4 ms·

I had no faith at all in Mayer. Not because she isn't a good product manager. Mainly because for a turnaround situation I would hire someone who was there befo

I had no faith at all in Mayer. Not because she isn't a good product manager. Mainly because for a turnaround situation I would hire someone who was there before with a successful turnaround under h-- belt. Not someone without any turnaround knowledge (what to cut, high investor pressure, ...)

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
threeseed 11y ago
Yahoo reminds me a lot of Apple before Steve Jobs rejoined. They don't need a turnaround artist like Gil Amelio they need an insanely great product person to bring back some innovation, creativity and attention to detail. Based on her experience and from what everyone says about her she should have been perfect. And I'm quite baffled why she's not managing to get any runs on the board.
- BogusIKnow 11y ago
  No Yahoo is way beyond that. Sure Jobs is one way to turn a company around, sadly the supply of Jobs is limited. But there have been many successful turnarounds of - e.g. traditional - companies, which got profitable and growing again in the long run. Not every turnaround needs to end with the most valuable company on the planet. If you aim for a second Steve Jobs experience, this is lottery play and wishful thinking. "Based on her experience and from what everyone says about her she should have been perfect." Which either means: a.) She isn't that good as a product manager b.) Your theory is wrong. c.) Jobs turned Apple not around only on his vision but b/c he was able to kick everyone hard
  - threeseed 11y ago
    Well it's clear that she was hired to be a product driven CEO not just a turnaround artist focused on the financial/operational parts of the business. And from day one she made it clear she was going to get involved in the product aspects e.g. changing Yahoo logo, fast tracking certain mobile products etc. But then everything's kind of stalled. It's all a bit strange.
    - xyzzy4 11y ago
      It doesn't seem like the logo change fixed the company.
- mdorazio 11y ago
  But Steve wasn't just a great product person, and it wasn't just a great product that turned Apple around. If you dig into the actual history, Steve significantly restructured Apple when he returned, killing licensing deals and products without a future, and refocusing the remaining product line before he set about creating a single new true innovation. And remember that Apple didn't really pick up steam until it capitalized on the iPod's traction years after Steve returned. 1997 Apple and 2016 Yahoo also exist in very different markets and very different landscapes, to the point that I'm not sure it's fair to say that Yahoo could even plausibly make an Apple-like turnaround happen without completely changing what it does. Apple's resurgence was as much about its great hardware as about its great software, and Yahoo doesn't really have either; it has services, which are a quite different beast these days.
  - threeseed 11y ago
    But killing off unsuccessful products and focusing on implementing successful ones properly is what good product management is all about. And it seems to be what Yahoo is still lacking. And services are products too. Apple iCloud is a product just like Flickr, Yahoo Home Page, Yahoo Mail etc.
  - marincounty 11y ago
    I think we all agree Mr. jobs was a talented engineer, and knew innately that the average computer user needed simplicity, and someting slick. He succeeded. I'm not sure what Yahoo even does these days. They do have money, especially if they cut more jobs, and bring in that money sitting in that Chinese company. If I was in her shoes, I would put a lot of money into a wifi/cellular phone. Something like Rebublic wireless. I noticed Google is trying to get into that market, but they only offer two phone choices, and are charging $30/month for essentially wifi voip, and $10 per gig for data. I would love to see Yahoo get into this market. Get cell phone bills to under $10-$20 a month? It just seems like something they could do? Someone is going to drastically reduce cell phone monthly bills? I would like to see Yahoo play a part in the future. A lot of people think they need a lot of cell phone towers, but I have a weird feeling, most of that is marketing? In my world, I'm usually have access to wifi. Yes, there are times I need access to a cell phone signal, but it's not as much as I thought. I really feel in a few years, we will look back on our $80/month cell phone bills, and say, "I can't believe I paid those blood suckers that much money each month." Whatever happens, I hope Yahoo survives. They never screwed me over. I only wish them, and Marissa the best! I can't recall the spelling of her last name--no disrespect.
- 20andup 11y ago
  That's the exact problem. Mayors is not Steve Jobs. I feel like she is asking for 3 more year for a turn around simply because Steve Jobs took that amount of time to do so. But turn arounds aren't measure in how long it takes. It takes time for sure but thats only a small part of the equation. She doesn't understand even if she copied everything Steve Job did, she will probably not succeed.
cbeach 11y ago
> under _his_ belt Social justice warriors coming to correct you in 3.. 2.. 1..
- BogusIKnow 11y ago
  Thanks.
crikli 11y ago
Mayer is a prime example of what happens when someone whose career should have peaked at COO becomes CEO. You see it all the time in sports when guys who are brilliant technical coordinators get moved to head coach and subsequently flounder. There's more to being CEO (and head coach, to continue my analogy) than technical proficiency and strategic capability. There's a mix of requirements that are hard to quantify: human understanding, charm, charisma, empathy...character traits that are as much innate as learned. I look at Mayer...she has very few of the "head coach" traits. Brilliant operator, excellent technician, all of the things you want in a coordinator. But not someone you want as head coach. [EDIT] Typos/clarity.
- BogusIKnow 11y ago
  I was destined to become CEO from CTO but decided COO and second in command is the best position for me.
- crikli 11y ago
  "I was destined to become CEO from CTO but decided COO and second in command is the best position for me." I have a very good friend made exactly the same call. He just didn't feel he had the people skills to be the head guy...and given his slightly Aspergerish personality, he was right. So he now happily runs the company from the office of COO, as an absolutely brilliant technician, with a CEO who's smart enough to let him do so.
  - noir_lord 11y ago
    Another example of this working well is SpaceX with Elon Musk as CEO and Gwynn Shotwell as COO.
- GlideCleanser 11y ago
  > There's more to being CEO (and head coach, to continue my analogy) than technical proficiency and strategic capability. Eh, not that I totally disagree with you, but I dunno that that's really true. There are plenty of head coaches (and CEOs) who are just so technically proficient and/or excellent strategists that their lack of charm/empathy/charisma is a non-issue. Belichick and Jim Harbaugh (say what you want, but he's successful by any sense of the word) are two examples of very successful head coaches who aren't well-known for being particularly charming or empathetic (one is an emotional brick wall and the other is a screaming psychopath). There are CEOs who aren't particularly well-known for their people skills, but they're so good at strategy and execution that it really doesn't matter much. Anecdotally (from my tenure there), Bezos never gave/gives the impression of being particularly charismatic or charming. He's just really good at building the juggernaut that is Amazon. I'm not saying those skills are unimportant and certainly people like Belichick are the exception, but it's entirely possible to just be so good at strategy that the rest doesn't really matter. Mayer just doesn't seem to be quite at that level.
dorfsmay 11y ago
I think "their belt" is now accepted as the gender neutral way of saying this (I for one wish we just invented another word rather than make grammar more confusing and less logical, but I guess the people who can influence languages don't think the I do).
- paulddraper 11y ago
  "His belt" was the historical gender inclusive phase.
  - dorfsmay 11y ago
    I know, but the parent poster had written "h--", hence my comment.
bane 11y ago
My problem with her all along is that before Yahoo she literally has only ever had one job. And that job was part of the management structure with a successful company. While there she developed a reputation as a data-driven iterator, not a visionary leader who can create direction and focus. She inherited what others had already started, and figured out things to measure, then analyzed the measures very competently. If you look at her tenure at Yahoo so far, this has all essentially played out and her lack of qualitative acumen has been the source of most of the news about yahoo since she's taken over. This is an incredibly expensive experiment and learning ground for her. At best she's gone through the ceremony of "bold and decisive leader", made some big acquisitions and started some big changes on key properties. But that's like adding ships to a fleet and telling others to change out their sails. She still hasn't pointed Yahoo to a distinct vector and it's just kept adrift since then. I agree with many others that she would be much more effective as a COO type but lacks pretty much all the kinds of skills needed as the captain of a corporate ship.
- lisper 11y ago
  > She inherited what others had already started I am not Marissa Meyers' biggest fan, but I feel I have to come to her defense here. She was employee #20 at Google. She didn't inherit anything, she helped build Google from the ground up. There are a lot of reasons why Marissa is not a good CEO, but a history of riding on other people's coattails is not one of them.
  - bane 11y ago
    I can clarify what I mean, and it's not that she's simply ridden on other's coattails. She operated on her own and fantastically competently in what she did there. However, AFAIK, she did not originate or lead the early direction or kickoff of any of the products she worked on at Google. These were all products with directions and ideas that others put in place. She lead efforts to broaden the appeal and usability of all of these things once they already existed. This was not easy effort, or easy work. It has challenges and requires smart thinking like the other parts of product development. Simply figuring out what to measure can often require enormous creativity. These are very different skillsets and very few people have the skills to cross the boundaries from initiate to grow to sustain. She seems to have good skills in the grow and sustain areas, but I'm not aware of her having ever started any major product from scratch. If you look at what she's been doing at Yahoo this has carried through. She's tried to initiate changes to grow and change direction of existing products, and she's tried acquiring other existing products. But she hasn't kicked off a whole new class of "thing" at Yahoo from scratch. I know comparisons to Jobs is being thrown around here, but I don't think that's fair. He was such an outlier that I don't think it's very instructive to make those comparisons. Mayer needs to be compared to other more "prosaic" CEOs. Even her Yahoo predecessors. Even her former Google bosses. I'm pretty sure at this point that she hasn't been doing what's needed as a CEO of a large company. I'm not even sure she's brought much more to the table than her Yahoo predecessors. Think about this, the biggest Yahoo news since she's taken over has been the possibility of a sale and revelation that the corporate portfolio is essentially worthless minus its investment stakes in other companies. This was true before she started and remains true today. She has had no effective change in Yahoo despite being there for a while. What is Yahoo? It's a holding company that holds stakes in other companies and has a legacy media and internet arm that could be shut down tomorrow with almost no bottom-line impact to the company. Here's an example strategy that she should be undertaking: 0) Yahoo! changes names to Y! 1) All Y! products are to be spun out as individual businesses with Y! as the majority shareholder. 49% of each company should be offered up in a near-term IPO. 2) Y! will spend raised cash on purchasing stakes in other companies a la Alibaba. 3) Y! will form a both a Startup investment arm with significant seed capital and a Startup accelerator called Y!-Combine. To help enable success, these companies (and other acquisitions) get access to Y!'s existing technology portfolio, server/compute infrastructure and advertising network. 4) Y! will start a technology R&D arm called Y!-Research that will research technologies it can add it its portfolio of startup and acquisition enabling technologies. Any technology reaching a significant enough maturity level will be evaluated for sale, spin-out or open sourced. There. 4 steps that convert Yahoo from a whatever it is into a technology holding company with 4 continuous growth options and almost no headline grabbing layoffs needed. In fact she can start hiring all the people to make this possible today.
jsjohnst 11y ago
Yahoo! previously had someone with a turnaround under her belt (Carol Bartz) and it was a disaster.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

threeseed 11y ago

Yahoo reminds me a lot of Apple before Steve Jobs rejoined. They don't need a turnaround artist like Gil Amelio they need an insanely great product person to bring back some innovation, creativity and attention to detail. Based on her experience and from what everyone says about her she should have been perfect. And I'm quite baffled why she's not managing to get any runs on the board.

BogusIKnow 11y ago
No Yahoo is way beyond that. Sure Jobs is one way to turn a company around, sadly the supply of Jobs is limited. But there have been many successful turnarounds of - e.g. traditional - companies, which got profitable and growing again in the long run. Not every turnaround needs to end with the most valuable company on the planet. If you aim for a second Steve Jobs experience, this is lottery play and wishful thinking. "Based on her experience and from what everyone says about her she should have been perfect." Which either means: a.) She isn't that good as a product manager b.) Your theory is wrong. c.) Jobs turned Apple not around only on his vision but b/c he was able to kick everyone hard
- threeseed 11y ago
  Well it's clear that she was hired to be a product driven CEO not just a turnaround artist focused on the financial/operational parts of the business. And from day one she made it clear she was going to get involved in the product aspects e.g. changing Yahoo logo, fast tracking certain mobile products etc. But then everything's kind of stalled. It's all a bit strange.
  - xyzzy4 11y ago
    It doesn't seem like the logo change fixed the company.
mdorazio 11y ago
But Steve wasn't just a great product person, and it wasn't just a great product that turned Apple around. If you dig into the actual history, Steve significantly restructured Apple when he returned, killing licensing deals and products without a future, and refocusing the remaining product line before he set about creating a single new true innovation. And remember that Apple didn't really pick up steam until it capitalized on the iPod's traction years after Steve returned. 1997 Apple and 2016 Yahoo also exist in very different markets and very different landscapes, to the point that I'm not sure it's fair to say that Yahoo could even plausibly make an Apple-like turnaround happen without completely changing what it does. Apple's resurgence was as much about its great hardware as about its great software, and Yahoo doesn't really have either; it has services, which are a quite different beast these days.
- threeseed 11y ago
  But killing off unsuccessful products and focusing on implementing successful ones properly is what good product management is all about. And it seems to be what Yahoo is still lacking. And services are products too. Apple iCloud is a product just like Flickr, Yahoo Home Page, Yahoo Mail etc.
- marincounty 11y ago
  I think we all agree Mr. jobs was a talented engineer, and knew innately that the average computer user needed simplicity, and someting slick. He succeeded. I'm not sure what Yahoo even does these days. They do have money, especially if they cut more jobs, and bring in that money sitting in that Chinese company. If I was in her shoes, I would put a lot of money into a wifi/cellular phone. Something like Rebublic wireless. I noticed Google is trying to get into that market, but they only offer two phone choices, and are charging $30/month for essentially wifi voip, and $10 per gig for data. I would love to see Yahoo get into this market. Get cell phone bills to under $10-$20 a month? It just seems like something they could do? Someone is going to drastically reduce cell phone monthly bills? I would like to see Yahoo play a part in the future. A lot of people think they need a lot of cell phone towers, but I have a weird feeling, most of that is marketing? In my world, I'm usually have access to wifi. Yes, there are times I need access to a cell phone signal, but it's not as much as I thought. I really feel in a few years, we will look back on our $80/month cell phone bills, and say, "I can't believe I paid those blood suckers that much money each month." Whatever happens, I hope Yahoo survives. They never screwed me over. I only wish them, and Marissa the best! I can't recall the spelling of her last name--no disrespect.
20andup 11y ago
That's the exact problem. Mayors is not Steve Jobs. I feel like she is asking for 3 more year for a turn around simply because Steve Jobs took that amount of time to do so. But turn arounds aren't measure in how long it takes. It takes time for sure but thats only a small part of the equation. She doesn't understand even if she copied everything Steve Job did, she will probably not succeed.

cbeach 11y ago

> under _his_ belt Social justice warriors coming to correct you in 3.. 2.. 1..

BogusIKnow 11y ago
Thanks.

crikli 11y ago

Mayer is a prime example of what happens when someone whose career should have peaked at COO becomes CEO. You see it all the time in sports when guys who are brilliant technical coordinators get moved to head coach and subsequently flounder. There's more to being CEO (and head coach, to continue my analogy) than technical proficiency and strategic capability. There's a mix of requirements that are hard to quantify: human understanding, charm, charisma, empathy...character traits that are as much innate as learned. I look at Mayer...she has very few of the "head coach" traits. Brilliant operator, excellent technician, all of the things you want in a coordinator. But not someone you want as head coach. [EDIT] Typos/clarity.

BogusIKnow 11y ago
I was destined to become CEO from CTO but decided COO and second in command is the best position for me.
crikli 11y ago
"I was destined to become CEO from CTO but decided COO and second in command is the best position for me." I have a very good friend made exactly the same call. He just didn't feel he had the people skills to be the head guy...and given his slightly Aspergerish personality, he was right. So he now happily runs the company from the office of COO, as an absolutely brilliant technician, with a CEO who's smart enough to let him do so.
- noir_lord 11y ago
  Another example of this working well is SpaceX with Elon Musk as CEO and Gwynn Shotwell as COO.
GlideCleanser 11y ago
> There's more to being CEO (and head coach, to continue my analogy) than technical proficiency and strategic capability. Eh, not that I totally disagree with you, but I dunno that that's really true. There are plenty of head coaches (and CEOs) who are just so technically proficient and/or excellent strategists that their lack of charm/empathy/charisma is a non-issue. Belichick and Jim Harbaugh (say what you want, but he's successful by any sense of the word) are two examples of very successful head coaches who aren't well-known for being particularly charming or empathetic (one is an emotional brick wall and the other is a screaming psychopath). There are CEOs who aren't particularly well-known for their people skills, but they're so good at strategy and execution that it really doesn't matter much. Anecdotally (from my tenure there), Bezos never gave/gives the impression of being particularly charismatic or charming. He's just really good at building the juggernaut that is Amazon. I'm not saying those skills are unimportant and certainly people like Belichick are the exception, but it's entirely possible to just be so good at strategy that the rest doesn't really matter. Mayer just doesn't seem to be quite at that level.

dorfsmay 11y ago

I think "their belt" is now accepted as the gender neutral way of saying this (I for one wish we just invented another word rather than make grammar more confusing and less logical, but I guess the people who can influence languages don't think the I do).

paulddraper 11y ago
"His belt" was the historical gender inclusive phase.
- dorfsmay 11y ago
  I know, but the parent poster had written "h--", hence my comment.

bane 11y ago

My problem with her all along is that before Yahoo she literally has only ever had one job. And that job was part of the management structure with a successful company. While there she developed a reputation as a data-driven iterator, not a visionary leader who can create direction and focus. She inherited what others had already started, and figured out things to measure, then analyzed the measures very competently. If you look at her tenure at Yahoo so far, this has all essentially played out and her lack of qualitative acumen has been the source of most of the news about yahoo since she's taken over. This is an incredibly expensive experiment and learning ground for her. At best she's gone through the ceremony of "bold and decisive leader", made some big acquisitions and started some big changes on key properties. But that's like adding ships to a fleet and telling others to change out their sails. She still hasn't pointed Yahoo to a distinct vector and it's just kept adrift since then. I agree with many others that she would be much more effective as a COO type but lacks pretty much all the kinds of skills needed as the captain of a corporate ship.

lisper 11y ago
> She inherited what others had already started I am not Marissa Meyers' biggest fan, but I feel I have to come to her defense here. She was employee #20 at Google. She didn't inherit anything, she helped build Google from the ground up. There are a lot of reasons why Marissa is not a good CEO, but a history of riding on other people's coattails is not one of them.
- bane 11y ago
  I can clarify what I mean, and it's not that she's simply ridden on other's coattails. She operated on her own and fantastically competently in what she did there. However, AFAIK, she did not originate or lead the early direction or kickoff of any of the products she worked on at Google. These were all products with directions and ideas that others put in place. She lead efforts to broaden the appeal and usability of all of these things once they already existed. This was not easy effort, or easy work. It has challenges and requires smart thinking like the other parts of product development. Simply figuring out what to measure can often require enormous creativity. These are very different skillsets and very few people have the skills to cross the boundaries from initiate to grow to sustain. She seems to have good skills in the grow and sustain areas, but I'm not aware of her having ever started any major product from scratch. If you look at what she's been doing at Yahoo this has carried through. She's tried to initiate changes to grow and change direction of existing products, and she's tried acquiring other existing products. But she hasn't kicked off a whole new class of "thing" at Yahoo from scratch. I know comparisons to Jobs is being thrown around here, but I don't think that's fair. He was such an outlier that I don't think it's very instructive to make those comparisons. Mayer needs to be compared to other more "prosaic" CEOs. Even her Yahoo predecessors. Even her former Google bosses. I'm pretty sure at this point that she hasn't been doing what's needed as a CEO of a large company. I'm not even sure she's brought much more to the table than her Yahoo predecessors. Think about this, the biggest Yahoo news since she's taken over has been the possibility of a sale and revelation that the corporate portfolio is essentially worthless minus its investment stakes in other companies. This was true before she started and remains true today. She has had no effective change in Yahoo despite being there for a while. What is Yahoo? It's a holding company that holds stakes in other companies and has a legacy media and internet arm that could be shut down tomorrow with almost no bottom-line impact to the company. Here's an example strategy that she should be undertaking: 0) Yahoo! changes names to Y! 1) All Y! products are to be spun out as individual businesses with Y! as the majority shareholder. 49% of each company should be offered up in a near-term IPO. 2) Y! will spend raised cash on purchasing stakes in other companies a la Alibaba. 3) Y! will form a both a Startup investment arm with significant seed capital and a Startup accelerator called Y!-Combine. To help enable success, these companies (and other acquisitions) get access to Y!'s existing technology portfolio, server/compute infrastructure and advertising network. 4) Y! will start a technology R&D arm called Y!-Research that will research technologies it can add it its portfolio of startup and acquisition enabling technologies. Any technology reaching a significant enough maturity level will be evaluated for sale, spin-out or open sourced. There. 4 steps that convert Yahoo from a whatever it is into a technology holding company with 4 continuous growth options and almost no headline grabbing layoffs needed. In fact she can start hiring all the people to make this possible today.

jsjohnst 11y ago

Yahoo! previously had someone with a turnaround under her belt (Carol Bartz) and it was a disaster.