11 ms·

Yahoo Talent Exodus Accelerates as Marissa Mayer’s Turnaround Flounders

137 points by SeanBoocock 11y ago

venomsnake 11y ago
For something to flounder doesn't it have to first exist? There was no turnaround.
- bru_ 11y ago
  Don't know why you're getting "greyed out", but without writing an essay about it, this
  - venomsnake 11y ago
    Wild guess - there were so many diversity hopes piled on her, that any mention that she is less than revolutionary outrages some people. She is mediocre at best with nothing to show for it. Her big wins were set in motion before her time, her biggest acquisition (tumblr) is fuzzing out, and her highest profile thing was banning of remote work.
    - Karunamon 11y ago
      I think there's something to this - the "women in tech" angle was all over the news when she first picked up the reins. Unfortunately her history at the company has been, in a word, dismal. I'm not sure at this point of that's because of poor leadership, or because the ship was already taking on water.
coldpie 11y ago
What does Yahoo do? Microsoft has Windows, Office and Xbox. Amazon has massive web server and product distribution platforms. Apple has OS X and iPhone. Google has Android, search, ads, and an online office suite. What does Yahoo do? I guess they have some long-time email users and a well-liked stock tracking platform?
- nullrouted 11y ago
  Don't forget fantasy sports tracking!
  - huac 11y ago
    Their fantasy football platform, at least, is the best of the ones I've tried. Lots of obvious product placements and ads, but good UI and UX, well-gamified weekly/seasonal trophies, and interesting statistical stuff I haven't seen anywhere else.
    - Dublum 11y ago
      I agree, it also does a lot of little things right that other platforms mess up. For example, it's the only platform that doesn't penalize a team's defense for scores that occur when they're not on the field (e.g. an interception returned for a touchdown). It is, unfortunately though, an unholy browser memory hog as well.
- hgdkshfskjhf 11y ago
  And Flickr.
- dave_sullivan 11y ago
  From 2013, revenue sources (quarterly): Banner Ads: $423M Search Revenue: $403M Other: $245M 2014 total revenue for year was 4.6 Billion Apparently they're selling a few billion dollars worth of ads.
  - mariusmg 11y ago
    Never thought the web ads market is big enough for both Google and Yahoo.
    - oldmanjay 11y ago
      There are very few people with a correct conception of the scale of the web.
rokhayakebe 11y ago
Every body can sail a ship in good waters. She has been a CEO of a publicly traded company for 3 years. One that was "seemingly" in trouble. 3 years is a long time for a company that was founded 3 years ago. Yahoo is 21 years old and still alive (and somewhat doing well).
throwitaway1981 11y ago
I'm curious: how bad is it to leave a new job soon after starting (because you realize the product isn't as great as what you thought it would be/too much competition in space)? When you are a high performer, you really don't want to waste everyone's time if you end up in this bad situation. What is the professional thing to do? Asking because the article mentioned some people staying only for a few weeks. In a small startup, not seeing traction would be reasonable cause for departure since your paycheck directly depends on it. In a large company, things are not always interrelated in the short term. So there is more time to try out things. I guess the question is: how long should one try to make a new job work?
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  As long as you can justify in your next interview. Your employer will want to know whether you jumped ship to top off your salary, or if you really weren't getting what you put in. Take a case of stagnation as a chance to try something big. Even if it doesn't work, it makes for a compelling narrative.
- ufmace 11y ago
  It only really matters in the eyes of potential future employers, so consider how it looks to them. Having done interviews and resume screening myself, I wouldn't balk too hard at one quick departure, but I would want to hear a good explanation for why you left so soon. The job and/or company being very clearly something different from what you were told would be a good one. Multiple quick departures in a row are kind of a red flag for somebody looking to hire a full-time employee, as opposed to a consultant of some kind.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - whitneyrzoller 11y ago
    It would seem to matter not. Have a look at JMs career trajectory following his (first) exit from Amazon. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmccormack https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmccormack Amazon welcomes him back after a two month tour of duty with Yahoo. Six months later he goes to Google. He's got some obvious next steps: Apple, Tesla, Facebook, Snapchat?! Throw in some sentimental stints back at old Amazon, that's a career baby!
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
xacaxulu 11y ago
This is really too bad for diversity. >>Just last week, Yahoo lost two senior women execs — development head Jackie Reses to Square and marketing partnerships head Lisa Licht. Before that, another exec once close to Mayer — CMO Kathy Savitt — left for a job at a Hollywood entertainment company, although sources said that was due in part to increased estrangement between her and Mayer.
- PakG1 11y ago
  How is that bad for diversity? Reses landing at Square is not a bad thing for diversity. The others don't seem like they'll land at bad spots either. They were poached or left of their own accord, not fired. If Yahoo's the only game in town, then yeah, it's bad for diversity. But Yahoo's not the only game in town.
orf 11y ago
> Jon McCormack: At the end of last year, Mayer scored a coup in the hiring of the Amazon star to be in charge of all of Yahoo’s mobile engineers. He only stayed a few weeks. Ouch.
- dlandis 11y ago
  I don't know anything about him, but I would love to hear the story about how bad/hopeless a situation must need to be in order to warrant leaving so soon.
heimatau 11y ago
Maybe Twitter/Yahoo should team up or Snapchat. Get these teens some ads. Yahoo's mobile strategy is a struggle, maybe some partnerships are in order. I honestly believe Mayer could do it but since none of their apps are FB/Instagram/WhatsApp nor do they have the traction as these juggernauts, I'd suggest a partnership. Come on Yahoo. Find a niche, make some money. Losing these talented people. Maybe it's because they didn't perform or didn't realize the large task they they'd be responsible. Or maybe Mayer only hired them to steward a certain project (this wouldn't explain the quick exits but not all of these exits are quick). Mayer is a work horse. The issue might be with the hires and the difficulty of tasks.
- sirkneeland 11y ago
  I think that was the idea behind the Tumblr acquisition. It's just really, really hard to buy something "hot" without killing it (by external reputation/customer satisfaction or internal employee exodus) Off the top of my head I can only think of two that worked (Instagram, WhatsApp) and Facebook deserves huge credit for that. I don't think my own employer (Nokia), even in its heyday, ever successfully acquired and integrated a company.
  - heimatau 11y ago
    I agree that is what was behind Tumblr. But it's my belief that integration will take time. Yahoo could get ahold of some of the mobile ads, they've been investing heavily in mobile development. Twitter is about to make a big push with Dorsey (he's smart enough to know that's where he competes) and so is Snapchat, which is why I mentioned them.
- sjg007 11y ago
  Yahoo tried to be a snap chat channel but got voted off the island.
USNetizen 11y ago
Maybe, just maybe, it has something to do with the whole "work in our offices or quit" memo sent to virtual employees a while back not paying the dividends she had hoped. Adding insult to injury, perhaps her build-out of a full private nursery in the executive suite staffed with her personal nannies while simultaneously requiring staff to stop working remotely, even part time, had a deleterious impact on morale and work-life balance for those who cannot afford a team of private caretakers for their own families while they commute potentially for several extra hours each day. Perhaps we are just now starting to see the effects of potential internal management hypocrisy with all these departures, especially the ones that only lasted a brief time. Of course, this may be speculation on my part, but I can't see how decisions like those would encourage people, especially high performers, to stay long term if this is indicative of Yahoo management philosophy. Ref: http://gawker.com/5987043/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-installed-a-nursery-in-her-office http://gawker.com/5987043/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-installed-... http://gawker.com/5986462/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-no-more-working-from-home http://gawker.com/5986462/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-no-more-wo...
- VonGuard 11y ago
  The buzz about their work from home program was that people were abusing it and not doing actual work. I agree, they should be able to work from home, but when she did this, she was basically firing a buncha losers. They should allow people to work from home again, though.
  - USNetizen 11y ago
    What proof is there that these people were "losers" and slackers as you put it? Either way, you're right about needing to open it back up. The impact to morale overall must have been huge when these people had to scramble to protect their livelihood.
    - supercanuck 11y ago
      >What proof is there that these people were "losers" and slackers as you put it? Shitty Yahoo products.
fdang 11y ago
Bet she's really regretting turning down that Google job. And what the heck is with building a nursery in your own office while threatening people to quit if they aren't on board with her style.
danso 11y ago
One of the most visible signs of Yahoo's weakness was its strategy to hire big media stars...I'm aware that Yahoo News brings in a godly amount of pageviews to articles on its site...but that hasn't translated to giving a more noticeable platform for its media stars. Since Yahoo hired Katie Couric, who was once a huge star on network news, the most I've seen her name in the wild is in Reddit ads promoting her interviews. I can't think of any other popular news organization that has had to resort to Reddit ads to promote its stars. And remember David Pogue of the New York Times? His opinion was always spread widely when he was at the NYT...I've literally never seen any thing that he's written tweeted in the wild since he's been at Yahoo (though once in awhile I'll check in to read his stuff, which is actually still quite good and better than the NYT's current tech columnist). I know cultivating a media brand is different than building and maintaining your core engineering team...but the media push was one of the big initiatives from Mayer and it went pretty badly.
- cma 11y ago
  FWIW, Couric had been kicked off network news and moved back to daytime.
- spikels 11y ago
  These hires were part of Yahoo's content creation strategy which also included producing TV shows. They just wrote off $42 million for the TV shows[1]. These expensive celebrities are probably next as I doubt they can justify their cost on a shrinking platform. [1] http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/yahoo-misses-q3-earnings-marissa-mayer-narrower-product-focus-1201622483/ http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/yahoo-misses-q3-earning...
  - IgorPartola 11y ago
    I watched a few episodes of Community from the new season. Yahoo butchered it. That show suffered multiple bad decisions and quality went up and down like a yo-yo, but Yahoo's attempt at reviving it is by far the worst. If this is representative of the majority of their attempts at content creation, I can see why they would want to step away from that.
phantom_oracle 11y ago
Going back on my time-machine, I recall when she was first hired. Silicon Valley was abuzz with excitement, thinking Yahoo would once again become a tech-juggernaut that it once was, competing with Facebook, Google, etc. Truth be told, the previous CEOs geared up the company to be more like Buzzfeed than like Google, making Yahoo a media company. Granted, Yahoo would never be in the same circles as the common tech-juggernauts, but this is the natural evolution of companies. Monsanto once used to make poison, now they force their fake-seeds to feed the world. Deep down, we all wanted Yahoo to go back to being something, afterall, it was a cool company once upon a long 1990s time ago, but Mayer was probably the worst hire of them all. In the end, it doesn't matter though. She has a vested interest somewhere north of US200million and her failure at Yahoo will be celebrated when Twitter hires her as "Head of UX" once someone like Carl Icahn buys Yahoo shares to spinoff Alibaba faster and then spinoff: Yahoo Finance (Bloomberg), Flickr(Facebook), etc.
- sjg007 11y ago
  Nah, she'll become a VC.
backtoyoujim 11y ago
Is this one of those glass cliffs? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff
- gaius 11y ago
  Men have no exclusivity on being bad CEOs. Look at Carly Fiorina.
mazelife 11y ago
There was a pretty good long-form piece about Yahoo News in The Baffler a while back [1]. It was by Chris Lehmann, a former YN editor. Although one expects that there's going to be a certain amount of one-sidedness in an account by an employee that was let go, it makes a pretty compelling case that one of Yahoo's flagship properties was disastrously mismanaged. He's highly critical of Mayer: "When editorial knowledge is deployed to elevate advertising, it stops being either editorial, or knowledge; it’s hackery, sold out to the highest, or just the bare middling bidder. [...] Under Mayer’s leadership, the company has brought this ugly art form to sophisticated new heights — and in the process blown through all the basic rudiments of journalistic ethics." There's definitely some corroboration for that view point, BTW. [2] And it wasn't just the way the firewall between editorial and advertising was dismantled by Mayer. He documents the atrocious working conditions, the extent to which the executives Mayer hired to manage YN had no idea what they were doing, YN's reliance on gimmicks to try to juice page views (which didn't even work), and the way the site's editorial mission seemed to shift from week to week. Lehmann tells a particularly hilarious story about a Yahoo exec trying to pitch a Crossfire-type blog where a rightwing blowhard and a leftwing blowhard would argue with each other. The exec really wants to hire Robert Novak, not realizing the guy had died two years ago. Anyway, after reading this and then reading the OP...not surprising. [1] http://thebaffler.com/salvos/purple-reign http://thebaffler.com/salvos/purple-reign [2] http://deadspin.com/dan-gilbert-didnt-like-a-yahoo-blog-post-so-yahoo-dele-1685364080 http://deadspin.com/dan-gilbert-didnt-like-a-yahoo-blog-post...
taksintikk 11y ago
What exactly did she turn around? Yahoo still feels like a hot mess.
g8oz 11y ago
I've got a lot of respect for Yahoo's ability to survive despite being such a value destroying machine.
devopsproject 11y ago
This is what happens when you read a childrens book in front of all your employees http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-childrens-book-bobbie-had-a-nickel-2015-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-childrens-book-...
programminggeek 11y ago
Once Yahoo was willing to stop development of their own search engine and ad platform, I knew they were doomed. Yahoo's ad service was a lot nicer than MSFT Ad Center and nearly as nice as AdWords. They gave up on one of the most strategic positions they had. There is a pile of other stupidity there before and after that others could speak about, but with Yahoo making a deal with Google, it will only continue to be dumb. I believe the entire culture, history, and everything at Yahoo is predisposed to failure and is beyond fixing. It's like a losing sports team who has a history and culture of losing. It takes an entire overturning of everything usually to fix it.
- discardorama 11y ago
  > Yahoo's ad service was a lot nicer than MSFT Ad Center and nearly as nice as AdWords. They gave up on one of the most strategic positions they had. You can thank Carol Bartz for that. She should be enshrined in the same pantheon as Carly Fiorina.
bad_user 11y ago
I feel bad about such news. Ever since Marissa Mayer came they were starting to fix things with their services. Like for example Flickr was resurrected. If Marissa Mayer will leave, or if they narrow their focus, Flickr is probably not that profitable so it can stagnate again or be sold or killed. Which would be a shame.
discardorama 11y ago
"another worried about the ability of managers to stanch the flow of valued employees." That is the problem right there: shitty managers at Yahoo. I spent a few years there, and despite being in the industry for many years, I've yet to find a more dysfunctional setup. Managers have absolutely zero accountability at Yahoo. In any other place, if engineers start leaving a manager, it would be cause for concern; if too many do so, the manager is axed. But in Yahoo, shitty managers hang around, hopping from project to project, biding their time till they can find a new project to shit on. And the tech stack?!? Don't even get me started. Yahoo needs to cut out its management layers, and reduce the manager headcount by 75%. Only then will it start turning around.
- swagswag 11y ago
  what is the tech stack...
  - cloakandswagger 11y ago
    Primarily Yahoo Pipes with a PHP and COBOL backend. All stored in Microsoft SourceSafe, if the project you're working on is even using a VCS.
    - kaonashi 11y ago
      > Microsoft SourceSafe is that still a nightmare to work with remotely?
    - deciplex 11y ago
      I don't know if you're serious.
      - cscurmudgeon 11y ago
        He is bad at joking. E.g. Where do you think Hadoop comes from?
- vidoc 11y ago
cpeterso 11y ago
OK, armchair CEOs: how would you turn Yahoo! around?
- fredkbloggs 11y ago
  Sell the company if anyone is willing to pay a premium to the current share price. Otherwise liquidate most of it, perhaps keeping a small rump if that rump can churn out enough cash to keep the lights on and a small dividend flowing. An ad company can be run profitably with very little ongoing investment and minimal staffing, and that's all Yahoo is at this point. There's not going to be any turnaround. All that trying to turn it around is doing is enriching the senior executives at the shareholders' expense. The above plan will maximize returns to the shareholders, not hiring another whiz-bang CEO to make a nine-course gourmet meal out of this pile of fetid dung.
- rezashirazian 11y ago
  If this still holds true: http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/study-gmail-users-younger-better-educated-than-aol-yahoo-users/ http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/study-gmail-users-you... Then I would swing right and turn Yahoo into the Fox News of internets. Get bunch of Radio talk show hosts and conservative commentators, give them multiple platforms and let them loose. Get some cheap TLC reality shows that are exclusive and really try an appeal to Yahoo's current demographics. Instead of trying to appeal to the educated and affluent already entrenched in Google and Facebook, you invest in what you have and expand that market. This will create growth and momentum in the company. Once you have that, you compete with Google and Facebook.

137 points by SeanBoocock 11y ago

venomsnake 11y ago

For something to flounder doesn't it have to first exist? There was no turnaround.

bru_ 11y ago
Don't know why you're getting "greyed out", but without writing an essay about it, this
- venomsnake 11y ago
  Wild guess - there were so many diversity hopes piled on her, that any mention that she is less than revolutionary outrages some people. She is mediocre at best with nothing to show for it. Her big wins were set in motion before her time, her biggest acquisition (tumblr) is fuzzing out, and her highest profile thing was banning of remote work.
  - Karunamon 11y ago
    I think there's something to this - the "women in tech" angle was all over the news when she first picked up the reins. Unfortunately her history at the company has been, in a word, dismal. I'm not sure at this point of that's because of poor leadership, or because the ship was already taking on water.

coldpie 11y ago

What does Yahoo do? Microsoft has Windows, Office and Xbox. Amazon has massive web server and product distribution platforms. Apple has OS X and iPhone. Google has Android, search, ads, and an online office suite. What does Yahoo do? I guess they have some long-time email users and a well-liked stock tracking platform?

nullrouted 11y ago
Don't forget fantasy sports tracking!
- huac 11y ago
  Their fantasy football platform, at least, is the best of the ones I've tried. Lots of obvious product placements and ads, but good UI and UX, well-gamified weekly/seasonal trophies, and interesting statistical stuff I haven't seen anywhere else.
  - Dublum 11y ago
    I agree, it also does a lot of little things right that other platforms mess up. For example, it's the only platform that doesn't penalize a team's defense for scores that occur when they're not on the field (e.g. an interception returned for a touchdown). It is, unfortunately though, an unholy browser memory hog as well.
hgdkshfskjhf 11y ago
And Flickr.
dave_sullivan 11y ago
From 2013, revenue sources (quarterly): Banner Ads: $423M Search Revenue: $403M Other: $245M 2014 total revenue for year was 4.6 Billion Apparently they're selling a few billion dollars worth of ads.
- mariusmg 11y ago
  Never thought the web ads market is big enough for both Google and Yahoo.
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    There are very few people with a correct conception of the scale of the web.

rokhayakebe 11y ago

Every body can sail a ship in good waters. She has been a CEO of a publicly traded company for 3 years. One that was "seemingly" in trouble. 3 years is a long time for a company that was founded 3 years ago. Yahoo is 21 years old and still alive (and somewhat doing well).

throwitaway1981 11y ago

I'm curious: how bad is it to leave a new job soon after starting (because you realize the product isn't as great as what you thought it would be/too much competition in space)? When you are a high performer, you really don't want to waste everyone's time if you end up in this bad situation. What is the professional thing to do? Asking because the article mentioned some people staying only for a few weeks. In a small startup, not seeing traction would be reasonable cause for departure since your paycheck directly depends on it. In a large company, things are not always interrelated in the short term. So there is more time to try out things. I guess the question is: how long should one try to make a new job work?

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
As long as you can justify in your next interview. Your employer will want to know whether you jumped ship to top off your salary, or if you really weren't getting what you put in. Take a case of stagnation as a chance to try something big. Even if it doesn't work, it makes for a compelling narrative.
ufmace 11y ago
It only really matters in the eyes of potential future employers, so consider how it looks to them. Having done interviews and resume screening myself, I wouldn't balk too hard at one quick departure, but I would want to hear a good explanation for why you left so soon. The job and/or company being very clearly something different from what you were told would be a good one. Multiple quick departures in a row are kind of a red flag for somebody looking to hire a full-time employee, as opposed to a consultant of some kind.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- whitneyrzoller 11y ago
  It would seem to matter not. Have a look at JMs career trajectory following his (first) exit from Amazon. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmccormack https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmccormack Amazon welcomes him back after a two month tour of duty with Yahoo. Six months later he goes to Google. He's got some obvious next steps: Apple, Tesla, Facebook, Snapchat?! Throw in some sentimental stints back at old Amazon, that's a career baby!

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

xacaxulu 11y ago

This is really too bad for diversity. >>Just last week, Yahoo lost two senior women execs — development head Jackie Reses to Square and marketing partnerships head Lisa Licht. Before that, another exec once close to Mayer — CMO Kathy Savitt — left for a job at a Hollywood entertainment company, although sources said that was due in part to increased estrangement between her and Mayer.

PakG1 11y ago
How is that bad for diversity? Reses landing at Square is not a bad thing for diversity. The others don't seem like they'll land at bad spots either. They were poached or left of their own accord, not fired. If Yahoo's the only game in town, then yeah, it's bad for diversity. But Yahoo's not the only game in town.

orf 11y ago

> Jon McCormack: At the end of last year, Mayer scored a coup in the hiring of the Amazon star to be in charge of all of Yahoo’s mobile engineers. He only stayed a few weeks. Ouch.

dlandis 11y ago
I don't know anything about him, but I would love to hear the story about how bad/hopeless a situation must need to be in order to warrant leaving so soon.

heimatau 11y ago

Maybe Twitter/Yahoo should team up or Snapchat. Get these teens some ads. Yahoo's mobile strategy is a struggle, maybe some partnerships are in order. I honestly believe Mayer could do it but since none of their apps are FB/Instagram/WhatsApp nor do they have the traction as these juggernauts, I'd suggest a partnership. Come on Yahoo. Find a niche, make some money. Losing these talented people. Maybe it's because they didn't perform or didn't realize the large task they they'd be responsible. Or maybe Mayer only hired them to steward a certain project (this wouldn't explain the quick exits but not all of these exits are quick). Mayer is a work horse. The issue might be with the hires and the difficulty of tasks.

sirkneeland 11y ago
I think that was the idea behind the Tumblr acquisition. It's just really, really hard to buy something "hot" without killing it (by external reputation/customer satisfaction or internal employee exodus) Off the top of my head I can only think of two that worked (Instagram, WhatsApp) and Facebook deserves huge credit for that. I don't think my own employer (Nokia), even in its heyday, ever successfully acquired and integrated a company.
- heimatau 11y ago
  I agree that is what was behind Tumblr. But it's my belief that integration will take time. Yahoo could get ahold of some of the mobile ads, they've been investing heavily in mobile development. Twitter is about to make a big push with Dorsey (he's smart enough to know that's where he competes) and so is Snapchat, which is why I mentioned them.
sjg007 11y ago
Yahoo tried to be a snap chat channel but got voted off the island.

USNetizen 11y ago

Maybe, just maybe, it has something to do with the whole "work in our offices or quit" memo sent to virtual employees a while back not paying the dividends she had hoped. Adding insult to injury, perhaps her build-out of a full private nursery in the executive suite staffed with her personal nannies while simultaneously requiring staff to stop working remotely, even part time, had a deleterious impact on morale and work-life balance for those who cannot afford a team of private caretakers for their own families while they commute potentially for several extra hours each day. Perhaps we are just now starting to see the effects of potential internal management hypocrisy with all these departures, especially the ones that only lasted a brief time. Of course, this may be speculation on my part, but I can't see how decisions like those would encourage people, especially high performers, to stay long term if this is indicative of Yahoo management philosophy. Ref: http://gawker.com/5987043/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-installed-a-nursery-in-her-office http://gawker.com/5987043/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-installed-... http://gawker.com/5986462/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-no-more-working-from-home http://gawker.com/5986462/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-no-more-wo...

VonGuard 11y ago
The buzz about their work from home program was that people were abusing it and not doing actual work. I agree, they should be able to work from home, but when she did this, she was basically firing a buncha losers. They should allow people to work from home again, though.
- USNetizen 11y ago
  What proof is there that these people were "losers" and slackers as you put it? Either way, you're right about needing to open it back up. The impact to morale overall must have been huge when these people had to scramble to protect their livelihood.
  - supercanuck 11y ago
    >What proof is there that these people were "losers" and slackers as you put it? Shitty Yahoo products.

fdang 11y ago

Bet she's really regretting turning down that Google job. And what the heck is with building a nursery in your own office while threatening people to quit if they aren't on board with her style.

danso 11y ago

One of the most visible signs of Yahoo's weakness was its strategy to hire big media stars...I'm aware that Yahoo News brings in a godly amount of pageviews to articles on its site...but that hasn't translated to giving a more noticeable platform for its media stars. Since Yahoo hired Katie Couric, who was once a huge star on network news, the most I've seen her name in the wild is in Reddit ads promoting her interviews. I can't think of any other popular news organization that has had to resort to Reddit ads to promote its stars. And remember David Pogue of the New York Times? His opinion was always spread widely when he was at the NYT...I've literally never seen any thing that he's written tweeted in the wild since he's been at Yahoo (though once in awhile I'll check in to read his stuff, which is actually still quite good and better than the NYT's current tech columnist). I know cultivating a media brand is different than building and maintaining your core engineering team...but the media push was one of the big initiatives from Mayer and it went pretty badly.

cma 11y ago
FWIW, Couric had been kicked off network news and moved back to daytime.
spikels 11y ago
These hires were part of Yahoo's content creation strategy which also included producing TV shows. They just wrote off $42 million for the TV shows[1]. These expensive celebrities are probably next as I doubt they can justify their cost on a shrinking platform. [1] http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/yahoo-misses-q3-earnings-marissa-mayer-narrower-product-focus-1201622483/ http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/yahoo-misses-q3-earning...
- IgorPartola 11y ago
  I watched a few episodes of Community from the new season. Yahoo butchered it. That show suffered multiple bad decisions and quality went up and down like a yo-yo, but Yahoo's attempt at reviving it is by far the worst. If this is representative of the majority of their attempts at content creation, I can see why they would want to step away from that.

phantom_oracle 11y ago

Going back on my time-machine, I recall when she was first hired. Silicon Valley was abuzz with excitement, thinking Yahoo would once again become a tech-juggernaut that it once was, competing with Facebook, Google, etc. Truth be told, the previous CEOs geared up the company to be more like Buzzfeed than like Google, making Yahoo a media company. Granted, Yahoo would never be in the same circles as the common tech-juggernauts, but this is the natural evolution of companies. Monsanto once used to make poison, now they force their fake-seeds to feed the world. Deep down, we all wanted Yahoo to go back to being something, afterall, it was a cool company once upon a long 1990s time ago, but Mayer was probably the worst hire of them all. In the end, it doesn't matter though. She has a vested interest somewhere north of US200million and her failure at Yahoo will be celebrated when Twitter hires her as "Head of UX" once someone like Carl Icahn buys Yahoo shares to spinoff Alibaba faster and then spinoff: Yahoo Finance (Bloomberg), Flickr(Facebook), etc.

sjg007 11y ago
Nah, she'll become a VC.

backtoyoujim 11y ago

Is this one of those glass cliffs? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff

gaius 11y ago
Men have no exclusivity on being bad CEOs. Look at Carly Fiorina.

mazelife 11y ago

There was a pretty good long-form piece about Yahoo News in The Baffler a while back [1]. It was by Chris Lehmann, a former YN editor. Although one expects that there's going to be a certain amount of one-sidedness in an account by an employee that was let go, it makes a pretty compelling case that one of Yahoo's flagship properties was disastrously mismanaged. He's highly critical of Mayer: "When editorial knowledge is deployed to elevate advertising, it stops being either editorial, or knowledge; it’s hackery, sold out to the highest, or just the bare middling bidder. [...] Under Mayer’s leadership, the company has brought this ugly art form to sophisticated new heights — and in the process blown through all the basic rudiments of journalistic ethics." There's definitely some corroboration for that view point, BTW. [2] And it wasn't just the way the firewall between editorial and advertising was dismantled by Mayer. He documents the atrocious working conditions, the extent to which the executives Mayer hired to manage YN had no idea what they were doing, YN's reliance on gimmicks to try to juice page views (which didn't even work), and the way the site's editorial mission seemed to shift from week to week. Lehmann tells a particularly hilarious story about a Yahoo exec trying to pitch a Crossfire-type blog where a rightwing blowhard and a leftwing blowhard would argue with each other. The exec really wants to hire Robert Novak, not realizing the guy had died two years ago. Anyway, after reading this and then reading the OP...not surprising. [1] http://thebaffler.com/salvos/purple-reign http://thebaffler.com/salvos/purple-reign [2] http://deadspin.com/dan-gilbert-didnt-like-a-yahoo-blog-post-so-yahoo-dele-1685364080 http://deadspin.com/dan-gilbert-didnt-like-a-yahoo-blog-post...

taksintikk 11y ago

What exactly did she turn around? Yahoo still feels like a hot mess.

g8oz 11y ago

I've got a lot of respect for Yahoo's ability to survive despite being such a value destroying machine.

devopsproject 11y ago

This is what happens when you read a childrens book in front of all your employees http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-childrens-book-bobbie-had-a-nickel-2015-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-childrens-book-...

programminggeek 11y ago

Once Yahoo was willing to stop development of their own search engine and ad platform, I knew they were doomed. Yahoo's ad service was a lot nicer than MSFT Ad Center and nearly as nice as AdWords. They gave up on one of the most strategic positions they had. There is a pile of other stupidity there before and after that others could speak about, but with Yahoo making a deal with Google, it will only continue to be dumb. I believe the entire culture, history, and everything at Yahoo is predisposed to failure and is beyond fixing. It's like a losing sports team who has a history and culture of losing. It takes an entire overturning of everything usually to fix it.

discardorama 11y ago
> Yahoo's ad service was a lot nicer than MSFT Ad Center and nearly as nice as AdWords. They gave up on one of the most strategic positions they had. You can thank Carol Bartz for that. She should be enshrined in the same pantheon as Carly Fiorina.

bad_user 11y ago

I feel bad about such news. Ever since Marissa Mayer came they were starting to fix things with their services. Like for example Flickr was resurrected. If Marissa Mayer will leave, or if they narrow their focus, Flickr is probably not that profitable so it can stagnate again or be sold or killed. Which would be a shame.

discardorama 11y ago

"another worried about the ability of managers to stanch the flow of valued employees." That is the problem right there: shitty managers at Yahoo. I spent a few years there, and despite being in the industry for many years, I've yet to find a more dysfunctional setup. Managers have absolutely zero accountability at Yahoo. In any other place, if engineers start leaving a manager, it would be cause for concern; if too many do so, the manager is axed. But in Yahoo, shitty managers hang around, hopping from project to project, biding their time till they can find a new project to shit on. And the tech stack?!? Don't even get me started. Yahoo needs to cut out its management layers, and reduce the manager headcount by 75%. Only then will it start turning around.

swagswag 11y ago
what is the tech stack...
- cloakandswagger 11y ago
  Primarily Yahoo Pipes with a PHP and COBOL backend. All stored in Microsoft SourceSafe, if the project you're working on is even using a VCS.
  - kaonashi 11y ago
    > Microsoft SourceSafe is that still a nightmare to work with remotely?
  - deciplex 11y ago
    I don't know if you're serious.
    - cscurmudgeon 11y ago
      He is bad at joking. E.g. Where do you think Hadoop comes from?
vidoc 11y ago

cpeterso 11y ago

OK, armchair CEOs: how would you turn Yahoo! around?

fredkbloggs 11y ago
Sell the company if anyone is willing to pay a premium to the current share price. Otherwise liquidate most of it, perhaps keeping a small rump if that rump can churn out enough cash to keep the lights on and a small dividend flowing. An ad company can be run profitably with very little ongoing investment and minimal staffing, and that's all Yahoo is at this point. There's not going to be any turnaround. All that trying to turn it around is doing is enriching the senior executives at the shareholders' expense. The above plan will maximize returns to the shareholders, not hiring another whiz-bang CEO to make a nine-course gourmet meal out of this pile of fetid dung.
rezashirazian 11y ago
If this still holds true: http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/study-gmail-users-younger-better-educated-than-aol-yahoo-users/ http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/study-gmail-users-you... Then I would swing right and turn Yahoo into the Fox News of internets. Get bunch of Radio talk show hosts and conservative commentators, give them multiple platforms and let them loose. Get some cheap TLC reality shows that are exclusive and really try an appeal to Yahoo's current demographics. Instead of trying to appeal to the educated and affluent already entrenched in Google and Facebook, you invest in what you have and expand that market. This will create growth and momentum in the company. Once you have that, you compete with Google and Facebook.