8 ms·

Transformation at Yahoo Foiled by Its Leader’s Inability to Bet the Farm

89 points by kanamekun 11y ago

iaw 11y ago
I saw the writing on the wall when she cancelled the work from home policy and forced a lot of parents to either quit or start coming into the office. While, on the flip side she had an executive package that included day care right off of her office. I decided I would never work for a company that hired Marissa Mayer after that. I screen my employers more carefully than they screen me, and that move showed she didn't give one shit about any of hers.
- greyman 11y ago
  But wasn't that move following her observation, that (some of those) work from home people just haven't work?
  - iaw 11y ago
    Yes and no. The stated objective was to improve collaboration in "hallway and cafeteria" discussions [1]. Privately, former Yahoo employees said that the policy led to "people slacking off like crazy, not being available, and spending a lot of time on non-Yahoo projects," which is a problem with the management of employees not the policy itself. If someone is working from home and not meeting their duties they should be fired. Eliminating the policy was a band-aid, having hard conversations and getting rid of the slackers (and their managers) would have been the cure. [1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/26/us-workplace-flexibility-idUSBRE91P0S720130226 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/26/us-workplace-flexi...
  - ryanfitz 11y ago
    I bet if she scanned the work from office people she would also find people who just don't work.
    - iaw 11y ago
      At one horrible startup I worked for I would do 3 hours of work and then wait out another 6 hours because of the 9 hour face time expectation. I had high output because I'm good at what I do but they couldn't wrap their heads around not having me there constantly. I ended up quitting because I was tired of watching my boss browse Facebook and sports blogs all day.
      - aswanson 11y ago
        Guessing they didn't get a good exit?
        iaw 11y ago
        Before I got there they rolled the dice and walked away from a $250MM acquisition offer and ousted their original CEO. They were somehow able to acquire additional funding before I left but, based on the numbers I saw, they were using questionable models to indicate that they were more profitable than they are. They still exist and will probably take another 18 months to wither and die. The experience taught me to look hard for red flags and to hold my company as accountable as myself.
        aswanson 11y ago
        Absolutely, you are as much of a business as your employer.
  - 67726e 11y ago
    My old boss had a very relevant point about why the company would fire folks as they did. If you have a guy on your team who usually doesn't work enough or comes late and leaves early you can fire him, or put up aa time clock, but the second you put up that time clock you've just alienated all the other good employees who didn't need babysitting. If people abuse the system, fire them and don't punish the loyal and hardworking. Mass punishment may work in the military, but this is the private sector and I have options.
    - ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
      Mass punishment is also pretty shitty in the military.
      - pc86 11y ago
        It's much different though in that the goal to get the group to a point where it is self-correcting (e.g. of new troops).
  - humanrebar 11y ago
    That might have been a machete approach to a problem more appropriate for a few dozen scalpels. Maybe Yahoo didn't have time to sort through all those cases, but it shouldn't be surprised that: 1. Yahoo might have pushed out many people who didn't deserve it. Many of them are working parents and perhaps people with disabilities. 2. Yahoo might have pushed out "cheaters" without really telling them why, leaving them disgruntled about work-from-home policies instead of embarrassed that they were caught not doing their jobs. 3. Yahoo singled out a certain category of "cheaters" unfairly. I'll bet $5000 that there were at least twenty always-at-their-desks Yahoo employees who "wasted" a significant amount of time on HN, facebook, reddit, Yahoo video, or just talking about hobbies and sports with coworkers. Taking the ax to at-home slackers and ignoring the general slacker problem is slightly unfair. It doesn't project communication and transparency; it teaches employees to hide their routine from their bosses as much as possible.
- discardorama 11y ago
  > I saw the writing on the wall when she cancelled the work from home policy Disclaimer: I was at Yahoo when she came and implemented this policy. It irritates me to see uninformed people making such blanket comments. You have no idea what the policy was; I do. Let me explain it, in the hope that you (and others with this mindset) may learn something about it, and maybe even change their views. There was a group of Yahoos ( < 200 ) who had a permanent work-from-home exemption (if you can call it that; there was never much of an enforced policy earlier). They never came in to an office (except for the occasional IT issue and package pickup). There were a couple of incidents where these remote workers were found to be moonlighting. So a study was done to see how many of these remote workers actually VPNed in. After a month or two, it turned out, a good number of them were actually working part-time. So a blanket ban was issued, with the caveat that if you could make a compelling case, you would still be allowed to WFH. In fact, a colleague of mine continued to work from home after this policy change. A number of strong people continued to WFH; a few were let go; and the rest had to hoof it to office. Now, the mistake Marissa made wasn't with this policy; but it was in how she didn't go the next step: holding the managers of the shirkers responsible. Which brings me to my thinking about why it's so hard to turn around Yahoo: the middle management. (Please do me a favor and read PG's excellent post http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html after you're done reading this). Yahoo is filled with managers whose sole contribution is survival. There is no accountability for screwing up. Fucking up products badly has never gotten anyone fired. Did you know Yahoo went through 3 different iterations of an attempt at a "social network"? Each and every time, sane minds pointed out that the concept was bad, the UX was bad, etc.; and yet the managers prevailed and it went down in flames, as predicted. The joke in Yahoo used to be: throw everything into version 1.0, because you never know if there will be a version 1.1. Marissa is failing not because she's a bad CEO (having seen Yahoo CEOs like Terry Semel, I can assure you she's the best they've had in the last 10 years); it's because she has no supporting cast. She trusts people too much. One manager once said to me (about her): meh, she'll be gone in a couple of years; I'll still be around. He had been there since 2001, and had no intention of moving anywhere. Collected fat paychecks by taking credit for others' work. And he was just one of many, many in there. Over the years I encountered so many people like him, where you had no idea what actually they contributed to the company. /rant
- snowwrestler 11y ago
  I'm a parent. "Working from home," if the kids are also in the home without supplemental childcare, is bullshit. It is impossible to parent children and do good technical work at the same time. You know how folks complain about open office plans? Because of the distracting noise and potential for interruptions? Well imagine an open office with coworkers who have no sense of social tact, cannot take care of themselves, and have a constant deep need for your attention. That's what it is like for a parent to work at home and parent their kids at the same time. So when I hear that parents at Yahoo were using "work at home" as a substitute for childcare, I think that Yahoo did the right thing by cancelling the policy. That is pretty clear abuse of it.
ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
What a silly article. Yahoo has been doomed for quite sometime, and I doubt anyone could've turned it around. But then I'm not a clickbaity tech journo.
xiaoma 11y ago
>There’s just one example everyone can think of — Apple — but that effort took nearly a decade to show results It didn't take a decade. Apple was months away from bankruptcy when Jobs went back.
- johnchristopher 11y ago
  But it didn't take months to turn the Apple of those days into the Apple of today.
  - ssharp 11y ago
    I'd say by the third iteration of both OSX and the iPod that it was clear Apple had turned itself around. There were obviously still a lot of gains to be made, but by 2004 the company was strong and there was a clear foundation laid. Apple started to skyrocket shortly after. Granted, this was a longer time frame, between 1997 and 2003/4, but there were consistent signs along the way that improvements were happening and Jobs' decisions on where to make cuts and where to focus were correct. I think it's hard to say the same thing for Yahoo.
  - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    True - but how is the Yahoo of today different from the Yahoo of 2012? Yahoo has always been a bulging cupboard full of random services, and that hasn't changed. One of the things Jobs brought back to Apple was strategy - not just a strategy for specific products, but a focus on creating certain kinds of customer experiences and expectations. Mayer hasn't done anything similar at Yahoo. She's been a tactical manager, not a strategic CEO. She keeps trying to do strategy with things like Project Index, but most of her acquisitions and ideas seem to have been impulse buys - arguably on the premise that the typical Yahoo user is someone a lot like herself.
- Agathos 11y ago
  And how does a columnist get away with writing that sentence without mentioning IBM?
  - 11y ago
greyman 11y ago
The problem is, that Yahoo didn't have any unique technology when she took over. Creating one almost from scratch and make success with it - in such a short time of 3 years - is quite difficult. But I tend to agree with the author's sentiment, that she probably just didn't have any transformation plan... she just wanted to do incremental improvements in the areas Yahoo was strong enough. What I am missing is why it is called a failure after such a short time. Can't they just let her continue?
- iaw 11y ago
  She's making nearly $1 million a month and hasn't demonstrated any long-term initiatives that will actually make Yahoo worth anything to it's investors. They brought her in because they thought she was a golden child and paid her as such, it's been ~4 years and with no results. Even worse, left to it's own devices Yahoo probably could have avoided the huge morale issues she created. She was given huge latitude by the board to make decisions and show that they were valid. In the end she created an environment that led to an exodus of top talent. She's a good high-level executive but not really a CEO.
  - jonlucc 11y ago
    I think she even might make a great CEO, but not at Yahoo. They've had a very difficult problem to solve, and there might be a handful of people capable of righting the ship.
- x0x0 11y ago
  sometimes executing well is enough. Yahoo should be able to leverage their homepage to jumpstart other businesses.
swang 11y ago
I wonder if a big problem is that Yahoo couldn't really plant their flag on (for example) video and completely change the company towards that rapidly. Too many people still use the current version of their site and changing that could have alienated people Yahoo is still relatively popular in some Asian countries because they prefer the everything on the same site web portal.
uptownfunk 11y ago
Glad I didn't pursue that role as apm lol. But always easy to say shoulda coulda woulda
humanrebar 11y ago
> Instead of making a single big bet that might have focused the company on something completely different and potentially groundbreaking, Ms. Mayer staked out a lot of small and midsize positions, rarely committing to anything early enough to make a difference. For Ms. Mayer, original programming was just one of dozens of products in a portfolio that remains too complex to understand. Other sources indicate that Mayer is very much a metrics-based decision maker (a). I'm wondering if that's the result of putting a metrics-based decision maker at the head of a technology company. For sustaining innovation, carefully finding a local maximum seems fine, but in a dynamic field, you also need to be able to make a big move based on a more qualitative understanding of your surroundings. As a technical contributor, I've been on-and-off frustrated my whole career by quantitative managers asking for promises of real profit before committing to cleaning up technical debt. There's no honest way to come up with a good number here. You can't solve the problem thirty times and then present a high mean and low p-value. "Keep doing what we're doing but maybe 5% better" requires absolutely no proof, in contrast. You don't have to prove that COBOL-based system XYZ won't blow up in your face or that frames-in-frames webpage mycompany.com/abc won't eventually look unprofessional and affect the company's brand. I'm wondering if Mayer's "inability to bet the farm" is a higher-level version of the same problem... setting the bar too high for definitive proof creates barriers to strategic moves into areas with incomplete information. a) http://www.businessinsider.com/how-marissa-mayer-figured-out-work-at-home-yahoos-were-slacking-off-2013-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/how-marissa-mayer-figured-out...
- iaw 11y ago
  I think you have a valid, and insightful, point. Metrics are meaningless for visionary projects because there's nothing there to measure yet. I actually would have been happy if Yahoo resurrected a web portal and built social search to address the failings of Google, but instead there was this weird unfocused acquisition spree.
  - 2close4comfort 11y ago
    I think you both are on to something. It does seem that there is a lack of focus and direction which I think makes and organization spread in any and all directions that they perceive profit. With focus in any one direction the org with have path on which they can build off of instead of running in all directions at once with no one ever making a real breakthrough. Being metric based just means that you are more focused on building shareholder value than making long-term decisions. That works well in some businesses, in others and I think this is more true in Technology this is not a valid long-term strategy.
seunosewa 11y ago
When you bet the farm, you win, or you're fired. Especially as a Yahoo CEO. So she's wise not to.
- mentat 11y ago
  When you're a CEO at that level you can always get a new gig and you always get a golden parachute. Always.
- iaw 11y ago
  She's received $1 million a month since she started. What does being fired matter after a few months? It's better, in my opinion, to bet big and fail than be crippled by paralysis.
  - Touche 11y ago
    Better for who? I don't see any reason why you would want to "bet big" at an established company. Betting big and failing puts you in a worse position. Sell the company to someone else and let them "bet big" if they want, or do what a lot of failed companies do and make a lot of money as it slowly unwinds.
    - iaw 11y ago
      So what's better? A slow death or a fast one? As an investor I'd rather a fast death, salvage what capital I have remaining after the death, and invest it elsewhere. A slow death means that the long-term value of my money keeps decreasing over time as it's trapped in a weak investment with the hope that it may improve. As an employee, I'd rather work for a company trying to accomplish something big than keeping the boat floating in the same direction. What's the difference between working for Yahoo and Comcast in this context? Both of them aren't doing anything all that innovative or interesting. As an investor and an employee it's better to bet big and fail then to never try. If the company was established and successful I'd agree with you fully, but the company wasn't successful for nearly a decade before they brought her in. This, in my opinion, invalidates the 'stay the course' strategy.
deleted 11y ago
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pmlnr 11y ago
They could have been 500px, if Flickr was addressed in time ( or just left as an incubated project instead of forcing integration, see http://gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost-the-internet http://gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost-... ) - and maybe not with a sync-up-everything-on-first run android app. They could have been a lot of things but they managed to smash every potential idea with the tight, corporate-wide integration. They still have the Yahoo! Finance, which I believe, is without competition. Focus on that, stay ahead of competition, if all the rest if falling apart anyway. And start killing the rest of the services which are making less and less money. As much as I dislike the decisions Google made with dropping the Reader, Labs, etc., I understand the reasoning, and that is what Yahoo should have done as well.
- rs999gti 11y ago
  Don't forget Yahoo Sports and their excellent Fantasy Sports platform. Those two properties in themselves could be a separate company or the backbone to the two big players in fantasy sports.
- iaw 11y ago
  Yahoo finance is the only Yahoo product that I use, it is exactly what it tries to be and meets all my needs. It's too bad that that can't be said about the rest of their products.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >They could have been 500px, if Flickr was addressed in time Is 500px really anything to write home about though? Seems even more marginal and doomed to fail than Flickr.
  - snowwrestler 11y ago
    Flickr gets, like, 100x the traffic that 500px does.
devit 11y ago
Well, the only valuable thing that Yahoo has is the brand and multi-service portal, so what they need to do is to buy or partner with other companies to make great Yahoo! Thing services and improve their existing ones, perhaps by spinning them off while keeping the Yahoo! branding and some stock. For that, they'd need a CEO with great deal-making and people skills and an intuitive grasp of what the average person cares and is going to care about. Marissa Mayer doesn't really seem a great fit, since she seems more of an introvert great at perfecting a product, as opposed to someone great at communicating and making deals, and she is also probably not very close herself to the average Yahoo user. She could possibly try to innovate in advertising technology though, although I'm not sure if it's possible to much better there.
deleted 11y ago
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chollida1 11y ago
One thing that Yahoo highlights is the importance of why you need to take care of your share price. I've seen a few people here ask why a company would care about their share price after they've gone public. It affects your company both internally and externally. Having a rising share price means you can play a different game than the rest of your competitors. Internaly it helps hire and retain good employees. Ask anyone who started at Microsoft in 1990 and worked their for a decade, or Google from 2004 until 2014. I'd bet most of them would have gladly given up their salary for more option grants. Externally it means Facebook can pay 15 Billion for WhatsApp. I'm sure Yahoo was very interested in WhatsApp, but 1) couldn't justify paying 15 Billion almost 1/2 of their value for the app 2) Who in their right mind would take Yahoo stock over FB stock? Sadly everything is going wrong for Yahoo, - Alibaba's shares have dropped since they went public - it now looks like they are going to have to pay around 20% of their Alibaba holdings in tax ( about 7 Billion). - Anyone who is going to buy some of their assets is going to have to pick up some money loosing businesses to get a deal done, which will make negotiations much tougher and probably mean the teams that get picked up are going to be cut down My new favorite theory that is floating around is that Alibaba actually acquires Yahoo's Alibaba stake and Yahoo's front page. Microsoft still acquires the search assets and mail. Google acquires Flickr and the fantasy sports and finance are spun out into a new company./
- sbierwagen 11y ago
  Maybe throw some line breaks into that second <pre> block.
deleted 11y ago
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jfoster 11y ago
I'm not convinced betting the farm was even necessary. What would be wrong with continuing business as usual whilst attempting a larger initiative that could deliver long term growth?
JulianMorrison 11y ago
Ugh, now I'm worried Yahoo will drag down Tumblr, which is a genuinely unique and useful thing.
- soylentcola 11y ago
  Tumblr is certainly popular but it always reminded me of LiveJournal: a sort of simplified blog-lite with the ability to comment or follow pages/people that you like. For the blogger, there's the ability to go as simple as just posting links and images or customize your layout to some degree. The thing that always struck me when I looked through tumblr is that essentially all of the "comments" are just the equivalent of likes or retweets and less actual comment threads. Always seemed like sort of a waste but I guess people use it more like a "richer" version of Twitter without the character limit and with easier embedding of media.
  - JulianMorrison 11y ago
    The thing Tumblr does that's unique is: to join the comment thread you have to have a blog, and your reply goes on your blog (and includes an automatically generated reference to the blogs of each of the other people in the thread). That may sound odd and awkward and in many ways it is, but the consequence is that every conversation connects you to many other people to "follow". And then the posts you get from them on your dash connect you to others. So with Tumblr, it's extremely easy to form "communities" - and to find them.
  - wan23 11y ago
    The lack of comment threads is a feature. It prevents other people from interjecting into the story you want to tell with your blog. For example, if you post something on YouTube it's kind of inevitable that someone will come along and comment that they hate your face, whereas on Tumblr you can write that comment but you have to reblog the item to your own blog to do it. Also, your reblogs are pushed to your followers' streams but people viewing the original post don't see it, so if you write something nasty it just makes you look bad.
    - 11y ago
jv0010 11y ago
The hindsight comments are valid however it's definite to say that yahoo had and has a lot more issues to get itself into a competitive position. The comment about boring tenure definitely is big call to say the least and if one is to judge Marisa about her efforts over her career prior and during yahoo she was the CEO they needed. Going into yahoo and transforming it is a big call and to draw parallels to Apple should not be compared. It's safe to say anyone going into yahoo would know that plugging the holes in the company was the main agenda and at least keeping momentum of operations and brand was a realistic fix, which Marisa did extremely well. Tech companies with the latest and greatest innovative product is what all general spectators love to grade a company. It's sexy it gets media attention and creates a lot of noise within communities. The fair way to look at her role would have been to stop the ship from sinking and if she is to be judged as a person which this article does, her career is dynamic and adaptable and it's safe to say no matter what the outcome any will want her with open arms.
- Retric 11y ago
  I don't think these comments are valid. They boil down to, how dare you succeed without being bold. Yahoo, is a profitable company, but without the 20x multiple from crazy investors it looks like a failure.
  - jv0010 11y ago
    It may be profitable but the lack of being dominant in hardware / social / media services / search etc is on the tip of everyone's tongue. So yes I agree it's always beneficial to invest in the latest and greatest bold attributes to success helps, especially in technology as it allows new connectivity, data and information generation is a big expectation and in 2015 to put this on the shoulders of Marisa is only 1 factor of a role as a CEO. Talent to grow is a company wide thing and a great move Marisa has done is addressing the importance of hiring talent and restructuring the way it operates. Whether it's too late or not yahoo will always be the sum of its total operation which are the holes the yahoo Ceo addressed at the early stages.
lawnchair_larry 11y ago
Quite a few armchair CEOs commenting here who would have done better, no doubt.
kingmanaz 11y ago
Hated when they killed YUI. Spent several months learning the library and showcasing a YUI3 portal to coworkers and suddenly development was halted and Yahoo's pages pulled. Poof.
vorotato 11y ago
I am constantly fascinated by the hyper-polarized views of this CEO placed at the helm of a drowning company. Either she's at fault for not risking it all taking out yahoo in a blaze of glory, or fault for risking large sums of money with tumblr, or she's literally Jesus Christ. I think its wise of them to take the middle road, and grow but not "risk the farm". Though, what do I know I'm not in the future looking back.
- colmvp 11y ago
  I don't know what solution they should have done. I'm not paid millions of dollars but more importantly, I don't know what the structure and politics are like at at that company. But I'm amazed by how many people are willing to give Mayer a pass despite so many people from inside the company at the C and VP level leaving for reasons that include a confused strategy and mismanagement, specifically from Mayer, has undermined any attempts at a turnaround. Here's an excerpt from a Forbes piece: > 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.”
Kluny 11y ago
Am I the only one who thinks Yahoo is never going to get anywhere until they change the goddam stupid name?
fiatmoney 11y ago
You can make a large amount of money by successfully riding down a declining business, even in the technology sector. It's just not true that bold moves that "bet the farm" are a generally winning strategy, although pundits do like that it generates a lot of drama. Of course, the former isn't really Yahoo's approach either.
fredgrott 11y ago
I do not think author understood the challenge that turning-around Yahoo presents: 1. Decimation of core revenue by everyone moving to mobile. 2. Core management not suitable to face future challenges. 3. Non manager employees not pulling in the same direction. It was not her job to bet the farm, it was her job to revamp the people infrastructure and management infrastructure so that some innovative solutions bubble up from the middle that might be tried..

89 points by kanamekun 11y ago

iaw 11y ago

I saw the writing on the wall when she cancelled the work from home policy and forced a lot of parents to either quit or start coming into the office. While, on the flip side she had an executive package that included day care right off of her office. I decided I would never work for a company that hired Marissa Mayer after that. I screen my employers more carefully than they screen me, and that move showed she didn't give one shit about any of hers.

greyman 11y ago
But wasn't that move following her observation, that (some of those) work from home people just haven't work?
- iaw 11y ago
  Yes and no. The stated objective was to improve collaboration in "hallway and cafeteria" discussions [1]. Privately, former Yahoo employees said that the policy led to "people slacking off like crazy, not being available, and spending a lot of time on non-Yahoo projects," which is a problem with the management of employees not the policy itself. If someone is working from home and not meeting their duties they should be fired. Eliminating the policy was a band-aid, having hard conversations and getting rid of the slackers (and their managers) would have been the cure. [1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/26/us-workplace-flexibility-idUSBRE91P0S720130226 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/26/us-workplace-flexi...
- ryanfitz 11y ago
  I bet if she scanned the work from office people she would also find people who just don't work.
  - iaw 11y ago
    At one horrible startup I worked for I would do 3 hours of work and then wait out another 6 hours because of the 9 hour face time expectation. I had high output because I'm good at what I do but they couldn't wrap their heads around not having me there constantly. I ended up quitting because I was tired of watching my boss browse Facebook and sports blogs all day.
    - aswanson 11y ago
      Guessing they didn't get a good exit?
      - iaw 11y ago
        Before I got there they rolled the dice and walked away from a $250MM acquisition offer and ousted their original CEO. They were somehow able to acquire additional funding before I left but, based on the numbers I saw, they were using questionable models to indicate that they were more profitable than they are. They still exist and will probably take another 18 months to wither and die. The experience taught me to look hard for red flags and to hold my company as accountable as myself.
        aswanson 11y ago
        Absolutely, you are as much of a business as your employer.
- 67726e 11y ago
  My old boss had a very relevant point about why the company would fire folks as they did. If you have a guy on your team who usually doesn't work enough or comes late and leaves early you can fire him, or put up aa time clock, but the second you put up that time clock you've just alienated all the other good employees who didn't need babysitting. If people abuse the system, fire them and don't punish the loyal and hardworking. Mass punishment may work in the military, but this is the private sector and I have options.
  - ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
    Mass punishment is also pretty shitty in the military.
    - pc86 11y ago
      It's much different though in that the goal to get the group to a point where it is self-correcting (e.g. of new troops).
- humanrebar 11y ago
  That might have been a machete approach to a problem more appropriate for a few dozen scalpels. Maybe Yahoo didn't have time to sort through all those cases, but it shouldn't be surprised that: 1. Yahoo might have pushed out many people who didn't deserve it. Many of them are working parents and perhaps people with disabilities. 2. Yahoo might have pushed out "cheaters" without really telling them why, leaving them disgruntled about work-from-home policies instead of embarrassed that they were caught not doing their jobs. 3. Yahoo singled out a certain category of "cheaters" unfairly. I'll bet $5000 that there were at least twenty always-at-their-desks Yahoo employees who "wasted" a significant amount of time on HN, facebook, reddit, Yahoo video, or just talking about hobbies and sports with coworkers. Taking the ax to at-home slackers and ignoring the general slacker problem is slightly unfair. It doesn't project communication and transparency; it teaches employees to hide their routine from their bosses as much as possible.
discardorama 11y ago
> I saw the writing on the wall when she cancelled the work from home policy Disclaimer: I was at Yahoo when she came and implemented this policy. It irritates me to see uninformed people making such blanket comments. You have no idea what the policy was; I do. Let me explain it, in the hope that you (and others with this mindset) may learn something about it, and maybe even change their views. There was a group of Yahoos ( < 200 ) who had a permanent work-from-home exemption (if you can call it that; there was never much of an enforced policy earlier). They never came in to an office (except for the occasional IT issue and package pickup). There were a couple of incidents where these remote workers were found to be moonlighting. So a study was done to see how many of these remote workers actually VPNed in. After a month or two, it turned out, a good number of them were actually working part-time. So a blanket ban was issued, with the caveat that if you could make a compelling case, you would still be allowed to WFH. In fact, a colleague of mine continued to work from home after this policy change. A number of strong people continued to WFH; a few were let go; and the rest had to hoof it to office. Now, the mistake Marissa made wasn't with this policy; but it was in how she didn't go the next step: holding the managers of the shirkers responsible. Which brings me to my thinking about why it's so hard to turn around Yahoo: the middle management. (Please do me a favor and read PG's excellent post http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html after you're done reading this). Yahoo is filled with managers whose sole contribution is survival. There is no accountability for screwing up. Fucking up products badly has never gotten anyone fired. Did you know Yahoo went through 3 different iterations of an attempt at a "social network"? Each and every time, sane minds pointed out that the concept was bad, the UX was bad, etc.; and yet the managers prevailed and it went down in flames, as predicted. The joke in Yahoo used to be: throw everything into version 1.0, because you never know if there will be a version 1.1. Marissa is failing not because she's a bad CEO (having seen Yahoo CEOs like Terry Semel, I can assure you she's the best they've had in the last 10 years); it's because she has no supporting cast. She trusts people too much. One manager once said to me (about her): meh, she'll be gone in a couple of years; I'll still be around. He had been there since 2001, and had no intention of moving anywhere. Collected fat paychecks by taking credit for others' work. And he was just one of many, many in there. Over the years I encountered so many people like him, where you had no idea what actually they contributed to the company. /rant
snowwrestler 11y ago
I'm a parent. "Working from home," if the kids are also in the home without supplemental childcare, is bullshit. It is impossible to parent children and do good technical work at the same time. You know how folks complain about open office plans? Because of the distracting noise and potential for interruptions? Well imagine an open office with coworkers who have no sense of social tact, cannot take care of themselves, and have a constant deep need for your attention. That's what it is like for a parent to work at home and parent their kids at the same time. So when I hear that parents at Yahoo were using "work at home" as a substitute for childcare, I think that Yahoo did the right thing by cancelling the policy. That is pretty clear abuse of it.

ZanyProgrammer 11y ago

What a silly article. Yahoo has been doomed for quite sometime, and I doubt anyone could've turned it around. But then I'm not a clickbaity tech journo.

xiaoma 11y ago

>There’s just one example everyone can think of — Apple — but that effort took nearly a decade to show results It didn't take a decade. Apple was months away from bankruptcy when Jobs went back.

johnchristopher 11y ago
But it didn't take months to turn the Apple of those days into the Apple of today.
- ssharp 11y ago
  I'd say by the third iteration of both OSX and the iPod that it was clear Apple had turned itself around. There were obviously still a lot of gains to be made, but by 2004 the company was strong and there was a clear foundation laid. Apple started to skyrocket shortly after. Granted, this was a longer time frame, between 1997 and 2003/4, but there were consistent signs along the way that improvements were happening and Jobs' decisions on where to make cuts and where to focus were correct. I think it's hard to say the same thing for Yahoo.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  True - but how is the Yahoo of today different from the Yahoo of 2012? Yahoo has always been a bulging cupboard full of random services, and that hasn't changed. One of the things Jobs brought back to Apple was strategy - not just a strategy for specific products, but a focus on creating certain kinds of customer experiences and expectations. Mayer hasn't done anything similar at Yahoo. She's been a tactical manager, not a strategic CEO. She keeps trying to do strategy with things like Project Index, but most of her acquisitions and ideas seem to have been impulse buys - arguably on the premise that the typical Yahoo user is someone a lot like herself.
Agathos 11y ago
And how does a columnist get away with writing that sentence without mentioning IBM?
- 11y ago

greyman 11y ago

The problem is, that Yahoo didn't have any unique technology when she took over. Creating one almost from scratch and make success with it - in such a short time of 3 years - is quite difficult. But I tend to agree with the author's sentiment, that she probably just didn't have any transformation plan... she just wanted to do incremental improvements in the areas Yahoo was strong enough. What I am missing is why it is called a failure after such a short time. Can't they just let her continue?

iaw 11y ago
She's making nearly $1 million a month and hasn't demonstrated any long-term initiatives that will actually make Yahoo worth anything to it's investors. They brought her in because they thought she was a golden child and paid her as such, it's been ~4 years and with no results. Even worse, left to it's own devices Yahoo probably could have avoided the huge morale issues she created. She was given huge latitude by the board to make decisions and show that they were valid. In the end she created an environment that led to an exodus of top talent. She's a good high-level executive but not really a CEO.
- jonlucc 11y ago
  I think she even might make a great CEO, but not at Yahoo. They've had a very difficult problem to solve, and there might be a handful of people capable of righting the ship.
x0x0 11y ago
sometimes executing well is enough. Yahoo should be able to leverage their homepage to jumpstart other businesses.

swang 11y ago

I wonder if a big problem is that Yahoo couldn't really plant their flag on (for example) video and completely change the company towards that rapidly. Too many people still use the current version of their site and changing that could have alienated people Yahoo is still relatively popular in some Asian countries because they prefer the everything on the same site web portal.

uptownfunk 11y ago

Glad I didn't pursue that role as apm lol. But always easy to say shoulda coulda woulda

humanrebar 11y ago

> Instead of making a single big bet that might have focused the company on something completely different and potentially groundbreaking, Ms. Mayer staked out a lot of small and midsize positions, rarely committing to anything early enough to make a difference. For Ms. Mayer, original programming was just one of dozens of products in a portfolio that remains too complex to understand. Other sources indicate that Mayer is very much a metrics-based decision maker (a). I'm wondering if that's the result of putting a metrics-based decision maker at the head of a technology company. For sustaining innovation, carefully finding a local maximum seems fine, but in a dynamic field, you also need to be able to make a big move based on a more qualitative understanding of your surroundings. As a technical contributor, I've been on-and-off frustrated my whole career by quantitative managers asking for promises of real profit before committing to cleaning up technical debt. There's no honest way to come up with a good number here. You can't solve the problem thirty times and then present a high mean and low p-value. "Keep doing what we're doing but maybe 5% better" requires absolutely no proof, in contrast. You don't have to prove that COBOL-based system XYZ won't blow up in your face or that frames-in-frames webpage mycompany.com/abc won't eventually look unprofessional and affect the company's brand. I'm wondering if Mayer's "inability to bet the farm" is a higher-level version of the same problem... setting the bar too high for definitive proof creates barriers to strategic moves into areas with incomplete information. a) http://www.businessinsider.com/how-marissa-mayer-figured-out-work-at-home-yahoos-were-slacking-off-2013-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/how-marissa-mayer-figured-out...

iaw 11y ago
I think you have a valid, and insightful, point. Metrics are meaningless for visionary projects because there's nothing there to measure yet. I actually would have been happy if Yahoo resurrected a web portal and built social search to address the failings of Google, but instead there was this weird unfocused acquisition spree.
- 2close4comfort 11y ago
  I think you both are on to something. It does seem that there is a lack of focus and direction which I think makes and organization spread in any and all directions that they perceive profit. With focus in any one direction the org with have path on which they can build off of instead of running in all directions at once with no one ever making a real breakthrough. Being metric based just means that you are more focused on building shareholder value than making long-term decisions. That works well in some businesses, in others and I think this is more true in Technology this is not a valid long-term strategy.

seunosewa 11y ago

When you bet the farm, you win, or you're fired. Especially as a Yahoo CEO. So she's wise not to.

mentat 11y ago
When you're a CEO at that level you can always get a new gig and you always get a golden parachute. Always.
iaw 11y ago
She's received $1 million a month since she started. What does being fired matter after a few months? It's better, in my opinion, to bet big and fail than be crippled by paralysis.
- Touche 11y ago
  Better for who? I don't see any reason why you would want to "bet big" at an established company. Betting big and failing puts you in a worse position. Sell the company to someone else and let them "bet big" if they want, or do what a lot of failed companies do and make a lot of money as it slowly unwinds.
  - iaw 11y ago
    So what's better? A slow death or a fast one? As an investor I'd rather a fast death, salvage what capital I have remaining after the death, and invest it elsewhere. A slow death means that the long-term value of my money keeps decreasing over time as it's trapped in a weak investment with the hope that it may improve. As an employee, I'd rather work for a company trying to accomplish something big than keeping the boat floating in the same direction. What's the difference between working for Yahoo and Comcast in this context? Both of them aren't doing anything all that innovative or interesting. As an investor and an employee it's better to bet big and fail then to never try. If the company was established and successful I'd agree with you fully, but the company wasn't successful for nearly a decade before they brought her in. This, in my opinion, invalidates the 'stay the course' strategy.

deleted 11y ago

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pmlnr 11y ago

They could have been 500px, if Flickr was addressed in time ( or just left as an incubated project instead of forcing integration, see http://gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost-the-internet http://gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost-... ) - and maybe not with a sync-up-everything-on-first run android app. They could have been a lot of things but they managed to smash every potential idea with the tight, corporate-wide integration. They still have the Yahoo! Finance, which I believe, is without competition. Focus on that, stay ahead of competition, if all the rest if falling apart anyway. And start killing the rest of the services which are making less and less money. As much as I dislike the decisions Google made with dropping the Reader, Labs, etc., I understand the reasoning, and that is what Yahoo should have done as well.

rs999gti 11y ago
Don't forget Yahoo Sports and their excellent Fantasy Sports platform. Those two properties in themselves could be a separate company or the backbone to the two big players in fantasy sports.
iaw 11y ago
Yahoo finance is the only Yahoo product that I use, it is exactly what it tries to be and meets all my needs. It's too bad that that can't be said about the rest of their products.
coldtea 11y ago
>They could have been 500px, if Flickr was addressed in time Is 500px really anything to write home about though? Seems even more marginal and doomed to fail than Flickr.
- snowwrestler 11y ago
  Flickr gets, like, 100x the traffic that 500px does.

devit 11y ago

Well, the only valuable thing that Yahoo has is the brand and multi-service portal, so what they need to do is to buy or partner with other companies to make great Yahoo! Thing services and improve their existing ones, perhaps by spinning them off while keeping the Yahoo! branding and some stock. For that, they'd need a CEO with great deal-making and people skills and an intuitive grasp of what the average person cares and is going to care about. Marissa Mayer doesn't really seem a great fit, since she seems more of an introvert great at perfecting a product, as opposed to someone great at communicating and making deals, and she is also probably not very close herself to the average Yahoo user. She could possibly try to innovate in advertising technology though, although I'm not sure if it's possible to much better there.

deleted 11y ago

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chollida1 11y ago

One thing that Yahoo highlights is the importance of why you need to take care of your share price. I've seen a few people here ask why a company would care about their share price after they've gone public. It affects your company both internally and externally. Having a rising share price means you can play a different game than the rest of your competitors. Internaly it helps hire and retain good employees. Ask anyone who started at Microsoft in 1990 and worked their for a decade, or Google from 2004 until 2014. I'd bet most of them would have gladly given up their salary for more option grants. Externally it means Facebook can pay 15 Billion for WhatsApp. I'm sure Yahoo was very interested in WhatsApp, but 1) couldn't justify paying 15 Billion almost 1/2 of their value for the app 2) Who in their right mind would take Yahoo stock over FB stock? Sadly everything is going wrong for Yahoo, - Alibaba's shares have dropped since they went public - it now looks like they are going to have to pay around 20% of their Alibaba holdings in tax ( about 7 Billion). - Anyone who is going to buy some of their assets is going to have to pick up some money loosing businesses to get a deal done, which will make negotiations much tougher and probably mean the teams that get picked up are going to be cut down My new favorite theory that is floating around is that Alibaba actually acquires Yahoo's Alibaba stake and Yahoo's front page. Microsoft still acquires the search assets and mail. Google acquires Flickr and the fantasy sports and finance are spun out into a new company./

sbierwagen 11y ago
Maybe throw some line breaks into that second <pre> block.

deleted 11y ago

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jfoster 11y ago

I'm not convinced betting the farm was even necessary. What would be wrong with continuing business as usual whilst attempting a larger initiative that could deliver long term growth?

JulianMorrison 11y ago

Ugh, now I'm worried Yahoo will drag down Tumblr, which is a genuinely unique and useful thing.

soylentcola 11y ago
Tumblr is certainly popular but it always reminded me of LiveJournal: a sort of simplified blog-lite with the ability to comment or follow pages/people that you like. For the blogger, there's the ability to go as simple as just posting links and images or customize your layout to some degree. The thing that always struck me when I looked through tumblr is that essentially all of the "comments" are just the equivalent of likes or retweets and less actual comment threads. Always seemed like sort of a waste but I guess people use it more like a "richer" version of Twitter without the character limit and with easier embedding of media.
- JulianMorrison 11y ago
  The thing Tumblr does that's unique is: to join the comment thread you have to have a blog, and your reply goes on your blog (and includes an automatically generated reference to the blogs of each of the other people in the thread). That may sound odd and awkward and in many ways it is, but the consequence is that every conversation connects you to many other people to "follow". And then the posts you get from them on your dash connect you to others. So with Tumblr, it's extremely easy to form "communities" - and to find them.
- wan23 11y ago
  The lack of comment threads is a feature. It prevents other people from interjecting into the story you want to tell with your blog. For example, if you post something on YouTube it's kind of inevitable that someone will come along and comment that they hate your face, whereas on Tumblr you can write that comment but you have to reblog the item to your own blog to do it. Also, your reblogs are pushed to your followers' streams but people viewing the original post don't see it, so if you write something nasty it just makes you look bad.
  - 11y ago

jv0010 11y ago

The hindsight comments are valid however it's definite to say that yahoo had and has a lot more issues to get itself into a competitive position. The comment about boring tenure definitely is big call to say the least and if one is to judge Marisa about her efforts over her career prior and during yahoo she was the CEO they needed. Going into yahoo and transforming it is a big call and to draw parallels to Apple should not be compared. It's safe to say anyone going into yahoo would know that plugging the holes in the company was the main agenda and at least keeping momentum of operations and brand was a realistic fix, which Marisa did extremely well. Tech companies with the latest and greatest innovative product is what all general spectators love to grade a company. It's sexy it gets media attention and creates a lot of noise within communities. The fair way to look at her role would have been to stop the ship from sinking and if she is to be judged as a person which this article does, her career is dynamic and adaptable and it's safe to say no matter what the outcome any will want her with open arms.

Retric 11y ago
I don't think these comments are valid. They boil down to, how dare you succeed without being bold. Yahoo, is a profitable company, but without the 20x multiple from crazy investors it looks like a failure.
- jv0010 11y ago
  It may be profitable but the lack of being dominant in hardware / social / media services / search etc is on the tip of everyone's tongue. So yes I agree it's always beneficial to invest in the latest and greatest bold attributes to success helps, especially in technology as it allows new connectivity, data and information generation is a big expectation and in 2015 to put this on the shoulders of Marisa is only 1 factor of a role as a CEO. Talent to grow is a company wide thing and a great move Marisa has done is addressing the importance of hiring talent and restructuring the way it operates. Whether it's too late or not yahoo will always be the sum of its total operation which are the holes the yahoo Ceo addressed at the early stages.

lawnchair_larry 11y ago

Quite a few armchair CEOs commenting here who would have done better, no doubt.

kingmanaz 11y ago

Hated when they killed YUI. Spent several months learning the library and showcasing a YUI3 portal to coworkers and suddenly development was halted and Yahoo's pages pulled. Poof.

vorotato 11y ago

I am constantly fascinated by the hyper-polarized views of this CEO placed at the helm of a drowning company. Either she's at fault for not risking it all taking out yahoo in a blaze of glory, or fault for risking large sums of money with tumblr, or she's literally Jesus Christ. I think its wise of them to take the middle road, and grow but not "risk the farm". Though, what do I know I'm not in the future looking back.

colmvp 11y ago
I don't know what solution they should have done. I'm not paid millions of dollars but more importantly, I don't know what the structure and politics are like at at that company. But I'm amazed by how many people are willing to give Mayer a pass despite so many people from inside the company at the C and VP level leaving for reasons that include a confused strategy and mismanagement, specifically from Mayer, has undermined any attempts at a turnaround. Here's an excerpt from a Forbes piece: > 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.”

Kluny 11y ago

Am I the only one who thinks Yahoo is never going to get anywhere until they change the goddam stupid name?

fiatmoney 11y ago

You can make a large amount of money by successfully riding down a declining business, even in the technology sector. It's just not true that bold moves that "bet the farm" are a generally winning strategy, although pundits do like that it generates a lot of drama. Of course, the former isn't really Yahoo's approach either.

fredgrott 11y ago

I do not think author understood the challenge that turning-around Yahoo presents: 1. Decimation of core revenue by everyone moving to mobile. 2. Core management not suitable to face future challenges. 3. Non manager employees not pulling in the same direction. It was not her job to bet the farm, it was her job to revamp the people infrastructure and management infrastructure so that some innovative solutions bubble up from the middle that might be tried..