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>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 f
by 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 agoBut it didn't take months to turn the Apple of those days into the Apple of today.
- ssharp 11y agoI'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 agoTrue - 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 agoAnd how does a columnist get away with writing that sentence without mentioning IBM?
- danso 11y agoBy being a not very good tech columnist? The thing that epitomizes Manjoo's work for me is when he gave a glowing review to the Apple Watch because of how it helped him deal with all the notifications he got from his other Apple devices.
- alrs 11y agoI made it that far into the article and waded straight into the HN comments, running an in-browser-search on "IBM". I despair that the tech world is being run by no-nothing teenagers credentialed solely by their family's bank accounts. Thanks for calling out this cringe-worthy assertion.
- lemevi 11y agoIt survived that with a cash infusion from Microsoft, not because it was showing results.
- xiaoma 11y agoThat deal with Microsoft was one of the first things Jobs did after returning. There's no way Gil Amelio would have or could have gotten the same out of Microsoft. The agreement itself was a significant accomplishment. Similarly slashing the complex lines of offerings, selling the original colored iMacs at bigger profit margins than Apple had seen in years, etc were all things he pushed in less time than Mayer has been at Yahoo! Of course it's not fair to expect a new CEO of a troubled company to live up to that standard, but it's completely false to say it took him 10 years to "show results". Just look at Apple's 10k filing from 1999. Net sales were hugely negative in 1997, in the black in 1998 and doubled in 1999. http://investor.apple.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=912057-99-10244&CIK=320193 http://investor.apple.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=912057-99-1...