I'm not going to try to argue whether she was a good CEO or bad one, but it's not like Yahoo was a thriving company with a bright future.
Yahoo was making a profit between 1 and 4 billions per year, for the 10 years prior to Mayer. Now the company doesn't exist.
Feel free to be nonchalant with billions of dollars, millions of users and tens of thousands of employees if you want, but this was real money for real people, and now it's gone.
She's not a CEO thats good at running a company, she's a CEO that you put in place when you want the company dead with the least amount of pain as possible and a great scapegoat
I see that you buy into the "glass cliff" narrative, but the truth is that no, she wasn't hired to sink the company. She was hired because board members thought that she had played a key role in creating Google and that she could bring some of that magic to Yahoo.
Yes she did. Yahoo was struggling but profitable before Mayer.
She sabotaged all the cash cows, like the women website (shine) because she felt it was tacky. She replaced it with immensely expensive bloggers that the usual Yahoo users didn't care about (like Katie Couric) and fancy fashion blogs that she liked but that drove away the millions of loyal users. Ad money dwindled down as she tried to attract sophisticated users that didn't want anything to do with Yahoo and scared away the peasants that were the real customer base but that she didn't like. She was like someone buying a McDonald's franchise and replacing bigmacs with $25 goat cheese paninis, then wondering why both the former customers and the fancy new ones she wanted to attract didn't show up.
She spent 1 BILLION for tumblr, which never paid off. She also made 50+ other acquisitions that went nowhere, see the list here: https://gizmodo.com/heres-what...
She also antagonized important partners and key internal team members, in part because she was extremely rude (being hours late for meetings with clients, making people beg for meetings in 5-minute increments and making them wait in line in front of her office, etc) and in part because she tried to rebuild a Google team at yahoo but hired all the wrong people, like Henrique De Castro (a 60 million dollars mistake) who himself antagonized everyone.
She also repeatedly botched possible partnerships with media companies and tech companies.
For the record, there's many examples of people who took companies in far more dire situations and turned them around, like Steve Jobs or Alan Mullaly, or even Lou Gerstner back in the 90s. Mayer had no vision, no strategy, and no execution skills, and yet she got paid more than those people.
Marissa Mayer made roughly $900,000 for every week she spent at Yahoo, while driving the company into the ground. And yet her name was mentioned as a possible new CEO for Uber.
So if that data finds its way into a political data mining company, would there be an investigation into the handing over of private data and a prosecution or would be simply be ignored?
The whole vote suppression thing is a hot potato. Suspicious tactics have been used on both sides for a long time; for instance, until his first primaries, Obama consistenly got elected by forcing opponents off the ballot on technicalities. Meanwhile, we can all remember those negative votes for Gore in Florida.
it obviously lead to confused questions about potential employers getting access to your income info. They only would get that if you let them have it.
In some industries it's a standard practice. I've worked for a firm that does "sensitive" work for a government agency (at least according to them, if you ask me it was not all that sensitive) and short of a finger up the ass they probed every intimate corner of my life. Background check, salary history, parking tickets, credit cards balance, I even had to get an affidavit from the police station stating that I wasn't the subject of an investigation and that I had no history of public disturbance. Technically I could have said no, but that would have been the same as turning down the job.
Not necessarily.. your credit score is a gross assessment of your general credit risk, but does not tell one anything about your ability to pay back loans of a given size, and while a paystub can confirm to many that you are presently employed, it says absolutely nothing about how long you've actually been employed, and how stable that income actually is.
I completely agree, the score doesn't give the whole picture. I've seen records with bankruptcies getting a better score than records with a collection history that had no outstanding balance.
The system is absurd. Years ago, someone I know got a call from Visa asking when her bankruptcy would be finished so they could send her a new card. I couldn't believe it, but now that I've seen my share of credit reports I have no doubt that this happens a lot. Even a history of bad checks barely move the needle.
The service is designed to provide automated employment and income verification for prospective employers, and tens of thousands of companies report employee salary data to it.
What business is it of a potential employer what I was paid by my previous employers? All that does is weaken the applicant's position when it comes time to negotiate a starting salary.
We use this kind of service at the office and it's mostly garbage. The data is not normalized, it's full of arbitrary formats. Some are clearly hourly rates, some are either hourly rates or possibly annual salary in thousands, some use the same lingo as bank account figures like 5FH (5-figure high) or Moderate 6. The end result is that while you may be able to have an idea of what a candidate possibly made at a previous job, you have no easy way to put it in perspective because you can't aggregate shit.
Have you seen these AI augmented camera arrays? They are about the most frightening thing I have ever seen.
Just a few days ago I saw a demo of a script that correctly identified in a video a person that was standing in the shadows and that I couldn't myself identify. And it only took a few seconds even if the person wasn't in the video before the 3rd minute. And it all ran on local machines, no cloud involved. As far as I know, this was impossible two years ago - it would even have been giggles material if it had happened in an episode of CSI.
I can't even imagine what will be possible in 5 years. Or what is already possible in the secrets datacenters of the NSA. I really hope someone somewhere is building a gigantic EMP because we could end up needing it sooner than later.
How does it deal with five o'clock shadows, or faces that need to be shaved more often than others? Change your beard style? Makeup? You point your apple device at someone else and they think you're creep-shooting and they punch you in the face? Does the software compensate for swollen lips and black eyes?
Why are we having again discussions that we had 10 years ago when this technology became mainstream outside of the Apple ecosystem? Are you guys that disconnected from the evolution of technology or is it just some virulent form of cognitive dissonnance? What's next, discussing the witchery of USB ports or OLED screens?
Between creimer and his Amazon affiliates links and Beauhd's endless iDiarrhea, Slashdot is quickly becoming nothing more than an organic links farm for pathetic SEO leeches.
The sad part is that while those morons pollute the site with their junk, they're not even making good money with it, they just shit all over the place for pennies.
Fight back, people. Don't let low-quality sellouts drive Slashdot futher into the ground.
The problem with capitalism is humanity. You can't impose some sort of alternative "monopoly" without having all of the problems the "evils of capitalism".
This always reminds me of that story about the copier factory in USSR. I don't remember the exact numbers but the factory had something like 500 workers and manufactured a total of 3 copiers per year, of which usually only 1 or 2 worked. And those workers who did such a splendid job wondered why the central heating at home didn't work or why they had to wait in line to buy stale bread.
Capitalism works because people are rewarded for hard work and talent. The reason why the system is fucked lately is not because of flaws in capitalism; it's because the government has become a monster and is letting idiot savants play sorcerer's apprentice with monetary policy and social programs from their ivory towers.
you only have to look at comments called out as shills or downvoted to oblivion for when they legitimately comment something that differs from the group think
I completely agree, people use moderation to silence dissenting opinions. This is why I opted out of the moderation thing a long time ago.
This does not compute. Is the cause for your opting out: -cynicism? -not wanting to participate in evil? -an acknowledgement that you would do it too?
I opted out because moderation doesn't work on Slashdot. Instead of using it to fight spam and actual trolls, people use moderation to punish people they disagree with.
Browsing at -1 solves the problem. In fact, there are always interesting comments that are scored 0 or 1, and often they are labeled "Troll" of "Flamebait" although they merely raise issues with the mainstream narrative.
There is no value in the moderation system, it's just a popularity contest that rewards people who submit to peer pressure. It's like listening to FM radio with people calling to request the same songs as everyone else.
you only have to look at comments called out as shills or downvoted to oblivion for when they legitimately comment something that differs from the group think
I completely agree, people use moderation to silence dissenting opinions. This is why I opted out of the moderation thing a long time ago.
As for people being called shills, it always has been a ludicrous accusation; even if it's obvious that some readers or even editors have agendas (like Beauhd and his endless pro-Apple propaganda) it's pretty clear that they're doing it out of misguided loyalty to a brand that they think make them look cool rather than for some form of monetary reward.
The real question is: given a fragile electric grid that shits itself when there's a storm, creating chaos in data centers, shouldn't Linux favor a fast-booting init system, as opposed to systemd?
Hurricanes that hit areas exclusively populated by brown people don't count. Everyone knows that.
Just like how it doesn't count when more brown people die in a month in Chicago than all the white people being shot in Las Vegas over the past decade.
I wonder who kills all those Chicago people, and if more gun laws would put a stop to that.
At a TED talk in 2014, Google’s then-CEO Larry Page said: “We did some weather simulations which probably hadn't really been done before, and if you control the altitude of the balloons, which you can do by pumping air into them and other ways, you can actually control roughly where they go.”
Both men were describing the engineering feat that Space Data had sought to patent more than a decade earlier. Filings with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) show that in 2000, Space Data began experimenting with a nationwide paging service from high-altitude balloons. Space Data filed its key patent application in 2001, and quickly went on to test text messages in 2002, phone calls in 2006, and 4G LTE data by 2012—a year before Google’s splashy launch.
There needs to be more than that. They need to be afraid to behave this way. People need to be scared to work with or for them.
After the whole "we hate white men" thing I wrote them off and cancelled any service I had with them. And then we found out why they're so hell-bent on hiring women instead of men: they pay them less, a clever tactic that's about to become a class action. So this new information about their crooked business deals is not really a surprise.
The funny part is that the only Google product I still use is Chrome because for some reason it's the only browser that works with Spotify on Linux. A free Google product to use a paid service from a competitor...
It's called polite fiction. Apple has lost the smartphone market a long time ago and their "new" devices are not even on par with 2-3 years old Samsung phones. They also never were a player in the desktop or laptop market. Everyone knows that. And yet, biased coverage in the media keep presenting Apple as a near-monopoly that constantly release bleeding edge tech.
All those buffoons like Beauhd and other fanbois are promoting this lie because they have invested too much of their own money and energy in the Apple brand. This level of delusional hypocrisy is on par with that of the Sandy Hook deniers. It's just sad.
Microsoft did a good job with Windows 10, except for: spying on their users. For that reason I swore off Microsoft Windows. Too bad, they almost had me considering using Windows again.
What are you using instead? That magnificent piece of software engineering designed by a company who patented ads embedded in the operating system but has still not found a way to make non-blurry fonts?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not going to try to argue whether she was a good CEO or bad one, but it's not like Yahoo was a thriving company with a bright future.
Yahoo was making a profit between 1 and 4 billions per year, for the 10 years prior to Mayer. Now the company doesn't exist.
Feel free to be nonchalant with billions of dollars, millions of users and tens of thousands of employees if you want, but this was real money for real people, and now it's gone.
She's not a CEO thats good at running a company, she's a CEO that you put in place when you want the company dead with the least amount of pain as possible and a great scapegoat
I see that you buy into the "glass cliff" narrative, but the truth is that no, she wasn't hired to sink the company. She was hired because board members thought that she had played a key role in creating Google and that she could bring some of that magic to Yahoo.
The same board members who hired her tried repeatedly to get rid of her. See this famous letter:
http://www.starboardvalue.com/...
Don't rewrite history. She was given all the money and power she needed, and she failed, full stop.
Yes she did. Yahoo was struggling but profitable before Mayer.
She sabotaged all the cash cows, like the women website (shine) because she felt it was tacky. She replaced it with immensely expensive bloggers that the usual Yahoo users didn't care about (like Katie Couric) and fancy fashion blogs that she liked but that drove away the millions of loyal users. Ad money dwindled down as she tried to attract sophisticated users that didn't want anything to do with Yahoo and scared away the peasants that were the real customer base but that she didn't like. She was like someone buying a McDonald's franchise and replacing bigmacs with $25 goat cheese paninis, then wondering why both the former customers and the fancy new ones she wanted to attract didn't show up.
She spent 1 BILLION for tumblr, which never paid off. She also made 50+ other acquisitions that went nowhere, see the list here:
https://gizmodo.com/heres-what...
She also antagonized important partners and key internal team members, in part because she was extremely rude (being hours late for meetings with clients, making people beg for meetings in 5-minute increments and making them wait in line in front of her office, etc) and in part because she tried to rebuild a Google team at yahoo but hired all the wrong people, like Henrique De Castro (a 60 million dollars mistake) who himself antagonized everyone.
She also repeatedly botched possible partnerships with media companies and tech companies.
For the record, there's many examples of people who took companies in far more dire situations and turned them around, like Steve Jobs or Alan Mullaly, or even Lou Gerstner back in the 90s. Mayer had no vision, no strategy, and no execution skills, and yet she got paid more than those people.
if possible, blacklist their CxOs.
Marissa Mayer made roughly $900,000 for every week she spent at Yahoo, while driving the company into the ground. And yet her name was mentioned as a possible new CEO for Uber.
There's no blacklist for those people
So if that data finds its way into a political data mining company, would there be an investigation into the handing over of private data and a prosecution or would be simply be ignored?
The whole vote suppression thing is a hot potato. Suspicious tactics have been used on both sides for a long time; for instance, until his first primaries, Obama consistenly got elected by forcing opponents off the ballot on technicalities. Meanwhile, we can all remember those negative votes for Gore in Florida.
Nobody will open that can of worms.
it obviously lead to confused questions about potential employers getting access to your income info. They only would get that if you let them have it.
In some industries it's a standard practice. I've worked for a firm that does "sensitive" work for a government agency (at least according to them, if you ask me it was not all that sensitive) and short of a finger up the ass they probed every intimate corner of my life. Background check, salary history, parking tickets, credit cards balance, I even had to get an affidavit from the police station stating that I wasn't the subject of an investigation and that I had no history of public disturbance. Technically I could have said no, but that would have been the same as turning down the job.
Not necessarily.. your credit score is a gross assessment of your general credit risk, but does not tell one anything about your ability to pay back loans of a given size, and while a paystub can confirm to many that you are presently employed, it says absolutely nothing about how long you've actually been employed, and how stable that income actually is.
I completely agree, the score doesn't give the whole picture. I've seen records with bankruptcies getting a better score than records with a collection history that had no outstanding balance.
The system is absurd. Years ago, someone I know got a call from Visa asking when her bankruptcy would be finished so they could send her a new card. I couldn't believe it, but now that I've seen my share of credit reports I have no doubt that this happens a lot. Even a history of bad checks barely move the needle.
What business is it of a potential employer what I was paid by my previous employers? All that does is weaken the applicant's position when it comes time to negotiate a starting salary.
We use this kind of service at the office and it's mostly garbage. The data is not normalized, it's full of arbitrary formats. Some are clearly hourly rates, some are either hourly rates or possibly annual salary in thousands, some use the same lingo as bank account figures like 5FH (5-figure high) or Moderate 6. The end result is that while you may be able to have an idea of what a candidate possibly made at a previous job, you have no easy way to put it in perspective because you can't aggregate shit.
Have you seen these AI augmented camera arrays? They are about the most frightening thing I have ever seen.
Just a few days ago I saw a demo of a script that correctly identified in a video a person that was standing in the shadows and that I couldn't myself identify. And it only took a few seconds even if the person wasn't in the video before the 3rd minute. And it all ran on local machines, no cloud involved. As far as I know, this was impossible two years ago - it would even have been giggles material if it had happened in an episode of CSI.
I can't even imagine what will be possible in 5 years. Or what is already possible in the secrets datacenters of the NSA. I really hope someone somewhere is building a gigantic EMP because we could end up needing it sooner than later.
How does it deal with five o'clock shadows, or faces that need to be shaved more often than others? Change your beard style? Makeup? You point your apple device at someone else and they think you're creep-shooting and they punch you in the face? Does the software compensate for swollen lips and black eyes?
Why are we having again discussions that we had 10 years ago when this technology became mainstream outside of the Apple ecosystem? Are you guys that disconnected from the evolution of technology or is it just some virulent form of cognitive dissonnance? What's next, discussing the witchery of USB ports or OLED screens?
Between creimer and his Amazon affiliates links and Beauhd's endless iDiarrhea, Slashdot is quickly becoming nothing more than an organic links farm for pathetic SEO leeches.
The sad part is that while those morons pollute the site with their junk, they're not even making good money with it, they just shit all over the place for pennies.
Fight back, people. Don't let low-quality sellouts drive Slashdot futher into the ground.
The problem with capitalism is humanity. You can't impose some sort of alternative "monopoly" without having all of the problems the "evils of capitalism".
This always reminds me of that story about the copier factory in USSR. I don't remember the exact numbers but the factory had something like 500 workers and manufactured a total of 3 copiers per year, of which usually only 1 or 2 worked. And those workers who did such a splendid job wondered why the central heating at home didn't work or why they had to wait in line to buy stale bread.
Capitalism works because people are rewarded for hard work and talent. The reason why the system is fucked lately is not because of flaws in capitalism; it's because the government has become a monster and is letting idiot savants play sorcerer's apprentice with monetary policy and social programs from their ivory towers.
you only have to look at comments called out as shills or downvoted to oblivion for when they legitimately comment something that differs from the group think
I completely agree, people use moderation to silence dissenting opinions. This is why I opted out of the moderation thing a long time ago.
This does not compute. Is the cause for your opting out:
-cynicism?
-not wanting to participate in evil?
-an acknowledgement that you would do it too?
I opted out because moderation doesn't work on Slashdot. Instead of using it to fight spam and actual trolls, people use moderation to punish people they disagree with.
Browsing at -1 solves the problem. In fact, there are always interesting comments that are scored 0 or 1, and often they are labeled "Troll" of "Flamebait" although they merely raise issues with the mainstream narrative.
There is no value in the moderation system, it's just a popularity contest that rewards people who submit to peer pressure. It's like listening to FM radio with people calling to request the same songs as everyone else.
"The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations."
- Adam Smith
you only have to look at comments called out as shills or downvoted to oblivion for when they legitimately comment something that differs from the group think
I completely agree, people use moderation to silence dissenting opinions. This is why I opted out of the moderation thing a long time ago.
As for people being called shills, it always has been a ludicrous accusation; even if it's obvious that some readers or even editors have agendas (like Beauhd and his endless pro-Apple propaganda) it's pretty clear that they're doing it out of misguided loyalty to a brand that they think make them look cool rather than for some form of monetary reward.
The real question is: given a fragile electric grid that shits itself when there's a storm, creating chaos in data centers, shouldn't Linux favor a fast-booting init system, as opposed to systemd?
It's about to change, though. Insurance companies are catching up.
This hurricane season is notable mainly because a hurricane hadn't made landfall on the U.S. since 2005
Which interestingly is the year of the Kyoto protocol. As expected, misguided greeners made things worse.
Hurricanes that hit areas exclusively populated by brown people don't count. Everyone knows that.
Just like how it doesn't count when more brown people die in a month in Chicago than all the white people being shot in Las Vegas over the past decade.
I wonder who kills all those Chicago people, and if more gun laws would put a stop to that.
The article is worth a read.
At a TED talk in 2014, Google’s then-CEO Larry Page said: “We did some weather simulations which probably hadn't really been done before, and if you control the altitude of the balloons, which you can do by pumping air into them and other ways, you can actually control roughly where they go.”
Both men were describing the engineering feat that Space Data had sought to patent more than a decade earlier. Filings with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) show that in 2000, Space Data began experimenting with a nationwide paging service from high-altitude balloons. Space Data filed its key patent application in 2001, and quickly went on to test text messages in 2002, phone calls in 2006, and 4G LTE data by 2012—a year before Google’s splashy launch.
What a bunch of common thieves and hypocrites
There needs to be more than that. They need to be afraid to behave this way. People need to be scared to work with or for them.
After the whole "we hate white men" thing I wrote them off and cancelled any service I had with them. And then we found out why they're so hell-bent on hiring women instead of men: they pay them less, a clever tactic that's about to become a class action. So this new information about their crooked business deals is not really a surprise.
The funny part is that the only Google product I still use is Chrome because for some reason it's the only browser that works with Spotify on Linux. A free Google product to use a paid service from a competitor...
Apple is very VERY good at making software.
Can someone mod the parent +1 Funny?
It's called polite fiction. Apple has lost the smartphone market a long time ago and their "new" devices are not even on par with 2-3 years old Samsung phones. They also never were a player in the desktop or laptop market. Everyone knows that. And yet, biased coverage in the media keep presenting Apple as a near-monopoly that constantly release bleeding edge tech.
All those buffoons like Beauhd and other fanbois are promoting this lie because they have invested too much of their own money and energy in the Apple brand. This level of delusional hypocrisy is on par with that of the Sandy Hook deniers. It's just sad.
Any company that did the proper research and found the true results apple would sue into oblivion.
Not just sue. Apple would send the SWAT like they did for that gizmodo guy who dared post a sneak preview of the iPhone.
That company has traded its soul for pure greed and malice. If Steve Wozniak was dead, he would turn over in his grave.
Microsoft did a good job with Windows 10, except for: spying on their users. For that reason I swore off Microsoft Windows. Too bad, they almost had me considering using Windows again.
What are you using instead? That magnificent piece of software engineering designed by a company who patented ads embedded in the operating system but has still not found a way to make non-blurry fonts?