16 ms·

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Faces Morale Challenge

140 points by shawndumas 11y ago

rw2 11y ago
Yahoo's fantasy football was super popular, why was no effort put in to make a competing product to Draft King? Tumblr acquisition was not a good one. It was too web oriented and users were moving more to mobile. It takes a long time to reverse momentum, and to try a lot of things.
- sagarun 11y ago
  https://sports.yahoo.com/dailyfantasy/ https://sports.yahoo.com/dailyfantasy/
- perryh2 11y ago
  I work on Daily Fantasy at Yahoo and would just like to point out that we do compete with DK/Fanduel :) https://yahoo.com/dailyfantasy/ https://yahoo.com/dailyfantasy/
  - rw2 11y ago
    oops, in my defense, I have never seen that product till now. Draft king throw their ads everywhere.
  - mateus1 11y ago
    Edited.
    - marblar 11y ago
      It looks like the parent comment removed it. It would be polite to edit yours as well.
      - mateus1 11y ago
        Of course. I was genuinely curious.
  - akg_67 11y ago
    Daily fantasy has very annoying pop up on Yahoo! Sports. Also, I guess daily fantasy product resulted in killing of NCAAF and NFL picks against Yahoo! Experts and Yahoo! Users. The Picks link goes to message "something went wrong, we are working on it" page now for several weeks. Instead it Should be 404 and Picks link removed.
    - perryh2 11y ago
      don't know why this is broken, but I'll file a bug. thank you! One of these days, I'm going to run a bot that crawls all pages on yahoo.com and reports non-200 responses...
      - akg_67 11y ago
        Or let users help you identify such pages. Instead of showing a vague message that indicates temporary failure due to time out, show the 404 with option to report the broken link. I miss picks because that's how I kept track performance of results from my own algos and compare with supposedly experts and crowds.
      - 1024core 11y ago
        Why write a bot? Doesn't yapache log such events? Just run a Hadoop job on the error logs.
        perryh2 11y ago
        I'd run it across the entire site. Sure, we do have logs, but it's not easy to access them for all *.yahoo.com. Logs from each property are ingested into different places. The infrastructure is way more complex than it should be making bare-minimum monitoring like alerts on non-200 responses on all properties difficult to maintain.
      - cpeterso 11y ago
        Shouldn't the yahoo.com servers already log when they return error responses? :)
- deleted 11y ago
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WalterSear 11y ago
Morale challenges tend to go hand in hand with moral challenges.
danharaj 11y ago
I see a lot of parallels between Marissa Mayer's tenure at Yahoo and Dick Costolo's tenure at Twitter. Dick left two quarters ago and Twitter is still struggling to meet investor expectations. I have a feeling that there are structural problems at Yahoo, like Twitter, that even a unicorn CEO would have difficulty fixing. A lot of analysts and investors seem very leadership oriented in their blame anyway.
- SwellJoe 11y ago
  There's a strong cult of personality around our industry, in general. The belief that a special CEO can make a billion dollar company. It ignores the role of luck, the other employees (sometimes there are thousands of employees, as in the case of Yahoo!, and every single one of them can make or break the company in small ways every day), changes in the market, etc. Steve Jobs is the epitome of the Magic CEO archetype, in this school of thought, and yet, he founded expensive failures, too, and almost rode Apple into the ground, to boot. There are so many variables that it seems harmful to the industry and the world as a whole to place so much value and so much blame on CEOs when things go right or wrong. All that said, I'd like to see an experiment where a CEO steps in, cuts C-level salaries dramatically (taking the hit from people leaving who care more about the million dollar bonus than the company itself), including their own, and re-directing that money to higher wages for employees and deeper, further ranging, research and development. Kinda replicate the history of HP, in reverse: Start with high executive salaries, awful outdated products, and defeated company morale, and start building a culture that looks toward the future, takes care of everyone in the company (before C-levels get bonuses) and treats them all with respect from top to bottom, and build products that define the market not follow it. But, I've never built or run a billion dollar company. I might be an idiot that no one should ever listen to.
  - seanmcdirmid 11y ago
    I wouldn't call NeXT an expensive failure, especially seeing how it laid the framework for Apple's current success. It is hard to say what would have happened if Steve Jobs stayed at Apple in the 80s....he was never actually CEO before 1997 (see http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/08/25/a-look-at-apples-ceos-from-1977-to-2011/ http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/08/25/a-look-at-apples-ceos...).
steve19 11y ago
"Ms. Mayer called a meeting with senior executives in August and asked them to sign a written agreement to stay with the company for at least three more years, according to two people familiar with the meeting." Is such an agreement enforceable? Or is this some meaningless pledge? If you want people to stay, give them a decent financial incentive.
- jakejake 11y ago
  You'd assume that if a CEO were asking you to sign such an agreement, they would offer some sort of incentive in return. Otherwise it seems more like an ultimatum for you to declare your loyalty.
  - TylerE 11y ago
    Actually, contractually that gets really interesting. Basically, for a contract to be valid both sides have to give something, this is referred to as "consideration". Now, normally, with work-related contracts the consideration is "continuing to employ you", but with senior mgmt (golden parachutes, stock options, etc) I bet the waters are murky.
    - cstejerean 11y ago
      From what I recall "continuing to employ you" is not legally acceptable consideration, because you had the job before the contract, and therefore you are not getting anything new. If it involves a pay raise, promotion, a bonus, etc, then it can be acceptable. IANAL.
      - kylec 11y ago
        Continued employment is sufficient consideration for some contracts http://www.jacksonlewis.com/publication/continued-employment-adequate-consideration-non-compete-imposed-mid-employment-hawaii-judge-rules http://www.jacksonlewis.com/publication/continued-employment.... However, I can't imagine that if Yahoo was so desperate to retain its executives that it would fire them if they didn't sign the agreement. I'm guessing that there was some additional incentive offered.
jonesb6 11y ago
Couldn't read the article because it appears to be behind a paywall. On the topic of Marissa Mayer though, has any analysis been done that's an overview of Meyer's major decisions/actions? I seem to see pieces come out almost monthly on things she's been doing at Yahoo, but as someone who doesn't follow executive movers and shakers too much, I don't want to come to an early judgement without fully understanding what her impact is. That said, I can't help but feel that many of her early "successes" were coincidental and overly hyped, mostly as a result of Yahoo's fortunate investment in Alibaba. If I were currently seeking employment I would be extremely dubious towards anyone trying to convince me that Yahoo isn't still running on fumes, despite all the hype.
- mateus1 11y ago
  Just Google the title and click the first result. That's how you can beat most paywalls.
- roymurdock 11y ago
  Click the "Web" hyperlink under the title of the post. It saves you going to google and typing in the name of the article.
  - deleted 11y ago
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zerocrat 11y ago
Can anyone share the article? cp /wsj/article /hn/comments
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- jonknee 11y ago
  https://www.google.com/search?q=Yahoo+CEO+Marissa+Mayer+Faces+Morale+Challenge https://www.google.com/search?q=Yahoo+CEO+Marissa+Mayer+Face...
  - zerocrat 11y ago
    Shit I am dumb. Thanks for the lesson. *Facepalm.
    - jonknee 11y ago
      Even better, just for this sort of thing there is a link called "web" at the top of the page that links to Google with the title. It's in the same line as flag.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
chollida1 11y ago
Sometimes, well it actually happens quite often, a company just runs its course and is better off just winding things up and closing shop. IMHO it looks like the likely end game for Yahoo is: - taken private by a Private Equity firm - divest Yahoo Japan and Alibaba - any divisions that aren't making an actual profit, (tumblr, flickr, fantasy sports, etc, will be shopped around and sold if possible, or shuttered if not possible. - search, email and the yahoo front page will be sold to Microsoft Yahoo has done everything by the MBA book to turn around the company, they are at the step of brining in Mckinsley consultants, never a terribly good sign. Sometimes, time just passes a company by and you can't do much to turn it around, its not the leadership's fault or the engineers fault. The market just says the company is no longer needed. This doesn't mean the company is un profitable. Corel was a company in the early 2000's that went this route. A company can circle the drain, making slightly less and less profit each year, slowly laying off people which causes them to miss their next quarter, which necessitates more layoffs and the circle continues until someone buys them out. I think this is the likely fate of Yahoo. The next step is to engage an investment bank to find them a takeover partner if Silver Lake doesn't want to be the one to take them private. What other possible route is there? They've brought in 4-5 CEO's each with their own vision of what yahoo should be and all of them has failed to turn the company around. What is Yahoo's area of expertise that they make money at and can do better that Google, Microsoft, Facebook or Amazon?
- akg_67 11y ago
  Yahoo is textbook example of failure of online "advertising revenue" only company. Most such companies failed in last dot bomb. Only Yahoo survived because it was the largest with decent cash reserves. I am sure another dot bomb like event will take out today's darlings too.
- shostack 11y ago
  Having watched way too much "House of Lies" where consultants often seem to be brought in to back-up the viewpoint of a given executive and make the case for whatever that person's agenda is...what would such consultants likely be doing in this case in "the real world?" I admittedly haven't had the experience of working with any consultants, so I'm curious for opinions from those who have what happens when they come in during a "typical" engagement of this nature.
onewaystreet 11y ago
The morale problem is a symptom of bad leadership. It's not going to be fixed with more bad leadership.
- asdfologist 11y ago
  Good leadership wouldn't have turned around MySpace. Sometimes, it's too late.
  - colmvp 11y ago
    On the flipside, sometimes it seems like we rely on hindsight bias. Would we still be talking about Apple in 2015 if Jobs hadn't come back? Or Tesla if Musk hadn't taken over as CEO in 2007? Both companies had significant uphill battles. And if you had the foresight to imagine Apple in 2015 back in 1997, you're probably a rich man. Just hypothesizing but imagine if MySpace had focused its industry connections in the music industry to focus more on music instead of social networking, and pushed for an on-demand music streaming player for mobile and desktop. They had millions of dollars in the bank and a head start in the U.S. market over Spotify and Rdio. Or imagine if Blockbuster video had either taken up Netflix's offer to be bought out or had invested in online streaming long before Netflix. I'm not saying it's easy or always viable or that luck doesn't play a role, but I often think we discount the potential for a company to still exist today because the only outcome we know of is the outcome that happened rather than the potential of alternate decisions.
- Bud 11y ago
  Steve Jobs could come back from the dead and he would be utterly helpless to revive the abject piece of crap that is Yahoo.
  - HillaryBriss 11y ago
    Warren Buffett once wrote: With few exceptions, when a manager with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for poor fundamental economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact. It's not clear to me that Yahoo's business has poor fundamental economics because I don't quite know what business it's in.
jacquesm 11y ago
Has Yahoo! stopped the lay-offs?
mmaunder 11y ago
You can bypass the paywall with this link: http://bit.ly/1XdzZgO http://bit.ly/1XdzZgO (Google search the original URL in quotes in future) Sounds like she's in a tough spot. You're pretty much forced into a situation of focusing on the good numbers when you're a public company or you'll get beaten up by the shareholders and shorts. So it's difficult to shine sunlight on the bad stuff to disinfect because that's not what public investors want to hear. Going into search? That's just crazy talk. Google has the space completely wrapped up. I think Yahoo has some excellent properties like finance.yahoo.com which is amazing and could unlock a deluge of cash with the right biz model. Retail investors visit the site in droves daily. Right now it's an advertising disaster. Prime space taken up by spammy link-baity ads injected into the main center content: "10 most popular fitness models on the planet". And prime spaces on the right taken up by amazon ads. The most targeted ads by etrade, scottrade and ameritrade are the smallest ads on the page with tiny icons on the left. They relaunched yahoo finance in September and sounds like their users hate the new site: https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/315477-finance-dd-3 https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/315477-finance-dd-3 The WSJ article isn't going to make life at Yahoo any easier unfortunately.
- gelatocar 11y ago
  You can also bypass the paywall by clicking the 'web' link under the post title on HN.
  - avn2109 11y ago
    I am not new at all to HN and never knew this, cool :)
    - firloop 11y ago
      It was added a couple of months ago.
  - rconti 11y ago
    THANK YOU. WSJ is the one site I see regularly linked that has such an intrusive paywall, and I've previously avoided them entirely for this reason. No "10 free articles", no interstitials. Just blocked.
colmvp 11y ago
I would recommend anyone interested in this story to also read the Forbes article about Mayer's problems and potential exit at Yahoo (http://www.forbes.com/sites/miguelhelft/2015/11/19/the-last-days-of-marissa-mayer/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/miguelhelft/2015/11/19/the-last-...). On top of stories about large number of executives have left over the course of 2015 (http://recode.net/2015/10/19/yahoo-talent-exodus-accelerates-as-marissa-mayers-turnaround-flounders/ http://recode.net/2015/10/19/yahoo-talent-exodus-accelerates...), the lack of vision/planning that contributed to executive discontent: > But perhaps none of these incidents damaged morale more than Mayer’s reorganization of Yahoo’s product teams. When Mayer launched the effort last fall, everyone agreed the existing structure had outlived its usefulness—for instance, mobile products was partitioned from other groups. But Mayer embarked on the process without laying out a grand vision for it. Instead, she began sketching out different scenarios in one-on-one meetings with various executives, floating one plan by one exec and a different by another. Unable to make up her mind, the process dragged on for months. “She went through 20 different permutations,” says an executive with knowledge of the process. “The product guys were twisting in the wind, not knowing what they were going to run.” > Product releases slowed to a trickle, and a turf war brewed as executives became concerned with their futures. Jon McCormack, a star executive who had joined Yahoo in January from Amazon and was promised a broad engineering portfolio covering critical areas like mobile, landed in the vacuum created by Mayer’s indecision. He was gone by the end of February and now works for Google. When Mayer announced the new structure in April, it was too late. “That was the beginning of everyone losing faith,” says another senior executive. “That’s when people started to look for other jobs.” I don't consider being the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company that's still trying to figure out where it fits in the 21st century a job anyone could possibly do, but it seems like Mayer's strategy has been a little all over the place with no real gain in any segment. From the WSJ article: > As her strategy has shifted, Ms. Mayer has variously cast Yahoo as a challenger to Netflix Inc. in online video content and as a threat to Google Inc. in Web search, but has made little progress toward either goal. I'm just not sure where she's trying to push Yahoo towards. What is their vision?
taurath 11y ago
There hasn't really been a "focus" at Yahoo in a long while - it feels like the new HP, where almost all the folks who built previously successful businesses within it have moved on, while at the same time the company is too big and integrated to make any meaningful changes or grow new profit centers (given that their cash cow is stalling). Its corporate stagflation. They are too diversified and have too many products to move quickly, generate almost no enthusiasm between either users (all old guard) or engineers/employees, and there's very little that any executive or employee can do.
Steko 11y ago
See also news this morning that y-mail is blocking users who are running ad-blockers; I'd bet their confidentiality terms are headed for a revision too as the user info fire sale gets underway.
gcb0 11y ago
the fact that the SVP of marketing left to join the lowest grade studio Hollywood have is worrisome. so much so I'd think it was a demission and not someone leaving on will...
deleted 11y ago
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pavornyoh 11y ago
A genuine question for you. What exactly does Yahoo do? When I think of Google, I think of search. With Amazon, an ecommerce giant for my shopping needs comes to mind. But with Yahoo, nothing comes to mind except all the spams I got when I had their email...
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  Actually, their spam filtering is quite good these days.
- porsupah 11y ago
  For me, they're: (1) the owner of Flickr, an acquisition they've tried to futz around with, but haven't actually managed to damage too much yet. (True, the site design's become much more heavyweight, but that's a general web design issue) Interestingly, whilst they tried to go ad-only, removing "Pro" accounts, they later reinstated them - but with an oddly tone-deaf press release that trumpeted that account level's availability again, and that rates wouldn't go up for two years. Fair enough, except Pro had been $25/yr, and they quietly noted they'd be $50/yr in the future. Is ad-only revenue that strong to consider dispelling paid accounts? (2) The original curated web index. Fiendishly difficult to scale, absolutely, but while it lasted, it was remarkably useful. Could such still work? It'd be a tremendous challenge, but, Wikipedia might suggest so - it's not as if Wikipedia is free of dead/changed links, but the footnote links do indeed tend to be useful. Yet, as I recall, their finances are/were quite robust - we may well simply not be Yahoo's audience.
  - rodgerd 11y ago
    > Could such still work? Effectively it would competing with Reddit, HN, Metafilter, and similar sites where the owners have an army of people curating the web for them, for free. Which makes it a hard ask. Obviously there's a demand because Reddit, HN, MF, etc, exist, but enough to make money off of?
    - visakanv 11y ago
      Actually IMHO the curation of Reddit and HN is pretty bad. Just my $0.02. My problem is that it's focused on what's new and relevant. The web sorely needs (IMHO again) really well curated paths that are organized from first principles rather than novelty. But I'm not an expert, just a random guy with an opinion.
jgord 11y ago
my perception is - they dont love the internet. they are missing the whole "fuck you, were yahoo, were building the internet" chutzpah which was so charming, and for which we all have a little glowing candlewick in our hearts for. For example .. I really wanted YUI to be usable .. it was so close.. but they didn't listen when people gave them feedback - eg. telling them to polish the table grid widget, this control was arguably the reason people were even using yui at all. The internet pluggable data feed pipes thing was promising.. almost there but not quite gelling in the developer group-mind. They have to hire some really opinionated people and let them loose on skunkworks [ but realworld ] projects . I look at the yahoo front page once every 3m to see if its still dead.. I check my email there due to nostalgia. They need to forget about ad revenue bullshit, get fired up and make stuff. I can guarantee there are great people at yahoo gnawing their arms off because they have nothing to rally around. They are dying anyway .. its time to hit for the bleachers.
- jgord 11y ago
  I read the article - There is not a single bullet point I give a shit about, that isn't summarized by their share price. I look at the yahoo.com front page, I look at msn.com front page - they look similar and are both spam to a first order approximation. If they wanted to, they could turn sentiment around in 3 months. There are so many things they can do : - become the datafeed API for the internet - buy a startup thats kicking ass [ and leave them alone to win ] - buy a tech video review media site thats growing fast - put up a $200k prize for best Yahoo innovation app - take 7 devs / designers / product people, put them in a room and let them have at it to make an app For any of these to work, they have to build a firewall around it, insulating if from the process of a big company, so it feels like a startup.
gamechangr 11y ago
Black turtle neck. She needs to wear the black turtle neck. It's the only way...to turn this ship around.
Bud 11y ago
Uh, she faces more than a mere "morale challenge". Her job is impossible. Her company is a gigantic load of bovine excrement with literally no redeeming qualities, products, or domain expertise to build upon. It should have been shut down five years ago and put out of its misery.
- melted 11y ago
  You do realize that "gigantic load of bovine excrement" describes, like, 90% of Silicon Valley, right? :-)
  - HillaryBriss 11y ago
    It used to be farmland.
hooande 11y ago
Yahoo started as a couple of people who said "This internet thing has a lot of content now, let's try to organize it for people." They should go back to doing that, and throw 20 years worth of technology and cultural growth at the problem. Along with as much manpower and machine learning tech as hundreds of millions of dollars can buy. I do enjoy the drama of the Mayer Saga, but it doesn't seem like any of Yahoo's attempts at innovation are working. They shouldn't be competing with Google in search. They should be redefining search. Some times the best way to change the game is to go back to basics. Of course if I knew exactly what that looked like, I would be too busy walking the path to wealth to write hn comments. But it does seem like Yahoo isn't doing anything innovative right now. Their most valuable properties, mail and the yahoo home page, are simply good enough versions of products that have become commodities. They began by offering a service that no one else was providing, and have ended up being relegated to being the internet's generic alternative to everything. It's Hail Mary time. If I were in Mayer's position, I would find a way to burn a few hundred million dollars of the alibaba money on a moon shot before the board had time to vote me out. The odds against may be overwhelming, but it's better than slightly slowing the angular velocity of their circle around the drain. With the recent tone of press articles about her tenure and what that does to an executive's reputation, I don't see what she has to lose.
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  > They shouldn't be competing with Google in search. They should be redefining search. Yahoo is hardly trying to compete with Google in search; they have literally been outsourcing search to Bing for several years now. The problem is that they're trying to figure out what they should be doing instead, and struggling.
- tayo42 11y ago
  >But it does seem like Yahoo isn't doing anything innovative right now. Aren't they starting to stream nfl games for free? The first one they did was from what I heard handled very well. I thought there was talks about more.
  - TheCondor 11y ago
PhilWright 11y ago
Whenever I see a struggling company like this I ask myself the simple question. If the company didn't exist, would there be a need to create it? In the case of Yahoo I think the answer is no. If they disappeared tomorrow there would be no compelling reason for others to try and fill the gap it left behind. Hell, I doubt most people would even noticed they had gone. So they need to build a new business from the dying ashes of the current revenue. At the moment it does not look like the CEO has any good ideas on how to do that.
- DannoHung 11y ago
  I object only on the grounds that Flickr is the only good photo site for people who really care about their photos. Having tried to use 500px for a few months, they cannot even manage to do album privacy correctly.
  - zanny 11y ago
    I just use imgur. Am I doing something wrong?
    - ghaff 11y ago
      I don't think you're doing something wrong but I think you're doing something differently from a Flickr Pro subscriber who is using the site to store curated high quality photos online.
    - EdiX 11y ago
      Imgur will aggressively recompress any image above 5MB. A few years ago it used to be even worse.
  - crucifiction 11y ago
    SmugMug
  - jinst8gmi 11y ago
    That, and I'd be disappointed that my email account would vanish, along with years worth of mail.
philip1209 11y ago
I feel like Netflix understands how to keep morale high, and that's paying top of market and firing people who don't deserve that pay. Free lunches, massage rooms, etc are all marginally important compared to good pay. Perhaps Yahoo could innovate further by offering private offices. This isn't the panacea for innovation or a large company, but if the goal is to raise morale and hire top talent - I know those two things combined would get some experienced candidates to consider joining Yahoo.
- kylec 11y ago
  Or, you know, allow remote work. There are lots of talented programmers that don't live in the SF Bay area.
- jedberg 11y ago
  Those were some of the things that they did first. In her first month she made the meals free and gave raises to the top folks. Then she authorized management to hire new people at top of market. I had a few friends leave Netflix for Yahoo because they actually got raises and believed in the vision. Many have subsequently left when they realized the problems run deeper than that.
MrGando 11y ago
Is the story available to non-subscribers?
datashovel 11y ago
Don't get me wrong. I love the fact that Yahoo took a chance on Marissa Mayer. The thing that I can't overlook is none of the stories I have read indicate this was a matter of a perfect vision that was just poorly executed. All of the stories I've read lead me to believe there has been a somewhat muddled vision and less than spectacular execution on top of that. Then again it was only mid-2012 that she was appointed CEO. Not enough time IMO, though the stories these days make one wonder if allowing a full 5 years (I think a reasonable minimum term for CEO of a large corporation like Yahoo) is going to be more destructive than constructive. Especially when there seem to be many documented failures, and not much to hang one's hat on, in the form of successes, to this point.
- phamilton 11y ago
  I'm not sure that "perfect vision that was just poorly executed" is worth much. If execution is the hard part, then any sort of vision that didn't include execution is just nonsense.
  - datashovel 11y ago
    In terms of assessing a CEO's impact on an organization I think it could play an important role. For example if people are trying to knock down the doors to purchase / use what Yahoo is working on but they're abandoning because of scalability issues or buggy systems or continuous delays in delivery timelines, this sounds to me like we're dealing more with execution issues. On the other hand, if the site / products hum along without glitches, yet are receiving little to no attention or traction from the outside world, this could be a sign that the company is on the wrong track in a more fundamental way. Perhaps more directly linked to the "output" / "work product" of Marissa Mayer as CEO.
smegel 11y ago
Google is getting platform locking, much like Microsoft. Even if Yahoo did come out with a world class Docs, or Email, or Youtube, or Blogger, or Sites, or AppEngine - I would still stick with the Google equivalent because I am all connected. I sign into Chrome or an Android device and everything just works and syncs. I am locked into Google and I don't even have a Google+ account.
- IndianAstronaut 11y ago
  All Yahoo has to do is commit to no tracking of users and I would switch in a heartbeat.
  - pgodzin 11y ago
    So create a product that is hard to make money off of and impossible to track how users are using the applications in order to improve them?
pjzedalis 11y ago
Marissa comes from Google so I'd like to see more developer focus. Here are some ideas: - Buy Joyent. Get's you into the cloud game and you gain SmartOS and Node chops. - Buy BitTorrent and capitalize on its growth and the new sync technology. - Make YUI popular again in the responsive web era. Tumblr, Flickr, Develpr? - Probably should stop trying to out-Netflix Netflix. Community was never going to work but I understand the thinking. - Somebody is going to buy Groove Music (Xbox Music). I hope it's not Yahoo.
- yeukhon 11y ago
  I say none of these. * Too many "cloud" competitors, enough with trying to squeeze a margin. * I wouldn't want to compete with Box, DropBox, GDrive, S3, OneDrive, or BitTorrent Sync. To support enterprise customer at this level, I think is something Yahoo! not too familiar with. * Another Javascript framework to resurrect, probably time to rethink about how many JS developers you have to hire to to maintain the high visibility and demand from the community. * Community was a good show, but Yahoo's UI for their video content is just bloat. Too much information, graphic wise not too appealing. They have a shot, but so few people in my circle know about Yahoo video. But I think it still has a shot. * Why would Microsoft sell Xbox Music? I think the best thing for Yahoo to do, is to do sports and finance. They can continue to build contents around it. Yes there is ESPNSport, MLB, NBA etc but Yahoo can probably do better if they focus on building a community. They already have a huge sport community, why not use it? They already have content makers so make finance more attractive, try to go after Bloomberg. Social is dominated by Facebook and Twitter (and their acquired products like Instagram and Vine), but there is still much to explorer around social, not just adding friends.
nugget 11y ago
You need to own and exploit a monopoly in order to grow into a true tech heavyweight. Facebook has social (and all the traffic and user data that comes with it), Microsoft has the OS and utilities, Apple has the OS, hardware, and apps, and Google has search and (tbd) Android apps. Unless you monopolize something of extreme value (user data or a platform), you should focus on just making money, although unfortunately Wall Street doesn't value this very highly (see IAC). Yahoo has a bunch of great second and third place properties (search, news, weather, email) but no monopolies, and for this reason even the transition to mobile under MM was unlikely to move the needle for them. If they slimmed down and brought in the right kind of management the core properties could be extremely profitable.
- bad_user 11y ago
  I think you're missing the forest from the trees. Monopolies in software are created through excellence. If Facebook "has social" that's because they were and still are the best social network. Of course, now that they are big, they've got a huge lock-in effect, but that's besides the point. Microsoft "has the OS" (and I might add Office) because Windows really has been the best general purpose, generally available OS. Other attempts had potential, but they either keep failing to be as polished or stable for end-users (desktop Linux), or have not been available for all PCs (Mac OS, OS X), or they didn't survive for long enough (OS/2, BeOS). Not sure what monopoly Apple has, but it's no point in arguing that most of what Apple does is technically excellent and beautifully executed. Google "has search" because they had and still have the best search engine and their search engine is indispensable for most people. People talking about DuckDuckGo never tried doing searches from outside the US. Google also has Android, Gmail, Calendar, Docs and Maps, all of which are excellent.
  - nugget 11y ago
    No doubt you need to be excellent to create a monopoly (maintenance mode is much easier). But you also need the ingredients for it to exist in the first place (network effect, high value/exclusive/monetize-able data, high competitive barriers). Did Yahoo ever have a market like that, except with search early on? (They might have been able to do something interesting with messaging or mail early on to lock in those users, but they didn't.) They had a lot of eyeballs, a lot of ad salespeople, a lot of ad dollars, (later) a lot of ad network tech, a lot of great content, a lot of great niche sites (flickr). But nothing that competitors couldn't enter and replicate fairly quickly. If you were Yahoo today, and you could execute flawlessly on a single area of your current business or something closely adjacent to one of your current businesses (excluding search, which they continue to exit), what would you pick?
1024core 11y ago
It would be worthwhile to read Paul Graham's essay now, if you haven't already done so: "what happened to Yahoo"[1] The thing that jumps out at me is the lack of "hacker" culture at Yahoo. Sure, they have a few really smart people there; but the culture is missing. As long as this is the case, Yahoo will continue to wander aimlessly. Marissa (or the next CEO) would do well to work on putting together a hacker culture, and get rid of most of the PMs, Directors and VPs. Yahoo is too management-heavy, and hacker-light. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html
dude_abides 11y ago
"The CEO has hired management consultant McKinsey & Co. to look for areas of the company to cut, said a person familiar with the matter." Shudder.
ksec 11y ago
From my extremely limited knowledge, and mainly from reading, and reading between the line on others people's view. I think Marrissa will be a great COO, but she lacks the vision. Even people who used to work with her ( Eric Schmidt) had said she is the most quantitative CEO in silicon valley, if not the world. And from many other pieces of information she likes to measure everything, from colour, design or human aspect. But that is the problem. You cant measure something now and tell you what happens in the future. If you could do that you would be rich in no time. You want to steer the ship to the right direction. She believe she can Buy into talents with the so called talent acquisition. But if the company are doing some work they love, they will leave. It really is that simple. Talents have no problem finding different Jobs, so you need to do something rather then paying them higher. Sense of priority, what needs to be done first, it seems to me they are lack of focus. Google too, but google dont have the financial problem yahoo has. The lack of taste. There, quote from Steve Jobs. I dont know how to say it better. Sometimes I wish i could get to say a few words direct to Marissa. From a user perspective.
- trhway 11y ago
  >I think Marrissa will be a great COO, but she lacks the vision. Remember Fiorina? The same situation of a midlevel absolutely mediocre exec getting lucky at catching a huge wave bringing her straight to the top. Just a female, ie. charming, version of a "Yes"-man.
jackgavigan 11y ago
If you strip out the Alibaba and Yahoo Japan stakes, the market is valuing Yahoo's "core" at less than $8bn. It has $5.88bn of cash, cash equivalents and short-term marketable securities on its balance sheet, which means that the core business is valued at less $1.5bn. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UHMfzlmE7HXY_ph9BN686gOCiji1bQ-rsbnjtKD3oho/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UHMfzlmE7HXY_ph9BN68... The balance sheet figure for "Property and equipment" is higher than that. http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/YHOO/900583056x0x163717/e3b6723a-7d29-4a37-8dff-5bcf3a67d1d3/YHOO_III_BalanceSheetGAAP.pdf http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/YHOO/900583056x0x1637...
- adventured 11y ago
  In fact it doesn't mean that. Its the assets on Yahoo's balance sheet that are being discounted by investors. Yahoo's business receives a multiple rather than a discount - whether that's a multiple on sales or earnings. Cash and assets held on a corporate balance sheet are basically never $1 to $1 accounted for in a market cap. You can easily see that in action on the balance sheets of: Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, Comcast, Time Warner Cable. Are we to pretend that Berkshire Hathaway's business is worth ~$140 billion after we strip out all of its assets (cash, stock holdings etc)? So its earnings are getting a 7 or 8 multiple? Obviously that's not actually how valuations work. If you stripped out all of their assets, they'd very likely still get a fair market valuation on the operating business and its potential, perhaps 13-15 times earnings. A similar bogus claim was made that Yahoo was worth less than zero, when its Alibaba stake was at its peak. That's not actually how things work in reality, that scenario solely exists in a calculation. In reality, if you spin off all of Yahoo's assets (specifically Japan / Alibaba), the business would still be given a multiple, a meaningful valuation. Even lowly AOL was still worth $4.4 billion in the Verizon acquisition, and Yahoo's business is two to three times more valuable than that. There isn't a single example in the public market, in which a corporation with a relatively clean balance sheet, and $4 billion in sales, is given a negative ~$X billion valuation - much less a company that has historically been given high valuations as a semi-tech company. Which proves how absurdly wrong the negative value premise is (or the $1 to $1 asset discounting method applied to the assets, which are clearly not worth $1 to $1 in the market cap given taxation issues alone).
ZenoArrow 11y ago
Am I missing something here? Isn't Yahoo still highly profitable? So some senior execs left, so what, I'm sure they'll still have plenty of people wanting to work for them. Look beyond the spin from the WSJ. Look at the profits. Are Yahoo losing money?
teh_klev 11y ago
For the less gifted, such as myself, at getting around paywalls: https://archive.is/8NoAM https://archive.is/8NoAM
aws_ls 11y ago
IMHO Yahoo's biggest mistake was never grokking search. And they had two opportunities. First: When Larry and Sergei wanted to sell their search engine to them for a few millions, in the late 90s. They said they are focused on curated content, which was the future they apparently believed in. (Just paraphrasing from memory, the stories read in various articles and books on Google & search). But I also wonder, even if Yahoo had bought them out then, would the world be different today. Perhaps, the inevitable future of search would have been just a bit delayed. May be evolved like social networks. Second: Killing their own search engine in early 2000s, when they had some 30% search share. That was after they tried using Google's search API. Then they started to use Bing. I clearly remember that although Google was the best, but one knew people (lazy friends) who would use Yahoo search. DDG has shown, there is always a market. edit: typo
sjg007 11y ago
Things we need: 1. There needs to be a viable YouTube alternative. 2. They should take their experience with NFL streaming to expand that market for the NFL and add in other TV type content. This can be delivered through apps and apple tv like devices. College football is a market that would do well with this. Make a deal with the NCAA. It is impossible for cord cutters to watch their college team unless they are on watchespn or fox sports go. And even then you need to borrow your credentials. 3. Facebook M, Google Now, Siri, Cortana.. Yahoo needs to have a play here. You might integrate this tightly with #2. Buy and/or integrate: Crackle, Pandora, Roku, maybe Spotify, Cinemax. Why? All these need to be integrated into a consistent platform, each offer ad revenue opportunity, consolidation. In addition you can ramp up subscription revenues or on demand revenue.

140 points by shawndumas 11y ago

rw2 11y ago

Yahoo's fantasy football was super popular, why was no effort put in to make a competing product to Draft King? Tumblr acquisition was not a good one. It was too web oriented and users were moving more to mobile. It takes a long time to reverse momentum, and to try a lot of things.

sagarun 11y ago
https://sports.yahoo.com/dailyfantasy/ https://sports.yahoo.com/dailyfantasy/
perryh2 11y ago
I work on Daily Fantasy at Yahoo and would just like to point out that we do compete with DK/Fanduel :) https://yahoo.com/dailyfantasy/ https://yahoo.com/dailyfantasy/
- rw2 11y ago
  oops, in my defense, I have never seen that product till now. Draft king throw their ads everywhere.
- mateus1 11y ago
  Edited.
  - marblar 11y ago
    It looks like the parent comment removed it. It would be polite to edit yours as well.
    - mateus1 11y ago
      Of course. I was genuinely curious.
- akg_67 11y ago
  Daily fantasy has very annoying pop up on Yahoo! Sports. Also, I guess daily fantasy product resulted in killing of NCAAF and NFL picks against Yahoo! Experts and Yahoo! Users. The Picks link goes to message "something went wrong, we are working on it" page now for several weeks. Instead it Should be 404 and Picks link removed.
  - perryh2 11y ago
    don't know why this is broken, but I'll file a bug. thank you! One of these days, I'm going to run a bot that crawls all pages on yahoo.com and reports non-200 responses...
    - akg_67 11y ago
      Or let users help you identify such pages. Instead of showing a vague message that indicates temporary failure due to time out, show the 404 with option to report the broken link. I miss picks because that's how I kept track performance of results from my own algos and compare with supposedly experts and crowds.
    - 1024core 11y ago
      Why write a bot? Doesn't yapache log such events? Just run a Hadoop job on the error logs.
      - perryh2 11y ago
        I'd run it across the entire site. Sure, we do have logs, but it's not easy to access them for all *.yahoo.com. Logs from each property are ingested into different places. The infrastructure is way more complex than it should be making bare-minimum monitoring like alerts on non-200 responses on all properties difficult to maintain.
    - cpeterso 11y ago
      Shouldn't the yahoo.com servers already log when they return error responses? :)
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

WalterSear 11y ago

Morale challenges tend to go hand in hand with moral challenges.

danharaj 11y ago

I see a lot of parallels between Marissa Mayer's tenure at Yahoo and Dick Costolo's tenure at Twitter. Dick left two quarters ago and Twitter is still struggling to meet investor expectations. I have a feeling that there are structural problems at Yahoo, like Twitter, that even a unicorn CEO would have difficulty fixing. A lot of analysts and investors seem very leadership oriented in their blame anyway.

SwellJoe 11y ago
There's a strong cult of personality around our industry, in general. The belief that a special CEO can make a billion dollar company. It ignores the role of luck, the other employees (sometimes there are thousands of employees, as in the case of Yahoo!, and every single one of them can make or break the company in small ways every day), changes in the market, etc. Steve Jobs is the epitome of the Magic CEO archetype, in this school of thought, and yet, he founded expensive failures, too, and almost rode Apple into the ground, to boot. There are so many variables that it seems harmful to the industry and the world as a whole to place so much value and so much blame on CEOs when things go right or wrong. All that said, I'd like to see an experiment where a CEO steps in, cuts C-level salaries dramatically (taking the hit from people leaving who care more about the million dollar bonus than the company itself), including their own, and re-directing that money to higher wages for employees and deeper, further ranging, research and development. Kinda replicate the history of HP, in reverse: Start with high executive salaries, awful outdated products, and defeated company morale, and start building a culture that looks toward the future, takes care of everyone in the company (before C-levels get bonuses) and treats them all with respect from top to bottom, and build products that define the market not follow it. But, I've never built or run a billion dollar company. I might be an idiot that no one should ever listen to.
- seanmcdirmid 11y ago
  I wouldn't call NeXT an expensive failure, especially seeing how it laid the framework for Apple's current success. It is hard to say what would have happened if Steve Jobs stayed at Apple in the 80s....he was never actually CEO before 1997 (see http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/08/25/a-look-at-apples-ceos-from-1977-to-2011/ http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/08/25/a-look-at-apples-ceos...).

steve19 11y ago

"Ms. Mayer called a meeting with senior executives in August and asked them to sign a written agreement to stay with the company for at least three more years, according to two people familiar with the meeting." Is such an agreement enforceable? Or is this some meaningless pledge? If you want people to stay, give them a decent financial incentive.

jakejake 11y ago
You'd assume that if a CEO were asking you to sign such an agreement, they would offer some sort of incentive in return. Otherwise it seems more like an ultimatum for you to declare your loyalty.
- TylerE 11y ago
  Actually, contractually that gets really interesting. Basically, for a contract to be valid both sides have to give something, this is referred to as "consideration". Now, normally, with work-related contracts the consideration is "continuing to employ you", but with senior mgmt (golden parachutes, stock options, etc) I bet the waters are murky.
  - cstejerean 11y ago
    From what I recall "continuing to employ you" is not legally acceptable consideration, because you had the job before the contract, and therefore you are not getting anything new. If it involves a pay raise, promotion, a bonus, etc, then it can be acceptable. IANAL.
    - kylec 11y ago
      Continued employment is sufficient consideration for some contracts http://www.jacksonlewis.com/publication/continued-employment-adequate-consideration-non-compete-imposed-mid-employment-hawaii-judge-rules http://www.jacksonlewis.com/publication/continued-employment.... However, I can't imagine that if Yahoo was so desperate to retain its executives that it would fire them if they didn't sign the agreement. I'm guessing that there was some additional incentive offered.

jonesb6 11y ago

Couldn't read the article because it appears to be behind a paywall. On the topic of Marissa Mayer though, has any analysis been done that's an overview of Meyer's major decisions/actions? I seem to see pieces come out almost monthly on things she's been doing at Yahoo, but as someone who doesn't follow executive movers and shakers too much, I don't want to come to an early judgement without fully understanding what her impact is. That said, I can't help but feel that many of her early "successes" were coincidental and overly hyped, mostly as a result of Yahoo's fortunate investment in Alibaba. If I were currently seeking employment I would be extremely dubious towards anyone trying to convince me that Yahoo isn't still running on fumes, despite all the hype.

mateus1 11y ago
Just Google the title and click the first result. That's how you can beat most paywalls.
roymurdock 11y ago
Click the "Web" hyperlink under the title of the post. It saves you going to google and typing in the name of the article.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

zerocrat 11y ago

Can anyone share the article? cp /wsj/article /hn/comments

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
jonknee 11y ago
https://www.google.com/search?q=Yahoo+CEO+Marissa+Mayer+Faces+Morale+Challenge https://www.google.com/search?q=Yahoo+CEO+Marissa+Mayer+Face...
- zerocrat 11y ago
  Shit I am dumb. Thanks for the lesson. *Facepalm.
  - jonknee 11y ago
    Even better, just for this sort of thing there is a link called "web" at the top of the page that links to Google with the title. It's in the same line as flag.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

chollida1 11y ago

Sometimes, well it actually happens quite often, a company just runs its course and is better off just winding things up and closing shop. IMHO it looks like the likely end game for Yahoo is: - taken private by a Private Equity firm - divest Yahoo Japan and Alibaba - any divisions that aren't making an actual profit, (tumblr, flickr, fantasy sports, etc, will be shopped around and sold if possible, or shuttered if not possible. - search, email and the yahoo front page will be sold to Microsoft Yahoo has done everything by the MBA book to turn around the company, they are at the step of brining in Mckinsley consultants, never a terribly good sign. Sometimes, time just passes a company by and you can't do much to turn it around, its not the leadership's fault or the engineers fault. The market just says the company is no longer needed. This doesn't mean the company is un profitable. Corel was a company in the early 2000's that went this route. A company can circle the drain, making slightly less and less profit each year, slowly laying off people which causes them to miss their next quarter, which necessitates more layoffs and the circle continues until someone buys them out. I think this is the likely fate of Yahoo. The next step is to engage an investment bank to find them a takeover partner if Silver Lake doesn't want to be the one to take them private. What other possible route is there? They've brought in 4-5 CEO's each with their own vision of what yahoo should be and all of them has failed to turn the company around. What is Yahoo's area of expertise that they make money at and can do better that Google, Microsoft, Facebook or Amazon?

akg_67 11y ago
Yahoo is textbook example of failure of online "advertising revenue" only company. Most such companies failed in last dot bomb. Only Yahoo survived because it was the largest with decent cash reserves. I am sure another dot bomb like event will take out today's darlings too.
shostack 11y ago
Having watched way too much "House of Lies" where consultants often seem to be brought in to back-up the viewpoint of a given executive and make the case for whatever that person's agenda is...what would such consultants likely be doing in this case in "the real world?" I admittedly haven't had the experience of working with any consultants, so I'm curious for opinions from those who have what happens when they come in during a "typical" engagement of this nature.

onewaystreet 11y ago

The morale problem is a symptom of bad leadership. It's not going to be fixed with more bad leadership.

asdfologist 11y ago
Good leadership wouldn't have turned around MySpace. Sometimes, it's too late.
- colmvp 11y ago
  On the flipside, sometimes it seems like we rely on hindsight bias. Would we still be talking about Apple in 2015 if Jobs hadn't come back? Or Tesla if Musk hadn't taken over as CEO in 2007? Both companies had significant uphill battles. And if you had the foresight to imagine Apple in 2015 back in 1997, you're probably a rich man. Just hypothesizing but imagine if MySpace had focused its industry connections in the music industry to focus more on music instead of social networking, and pushed for an on-demand music streaming player for mobile and desktop. They had millions of dollars in the bank and a head start in the U.S. market over Spotify and Rdio. Or imagine if Blockbuster video had either taken up Netflix's offer to be bought out or had invested in online streaming long before Netflix. I'm not saying it's easy or always viable or that luck doesn't play a role, but I often think we discount the potential for a company to still exist today because the only outcome we know of is the outcome that happened rather than the potential of alternate decisions.
Bud 11y ago
Steve Jobs could come back from the dead and he would be utterly helpless to revive the abject piece of crap that is Yahoo.
- HillaryBriss 11y ago
  Warren Buffett once wrote: With few exceptions, when a manager with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for poor fundamental economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact. It's not clear to me that Yahoo's business has poor fundamental economics because I don't quite know what business it's in.

jacquesm 11y ago

Has Yahoo! stopped the lay-offs?

mmaunder 11y ago

You can bypass the paywall with this link: http://bit.ly/1XdzZgO http://bit.ly/1XdzZgO (Google search the original URL in quotes in future) Sounds like she's in a tough spot. You're pretty much forced into a situation of focusing on the good numbers when you're a public company or you'll get beaten up by the shareholders and shorts. So it's difficult to shine sunlight on the bad stuff to disinfect because that's not what public investors want to hear. Going into search? That's just crazy talk. Google has the space completely wrapped up. I think Yahoo has some excellent properties like finance.yahoo.com which is amazing and could unlock a deluge of cash with the right biz model. Retail investors visit the site in droves daily. Right now it's an advertising disaster. Prime space taken up by spammy link-baity ads injected into the main center content: "10 most popular fitness models on the planet". And prime spaces on the right taken up by amazon ads. The most targeted ads by etrade, scottrade and ameritrade are the smallest ads on the page with tiny icons on the left. They relaunched yahoo finance in September and sounds like their users hate the new site: https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/315477-finance-dd-3 https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/315477-finance-dd-3 The WSJ article isn't going to make life at Yahoo any easier unfortunately.

gelatocar 11y ago
You can also bypass the paywall by clicking the 'web' link under the post title on HN.
- avn2109 11y ago
  I am not new at all to HN and never knew this, cool :)
  - firloop 11y ago
    It was added a couple of months ago.
- rconti 11y ago
  THANK YOU. WSJ is the one site I see regularly linked that has such an intrusive paywall, and I've previously avoided them entirely for this reason. No "10 free articles", no interstitials. Just blocked.

colmvp 11y ago

I would recommend anyone interested in this story to also read the Forbes article about Mayer's problems and potential exit at Yahoo (http://www.forbes.com/sites/miguelhelft/2015/11/19/the-last-days-of-marissa-mayer/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/miguelhelft/2015/11/19/the-last-...). On top of stories about large number of executives have left over the course of 2015 (http://recode.net/2015/10/19/yahoo-talent-exodus-accelerates-as-marissa-mayers-turnaround-flounders/ http://recode.net/2015/10/19/yahoo-talent-exodus-accelerates...), the lack of vision/planning that contributed to executive discontent: > But perhaps none of these incidents damaged morale more than Mayer’s reorganization of Yahoo’s product teams. When Mayer launched the effort last fall, everyone agreed the existing structure had outlived its usefulness—for instance, mobile products was partitioned from other groups. But Mayer embarked on the process without laying out a grand vision for it. Instead, she began sketching out different scenarios in one-on-one meetings with various executives, floating one plan by one exec and a different by another. Unable to make up her mind, the process dragged on for months. “She went through 20 different permutations,” says an executive with knowledge of the process. “The product guys were twisting in the wind, not knowing what they were going to run.” > Product releases slowed to a trickle, and a turf war brewed as executives became concerned with their futures. Jon McCormack, a star executive who had joined Yahoo in January from Amazon and was promised a broad engineering portfolio covering critical areas like mobile, landed in the vacuum created by Mayer’s indecision. He was gone by the end of February and now works for Google. When Mayer announced the new structure in April, it was too late. “That was the beginning of everyone losing faith,” says another senior executive. “That’s when people started to look for other jobs.” I don't consider being the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company that's still trying to figure out where it fits in the 21st century a job anyone could possibly do, but it seems like Mayer's strategy has been a little all over the place with no real gain in any segment. From the WSJ article: > As her strategy has shifted, Ms. Mayer has variously cast Yahoo as a challenger to Netflix Inc. in online video content and as a threat to Google Inc. in Web search, but has made little progress toward either goal. I'm just not sure where she's trying to push Yahoo towards. What is their vision?

taurath 11y ago

There hasn't really been a "focus" at Yahoo in a long while - it feels like the new HP, where almost all the folks who built previously successful businesses within it have moved on, while at the same time the company is too big and integrated to make any meaningful changes or grow new profit centers (given that their cash cow is stalling). Its corporate stagflation. They are too diversified and have too many products to move quickly, generate almost no enthusiasm between either users (all old guard) or engineers/employees, and there's very little that any executive or employee can do.

Steko 11y ago

See also news this morning that y-mail is blocking users who are running ad-blockers; I'd bet their confidentiality terms are headed for a revision too as the user info fire sale gets underway.

gcb0 11y ago

the fact that the SVP of marketing left to join the lowest grade studio Hollywood have is worrisome. so much so I'd think it was a demission and not someone leaving on will...

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

pavornyoh 11y ago

A genuine question for you. What exactly does Yahoo do? When I think of Google, I think of search. With Amazon, an ecommerce giant for my shopping needs comes to mind. But with Yahoo, nothing comes to mind except all the spams I got when I had their email...

AnimalMuppet 11y ago
Actually, their spam filtering is quite good these days.
porsupah 11y ago
For me, they're: (1) the owner of Flickr, an acquisition they've tried to futz around with, but haven't actually managed to damage too much yet. (True, the site design's become much more heavyweight, but that's a general web design issue) Interestingly, whilst they tried to go ad-only, removing "Pro" accounts, they later reinstated them - but with an oddly tone-deaf press release that trumpeted that account level's availability again, and that rates wouldn't go up for two years. Fair enough, except Pro had been $25/yr, and they quietly noted they'd be $50/yr in the future. Is ad-only revenue that strong to consider dispelling paid accounts? (2) The original curated web index. Fiendishly difficult to scale, absolutely, but while it lasted, it was remarkably useful. Could such still work? It'd be a tremendous challenge, but, Wikipedia might suggest so - it's not as if Wikipedia is free of dead/changed links, but the footnote links do indeed tend to be useful. Yet, as I recall, their finances are/were quite robust - we may well simply not be Yahoo's audience.
- rodgerd 11y ago
  > Could such still work? Effectively it would competing with Reddit, HN, Metafilter, and similar sites where the owners have an army of people curating the web for them, for free. Which makes it a hard ask. Obviously there's a demand because Reddit, HN, MF, etc, exist, but enough to make money off of?
  - visakanv 11y ago
    Actually IMHO the curation of Reddit and HN is pretty bad. Just my $0.02. My problem is that it's focused on what's new and relevant. The web sorely needs (IMHO again) really well curated paths that are organized from first principles rather than novelty. But I'm not an expert, just a random guy with an opinion.

jgord 11y ago

my perception is - they dont love the internet. they are missing the whole "fuck you, were yahoo, were building the internet" chutzpah which was so charming, and for which we all have a little glowing candlewick in our hearts for. For example .. I really wanted YUI to be usable .. it was so close.. but they didn't listen when people gave them feedback - eg. telling them to polish the table grid widget, this control was arguably the reason people were even using yui at all. The internet pluggable data feed pipes thing was promising.. almost there but not quite gelling in the developer group-mind. They have to hire some really opinionated people and let them loose on skunkworks [ but realworld ] projects . I look at the yahoo front page once every 3m to see if its still dead.. I check my email there due to nostalgia. They need to forget about ad revenue bullshit, get fired up and make stuff. I can guarantee there are great people at yahoo gnawing their arms off because they have nothing to rally around. They are dying anyway .. its time to hit for the bleachers.

jgord 11y ago
I read the article - There is not a single bullet point I give a shit about, that isn't summarized by their share price. I look at the yahoo.com front page, I look at msn.com front page - they look similar and are both spam to a first order approximation. If they wanted to, they could turn sentiment around in 3 months. There are so many things they can do : - become the datafeed API for the internet - buy a startup thats kicking ass [ and leave them alone to win ] - buy a tech video review media site thats growing fast - put up a $200k prize for best Yahoo innovation app - take 7 devs / designers / product people, put them in a room and let them have at it to make an app For any of these to work, they have to build a firewall around it, insulating if from the process of a big company, so it feels like a startup.

gamechangr 11y ago

Black turtle neck. She needs to wear the black turtle neck. It's the only way...to turn this ship around.

Bud 11y ago

Uh, she faces more than a mere "morale challenge". Her job is impossible. Her company is a gigantic load of bovine excrement with literally no redeeming qualities, products, or domain expertise to build upon. It should have been shut down five years ago and put out of its misery.

melted 11y ago
You do realize that "gigantic load of bovine excrement" describes, like, 90% of Silicon Valley, right? :-)
- HillaryBriss 11y ago
  It used to be farmland.

hooande 11y ago

Yahoo started as a couple of people who said "This internet thing has a lot of content now, let's try to organize it for people." They should go back to doing that, and throw 20 years worth of technology and cultural growth at the problem. Along with as much manpower and machine learning tech as hundreds of millions of dollars can buy. I do enjoy the drama of the Mayer Saga, but it doesn't seem like any of Yahoo's attempts at innovation are working. They shouldn't be competing with Google in search. They should be redefining search. Some times the best way to change the game is to go back to basics. Of course if I knew exactly what that looked like, I would be too busy walking the path to wealth to write hn comments. But it does seem like Yahoo isn't doing anything innovative right now. Their most valuable properties, mail and the yahoo home page, are simply good enough versions of products that have become commodities. They began by offering a service that no one else was providing, and have ended up being relegated to being the internet's generic alternative to everything. It's Hail Mary time. If I were in Mayer's position, I would find a way to burn a few hundred million dollars of the alibaba money on a moon shot before the board had time to vote me out. The odds against may be overwhelming, but it's better than slightly slowing the angular velocity of their circle around the drain. With the recent tone of press articles about her tenure and what that does to an executive's reputation, I don't see what she has to lose.

chimeracoder 11y ago
> They shouldn't be competing with Google in search. They should be redefining search. Yahoo is hardly trying to compete with Google in search; they have literally been outsourcing search to Bing for several years now. The problem is that they're trying to figure out what they should be doing instead, and struggling.
tayo42 11y ago
>But it does seem like Yahoo isn't doing anything innovative right now. Aren't they starting to stream nfl games for free? The first one they did was from what I heard handled very well. I thought there was talks about more.
- TheCondor 11y ago

PhilWright 11y ago

Whenever I see a struggling company like this I ask myself the simple question. If the company didn't exist, would there be a need to create it? In the case of Yahoo I think the answer is no. If they disappeared tomorrow there would be no compelling reason for others to try and fill the gap it left behind. Hell, I doubt most people would even noticed they had gone. So they need to build a new business from the dying ashes of the current revenue. At the moment it does not look like the CEO has any good ideas on how to do that.

DannoHung 11y ago
I object only on the grounds that Flickr is the only good photo site for people who really care about their photos. Having tried to use 500px for a few months, they cannot even manage to do album privacy correctly.
- zanny 11y ago
  I just use imgur. Am I doing something wrong?
  - ghaff 11y ago
    I don't think you're doing something wrong but I think you're doing something differently from a Flickr Pro subscriber who is using the site to store curated high quality photos online.
  - EdiX 11y ago
    Imgur will aggressively recompress any image above 5MB. A few years ago it used to be even worse.
- crucifiction 11y ago
  SmugMug
- jinst8gmi 11y ago
  That, and I'd be disappointed that my email account would vanish, along with years worth of mail.

philip1209 11y ago

I feel like Netflix understands how to keep morale high, and that's paying top of market and firing people who don't deserve that pay. Free lunches, massage rooms, etc are all marginally important compared to good pay. Perhaps Yahoo could innovate further by offering private offices. This isn't the panacea for innovation or a large company, but if the goal is to raise morale and hire top talent - I know those two things combined would get some experienced candidates to consider joining Yahoo.

kylec 11y ago
Or, you know, allow remote work. There are lots of talented programmers that don't live in the SF Bay area.
jedberg 11y ago
Those were some of the things that they did first. In her first month she made the meals free and gave raises to the top folks. Then she authorized management to hire new people at top of market. I had a few friends leave Netflix for Yahoo because they actually got raises and believed in the vision. Many have subsequently left when they realized the problems run deeper than that.

MrGando 11y ago

Is the story available to non-subscribers?

datashovel 11y ago

Don't get me wrong. I love the fact that Yahoo took a chance on Marissa Mayer. The thing that I can't overlook is none of the stories I have read indicate this was a matter of a perfect vision that was just poorly executed. All of the stories I've read lead me to believe there has been a somewhat muddled vision and less than spectacular execution on top of that. Then again it was only mid-2012 that she was appointed CEO. Not enough time IMO, though the stories these days make one wonder if allowing a full 5 years (I think a reasonable minimum term for CEO of a large corporation like Yahoo) is going to be more destructive than constructive. Especially when there seem to be many documented failures, and not much to hang one's hat on, in the form of successes, to this point.

phamilton 11y ago
I'm not sure that "perfect vision that was just poorly executed" is worth much. If execution is the hard part, then any sort of vision that didn't include execution is just nonsense.
- datashovel 11y ago
  In terms of assessing a CEO's impact on an organization I think it could play an important role. For example if people are trying to knock down the doors to purchase / use what Yahoo is working on but they're abandoning because of scalability issues or buggy systems or continuous delays in delivery timelines, this sounds to me like we're dealing more with execution issues. On the other hand, if the site / products hum along without glitches, yet are receiving little to no attention or traction from the outside world, this could be a sign that the company is on the wrong track in a more fundamental way. Perhaps more directly linked to the "output" / "work product" of Marissa Mayer as CEO.

smegel 11y ago

Google is getting platform locking, much like Microsoft. Even if Yahoo did come out with a world class Docs, or Email, or Youtube, or Blogger, or Sites, or AppEngine - I would still stick with the Google equivalent because I am all connected. I sign into Chrome or an Android device and everything just works and syncs. I am locked into Google and I don't even have a Google+ account.

IndianAstronaut 11y ago
All Yahoo has to do is commit to no tracking of users and I would switch in a heartbeat.
- pgodzin 11y ago
  So create a product that is hard to make money off of and impossible to track how users are using the applications in order to improve them?

pjzedalis 11y ago

Marissa comes from Google so I'd like to see more developer focus. Here are some ideas: - Buy Joyent. Get's you into the cloud game and you gain SmartOS and Node chops. - Buy BitTorrent and capitalize on its growth and the new sync technology. - Make YUI popular again in the responsive web era. Tumblr, Flickr, Develpr? - Probably should stop trying to out-Netflix Netflix. Community was never going to work but I understand the thinking. - Somebody is going to buy Groove Music (Xbox Music). I hope it's not Yahoo.

yeukhon 11y ago
I say none of these. * Too many "cloud" competitors, enough with trying to squeeze a margin. * I wouldn't want to compete with Box, DropBox, GDrive, S3, OneDrive, or BitTorrent Sync. To support enterprise customer at this level, I think is something Yahoo! not too familiar with. * Another Javascript framework to resurrect, probably time to rethink about how many JS developers you have to hire to to maintain the high visibility and demand from the community. * Community was a good show, but Yahoo's UI for their video content is just bloat. Too much information, graphic wise not too appealing. They have a shot, but so few people in my circle know about Yahoo video. But I think it still has a shot. * Why would Microsoft sell Xbox Music? I think the best thing for Yahoo to do, is to do sports and finance. They can continue to build contents around it. Yes there is ESPNSport, MLB, NBA etc but Yahoo can probably do better if they focus on building a community. They already have a huge sport community, why not use it? They already have content makers so make finance more attractive, try to go after Bloomberg. Social is dominated by Facebook and Twitter (and their acquired products like Instagram and Vine), but there is still much to explorer around social, not just adding friends.

nugget 11y ago

You need to own and exploit a monopoly in order to grow into a true tech heavyweight. Facebook has social (and all the traffic and user data that comes with it), Microsoft has the OS and utilities, Apple has the OS, hardware, and apps, and Google has search and (tbd) Android apps. Unless you monopolize something of extreme value (user data or a platform), you should focus on just making money, although unfortunately Wall Street doesn't value this very highly (see IAC). Yahoo has a bunch of great second and third place properties (search, news, weather, email) but no monopolies, and for this reason even the transition to mobile under MM was unlikely to move the needle for them. If they slimmed down and brought in the right kind of management the core properties could be extremely profitable.

bad_user 11y ago
I think you're missing the forest from the trees. Monopolies in software are created through excellence. If Facebook "has social" that's because they were and still are the best social network. Of course, now that they are big, they've got a huge lock-in effect, but that's besides the point. Microsoft "has the OS" (and I might add Office) because Windows really has been the best general purpose, generally available OS. Other attempts had potential, but they either keep failing to be as polished or stable for end-users (desktop Linux), or have not been available for all PCs (Mac OS, OS X), or they didn't survive for long enough (OS/2, BeOS). Not sure what monopoly Apple has, but it's no point in arguing that most of what Apple does is technically excellent and beautifully executed. Google "has search" because they had and still have the best search engine and their search engine is indispensable for most people. People talking about DuckDuckGo never tried doing searches from outside the US. Google also has Android, Gmail, Calendar, Docs and Maps, all of which are excellent.
- nugget 11y ago
  No doubt you need to be excellent to create a monopoly (maintenance mode is much easier). But you also need the ingredients for it to exist in the first place (network effect, high value/exclusive/monetize-able data, high competitive barriers). Did Yahoo ever have a market like that, except with search early on? (They might have been able to do something interesting with messaging or mail early on to lock in those users, but they didn't.) They had a lot of eyeballs, a lot of ad salespeople, a lot of ad dollars, (later) a lot of ad network tech, a lot of great content, a lot of great niche sites (flickr). But nothing that competitors couldn't enter and replicate fairly quickly. If you were Yahoo today, and you could execute flawlessly on a single area of your current business or something closely adjacent to one of your current businesses (excluding search, which they continue to exit), what would you pick?

1024core 11y ago

It would be worthwhile to read Paul Graham's essay now, if you haven't already done so: "what happened to Yahoo"[1] The thing that jumps out at me is the lack of "hacker" culture at Yahoo. Sure, they have a few really smart people there; but the culture is missing. As long as this is the case, Yahoo will continue to wander aimlessly. Marissa (or the next CEO) would do well to work on putting together a hacker culture, and get rid of most of the PMs, Directors and VPs. Yahoo is too management-heavy, and hacker-light. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html

dude_abides 11y ago

"The CEO has hired management consultant McKinsey & Co. to look for areas of the company to cut, said a person familiar with the matter." Shudder.

ksec 11y ago

From my extremely limited knowledge, and mainly from reading, and reading between the line on others people's view. I think Marrissa will be a great COO, but she lacks the vision. Even people who used to work with her ( Eric Schmidt) had said she is the most quantitative CEO in silicon valley, if not the world. And from many other pieces of information she likes to measure everything, from colour, design or human aspect. But that is the problem. You cant measure something now and tell you what happens in the future. If you could do that you would be rich in no time. You want to steer the ship to the right direction. She believe she can Buy into talents with the so called talent acquisition. But if the company are doing some work they love, they will leave. It really is that simple. Talents have no problem finding different Jobs, so you need to do something rather then paying them higher. Sense of priority, what needs to be done first, it seems to me they are lack of focus. Google too, but google dont have the financial problem yahoo has. The lack of taste. There, quote from Steve Jobs. I dont know how to say it better. Sometimes I wish i could get to say a few words direct to Marissa. From a user perspective.

trhway 11y ago
>I think Marrissa will be a great COO, but she lacks the vision. Remember Fiorina? The same situation of a midlevel absolutely mediocre exec getting lucky at catching a huge wave bringing her straight to the top. Just a female, ie. charming, version of a "Yes"-man.

jackgavigan 11y ago

If you strip out the Alibaba and Yahoo Japan stakes, the market is valuing Yahoo's "core" at less than $8bn. It has $5.88bn of cash, cash equivalents and short-term marketable securities on its balance sheet, which means that the core business is valued at less $1.5bn. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UHMfzlmE7HXY_ph9BN686gOCiji1bQ-rsbnjtKD3oho/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UHMfzlmE7HXY_ph9BN68... The balance sheet figure for "Property and equipment" is higher than that. http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/YHOO/900583056x0x163717/e3b6723a-7d29-4a37-8dff-5bcf3a67d1d3/YHOO_III_BalanceSheetGAAP.pdf http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/YHOO/900583056x0x1637...

adventured 11y ago
In fact it doesn't mean that. Its the assets on Yahoo's balance sheet that are being discounted by investors. Yahoo's business receives a multiple rather than a discount - whether that's a multiple on sales or earnings. Cash and assets held on a corporate balance sheet are basically never $1 to $1 accounted for in a market cap. You can easily see that in action on the balance sheets of: Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, Comcast, Time Warner Cable. Are we to pretend that Berkshire Hathaway's business is worth ~$140 billion after we strip out all of its assets (cash, stock holdings etc)? So its earnings are getting a 7 or 8 multiple? Obviously that's not actually how valuations work. If you stripped out all of their assets, they'd very likely still get a fair market valuation on the operating business and its potential, perhaps 13-15 times earnings. A similar bogus claim was made that Yahoo was worth less than zero, when its Alibaba stake was at its peak. That's not actually how things work in reality, that scenario solely exists in a calculation. In reality, if you spin off all of Yahoo's assets (specifically Japan / Alibaba), the business would still be given a multiple, a meaningful valuation. Even lowly AOL was still worth $4.4 billion in the Verizon acquisition, and Yahoo's business is two to three times more valuable than that. There isn't a single example in the public market, in which a corporation with a relatively clean balance sheet, and $4 billion in sales, is given a negative ~$X billion valuation - much less a company that has historically been given high valuations as a semi-tech company. Which proves how absurdly wrong the negative value premise is (or the $1 to $1 asset discounting method applied to the assets, which are clearly not worth $1 to $1 in the market cap given taxation issues alone).

ZenoArrow 11y ago

Am I missing something here? Isn't Yahoo still highly profitable? So some senior execs left, so what, I'm sure they'll still have plenty of people wanting to work for them. Look beyond the spin from the WSJ. Look at the profits. Are Yahoo losing money?

teh_klev 11y ago

For the less gifted, such as myself, at getting around paywalls: https://archive.is/8NoAM https://archive.is/8NoAM

aws_ls 11y ago

IMHO Yahoo's biggest mistake was never grokking search. And they had two opportunities. First: When Larry and Sergei wanted to sell their search engine to them for a few millions, in the late 90s. They said they are focused on curated content, which was the future they apparently believed in. (Just paraphrasing from memory, the stories read in various articles and books on Google & search). But I also wonder, even if Yahoo had bought them out then, would the world be different today. Perhaps, the inevitable future of search would have been just a bit delayed. May be evolved like social networks. Second: Killing their own search engine in early 2000s, when they had some 30% search share. That was after they tried using Google's search API. Then they started to use Bing. I clearly remember that although Google was the best, but one knew people (lazy friends) who would use Yahoo search. DDG has shown, there is always a market. edit: typo

sjg007 11y ago

Things we need: 1. There needs to be a viable YouTube alternative. 2. They should take their experience with NFL streaming to expand that market for the NFL and add in other TV type content. This can be delivered through apps and apple tv like devices. College football is a market that would do well with this. Make a deal with the NCAA. It is impossible for cord cutters to watch their college team unless they are on watchespn or fox sports go. And even then you need to borrow your credentials. 3. Facebook M, Google Now, Siri, Cortana.. Yahoo needs to have a play here. You might integrate this tightly with #2. Buy and/or integrate: Crackle, Pandora, Roku, maybe Spotify, Cinemax. Why? All these need to be integrated into a consistent platform, each offer ad revenue opportunity, consolidation. In addition you can ramp up subscription revenues or on demand revenue.