutch Gun]

The fact that few people seem to know this could be part of Yahoo's problem. They just don't seem to have a strong corporate identify. I'll bet that just about anyone here could tell you what products and services Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, HP, IBM, Oracle, Cisco, and other companies are best known for. For Yahoo, I probably would have answered "mediocre e-mail, crappy search, and some decent services like news and Flickr", but beyond that, I really had no idea.

Re:serious question

[firex726]

Same for the movie page, keeps forgetting what location I set, despite having a Favorited theater; and when I enter a zip code it pulls every theater in my city, not just the nearest ones to my zip.

And now their Chrome extension will change your homepage and search engine to Yahoo, with no option to undo it unless you uninstall the extension, and it has shit reviews as a result.

Re:serious question

[tehcyder]

have gone from Zero to a Billion dollar ad business under Mayer.

so they are an ad company now. ok

Google is also an ad company.

Re:serious question

[towermac]

The one exception to that may be OSX/iOS. While it's true that Apple the company didn't do it, the creator, and possibly the soul of the Macintosh, did create it from scratch. (Well, as scratch as one can get in this area)

New mobile mail

[samwichse]

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.

Re:New mobile mail

[rogoshen1]

So what you're saying is.. the Dice crew and the Yahooligans get together, drink Balmer tier amounts of booze, then stay up all night playing laser tag -- and in the pale light of a hungover morning; push changes to production without testing?

Re:New mobile mail

[wiredlogic]

The Gmail app supports POP and IMAP accounts now. Just use that and evict the Yahoo app.

To her credit...

[Irate Engineer]

She was handed the wheel 10 years after the ship hit the iceberg, and they are still marginally afloat. Anybody who thinks that Yahoo should be kicking Apple to the curb right now is high.

I like yahoo, use it more than google

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

Yahoo has a great news thread that somehow custom tailors to you without you doing anything. It knows I like hockey and video games, but I never clicked any options. Sure yahoo is distracting with all the extra content, and you can forget why you came to the search page, but distractions can be good.

I always figure more search engines are good. We don't want the web to end up with just one search engine to rule them all. The only downside I say Yahoo or Google have is its hard to tell which websites are advertisements because they normally peddle malware. You'd think Google and Yahoo wouldn't allow sponsored links to come up first if they're hosting malware, but I guess the money they get trumps them being more functional.

Re:I like yahoo, use it more than google

[losfromla]

Thing is, yahoo doesn't do search anymore, remember? They outsourced search to bing, so you might as well go there for your search. Using yahoo does not contribute to a healthy search ecosystem in any way.

Re:I like yahoo, use it more than google

[tehcyder]

Yahoo has a great news thread that somehow custom tailors to you without you doing anything.

Are you suggesting that the Singularity has appeared at Yahoo, and a vast AI is in control?

Re:Nuuuuhuhahahahuauu uuhuhuh huuhuhu

[ganjadude]

Im not sure, why dont you laugh for me for comparison sake?

Oh God the Lens Flare, the Blur

[Kunedog]

TFA was directed by J.J. Abrams.

Re:Oh God the Lens Flare, the Blur

[justthinkit]

Also, the length. I am genuinely curious who...here or anywhere else...has time (or interest) to read all that.

130 hour weeks and "people first"?

[Torp]

"When Google was a young company, she worked 130 hours per week and often slept at her desk." Ref: http://www.entrepreneur.com/ar...
I don't think Yahoo is a place I'd like to work at. And come to think of it, she was promoted pretty high in the food chain at Google, which says something about working at Google too?

Re:130 hour weeks and "people first"?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:130 hour weeks and "people first"?

[Ryanrule]

she slept at the bosses desks...

Re:130 hour weeks and "people first"?

[eulernet]

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.

Re:130 hour weeks and "people first"?

[stephanruby]

"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.

Re:130 hour weeks and "people first"?

[cc1984_]

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.

You see yourself sleeping 130 hours a week? Good luck trying to fit in the showers, laundry and food!

Re:130 hour weeks and "people first"?

[Xest]

Yes, it basically means she never washed, and so was incredibly unhygienic, she never ate and so was suffering from severe malnutrition, or never slept which meant she was suffering the effects of prolonged sleep deprivation.

It has to be one of these things, because no one is super-human and can actually live under those conditions and still be healthy and useful.

So even if she did "work" for 130 hours, she'll have been a horrendous employee to have around, either smelling like crap and likely always getting ill or being permanently tired and unable to focus on anything.

If someone told me they did 130 hours a week I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole, having someone that unhealthy on your team would be a massive liability.

Re:130 hour weeks and "people first"?

[tehcyder]

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?

Goddammit yes, if it takes 170 hours a week to get the job done, then I expect my people to work 170 hours a week!

Re:130 hour weeks and "people first"?

[tehcyder]

You do know math right? Your 18/7 claim is only 4 hours shy of hers.

You do know reading comprehension, right? OP was not "claiming" 18/7, he was pointing out that that's what a 130 hour week means, and it is palpable nonsense.

Google supports Yahoo!

[mi]

If Google weren't afraid of "monopoly" accusations — and the resulting regulatory scrutiny — and started treating Yahoo! as a real competitor, Ms. Mayer's company would've gone the way of Radio Shack and Woolworth years ago.

I suppose, it is good for the rest of us while it lasts, but the moment Yahoo! actually does start performing (if that ever happens), Google may decide to take the gloves of...

Re:Google supports Yahoo!

[DerekLyons]

Nonsense. Everywhere but Gmail* that Google has tried to take on Yahoo - they've gotten their hands burned. Google does exceedingly well at buying startups and entering businesses where there's little to no competition... But (outside of search where they really did have a clear new idea), their record of taking on entrenched competition is mixed at best.

* Which was aimed as much at Microsoft as Yahoo!, and took a long time and (essentially) forcing Android users to have a Google account to best either one of them.

Telecommuting sort of sucks

[mveloso]

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.

Re:Telecommuting sort of sucks

[Rinikusu]

My office has telecommute days where coming in is optional and more often than not, I make the trek through LA traffic to work in the office. Not as many distractions and, because many of our devs work from home, the office is nice and quiet.

Re:Telecommuting sort of sucks

[phantomfive]

Yahoo was stagnating for years, so it's unclear what these people who were WFH were actually doing.

They were doing nothing. She checked the logs to make sure, people weren't logging into work.

She can demonstrate competency to me...

[rs79]

... by hiring Doug Crockford back.

Why would anybody let that happen?

Re:Brain drain-Meyer will win, no matter what

[ebusinessmedia1]

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.

Hm

[Greyfox]

Is there something hugely profitable that I've missed about running a company into the ground? It seems to be all the rage lately, been seeing it at HP, at IBM, at Sun, couple smaller companies I've worked at in the past. Some jackhole will come in, talk a big game, cut tiny little perks that used to be given to employees to the bone, spend a couple billion dollars on some idiotic shit like another company or a shiny new headquarters that's later discovered to be riddled with asbestos and sitting on top of a colony of leprosy-ridden armadillos and then jettisons with a $50 million golden parachute while the company burns. This has happened far too many times recently to be coincidence!

A good way to tell if your company has been thus afflicted is to look at the quality of the coffee now compared to the quality a couple years ago. At one such company that I worked at a few years ago, I one day remarked to my test minion that the coffee at the company was so good that you hardly even minded the urine. After the VC's took over and replaced it with, I want to say, "Peet's Coffee", the coffee there was so bad that the urine was an improvement!

Re:Hm

[gstoddart]

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.

Re:Hm

[TheGratefulNet]

A fucking drunk chimp could do as good of a job as most corporate CEOs.

agreed.

we had one as a president of the US for 2 terms. and half the country still thought 'things were fine'.

the value of leadership is HIGHLY over-rated. the workers are still the ones who do the real work, in ANY corporation.

Re:Hm

[recharged95]

Actually CEOs were somewhat different 15yrs ago. Remember the $1/day salary? There's very few CEOs nowadays that follow that paradigm... Today, there's so much VC and Wall Street influnence, and the social network, aka "club" mentality from the kiddies coming out of the universities--it's much a unfair racket as any other Wall Street business.

Re:Brain drain-Meyer will win, no matter what

[50000BTU_barbecue]

"SIlicon Valley"? Pretty sure you just described the vast majority of human history.

Yahoo is already a zombie

[msobkow]

Yahoo is already dead, and just can't accept the fact.

Over a year ago, they pushed an unholy abortion of an email interface that takes over 2 MINUTES to load on a 6.5 megabit link.

Now they've pushed an interface for their main news page that doesn't even render or refresh properly with Iceweasel/Debian.

While other sites are developing slick HTML5 interfaces, Yahoo seems hell-bent on creating the most UNUSABLE interfaces to hit the web since the days of AOL.

Quite frankly, when they die, it will be "good riddance" to the eyesore that Yahoo has become.

Re:Yahoo is already a zombie

[radish]

I just loaded yahoo mail on a clean browser and it took just under 2 seconds. Not ideal, but perfectly usable (and about the same as gmail).

Thanks for saving me the trouble

[DerekLyons]

Thanks for saving me the trouble of rolling out my canned reply on the topic. That question gets asked and answered every time the topic of Yahoo! comes up...

"Empire of the Rising Scum"

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

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".

Re:"Empire of the Rising Scum"

[tehcyder]

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".

What is so interesting is that in many (large) organisations, this is pretty much codified in their HR structures, so that in annual appraisals rather than being scored at what you've actually done in your job, it's all about how you have developed a network of trusted colleagues, attended negotiating and presentation courses, volunteered to run the sports club, and absorbed the company Mission Statement.

Several stories say Marissa Mayer was demoted.

[Futurepower(R)]

"... 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."

Re:Several stories say Marissa Mayer was demoted.

[rtb61]

When it comes to major corporations. The CEO is there as an ideas person, there are a range of managers to manage the company. Sure American egoistic pseudo celebrity worship tries to create the illusion that it is all the CEO who is to be credited with everything but the reality is, beyond new ideas, revision of existing ones, setting actual directions for the company, the CEO role is no where near a large as claimed. Of course one without ideas and the ability to set new courses to follow is pretty much useless and just occupying a space whilst trying to take credit for every one else's efforts. A good CEO only really needs to be there a few days of every week, needs to effectively delegate and should be spending more time thinking about the future of the company than wastefully spending time bureaucratically micro-managing it (because that is actually all they are good at). Spending a lot of time making sure they have very little to do is part of their function, the more than do as a manager, the less they do as the Chief Executive Officer and that is a straight up fact.

who says yahoo turned around?

[Karmashock]

They're at best treading water.

Problem: Not telecommuting, but bad management.

[Futurepower(R)]

It seemed to me that "Yahoo was stagnating for years" not because of employees working from home, but, overall, because of poor and insufficient management.

After Terry Semel, and before Marissa Meyer, there were 5 Yahoo CEOs who stayed less than 2 years each.

Nothing has changed, apparently. Marissa Mayer's second-in-command 'leaves with $109m' on being fired from Yahoo after just 15 months. The rapid changes in management continue, that time with a $109,000,000 loss for Yahoo. (What management arrangement allowed a poor manager, someone who was so bad he was fired, to make $7,266,666 per month?)

When Google stopped paying Mozilla Foundation $300,000,000 each year, Mozilla Foundation took money from Yahoo to sneakily "update" Firefox so that it uses "Yahoo search". Yahoo search is actually Microsoft's Bing search. A quote from Marissa:

"I'm thrilled to announce that we've entered into a five-year partnership with Mozilla to make Yahoo the default search experience on Firefox across mobile and desktop," Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer said in a blog post Wednesday. "This is the most significant partnership for Yahoo in five years."

Now, somehow, the Firefox and Thunderbird user interfaces have been degraded. Firefox no longer allows making a duplicate tab from a tab; it is necessary to right-click on a web page to make a duplicate; that doesn't work well because it is necessary to find a place on the web page that is not a link.

Thunderbird and SeaMonkey composer now have the Save-As bug.

So, Microsoft paid Yahoo. Yahoo paid Mozilla Foundation to trick users into using Microsoft's Bing search engine. And now Mozilla Foundation is apparently allowing the degradation of its products. Apparently Microsoft wants Firefox and Thunderbird to be degraded that so there will be more users of Microsoft's browser and email software.

The sneaky tactic is not working: American Firefox users dump Yahoo and go back to Google.

Now: Yahoo's Incredible Shrinking Profitability In Its Core Business (Forbes, March 1, 2015).

Re:Brain drain-Meyer will win, no matter what

[Anonymous Coward]

the only difference is silicon valley would have reinvented the wheel every time,

Sleeping 130 hours per week? You must be lion.

[Futurepower(R)]

24*7 = 168. Sleeping 130 hours leaves 38 hours for everything besides sleeping. Sounds like a male lion. Plus there are all those female lions hanging around.

Re:Brain drain-Meyer will win, no matter what

[BenJaminus]

Didn't they already reject a decent offer a year or two ago?

Turning around, or spinning in free-fall?

[Tsu Dho Nimh]

Selling 20-30% of the news slots to click-bait farms and advertorials was a start at turning things around.

Making the Tech and Politics news pages unreadible by adding humongous pictures ... another step downward.

Swiftean slide

[GerryHattrick]

East of the Atlantic, where people know what a Yahoo is (or was), the brand could never have been taken seriously. For those of us who don't already know, Swift described a yahoo as being filthy with unpleasant habits. At least they didn't name it for the absent millionaire boyfriend of Liz Hurley, a certain Bing.

She's a regular Carly Fiorina.

[jcr]

..except she looks better in a red dress.

Yahoo's decline will continue. Turns out that a celebrity CEO isn't worth shit if she can't actually do the job.

-jcr

Re:Brilliant how?

[tehcyder]

I've read a dozen articles about Marissa Mayer describing her as a "brilliant engineer" but I've never seen or heard what she's actually designed, implemented or improved.

Anyone got citations?

I'm not entirely sure, but I think she was the one who invented pron, so we should really all show a bit more respect.

In the U.S., also.

[Futurepower(R)]

Dictionary definition of Yahoo: A person who is very rude, loud, or stupid.

It amazes me that technically knowledgeable people choose names that limit their success.

TeX is 3 letters from another alphabet!

Gimp means: Usually Disparaging and Offensive. A term used to refer to a person who limps or is lame.