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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."

15 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Brain drain by afidel · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

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    1. Re:Brain drain by hey! · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

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    2. Re:Brain drain by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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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    3. Re:Brain drain by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  2. serious question by ganjadude · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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)

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    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.

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    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:serious question by bhcompy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  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. Telecommuting sort of sucks by mveloso · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  5. Re:Brain drain-Meyer will win, no matter what by ebusinessmedia1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. Hm by Greyfox · · Score: 4, Funny
    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!

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  7. 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.

  8. "Empire of the Rising Scum" by Beryllium+Sphere(tm) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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".

  9. Re:130 hour weeks and "people first"? by stephanruby · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "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.