12 ms·

It's easy to criticize Mayer but I think the expectations of what she could have achieved were pretty wildly out of whack. I'm reminded of Daniel Kahneman's di

• WalterBright 11y ago
  If one has great success once, it's possibly luck. When it's 3 times, there's something else going on. Jobs did it 3 times (Apple, Pixar, Apple again). Gates also did it 3 times (microcomputer BASIC, DOS, and 32 bit Windows). Is Amazon's success due to Bezos or luck? I prefer to bet on Bezos rather than luck.
  • agsamek 11y ago
    I don't understand why this had been downvoted. I support this.
  • rdl 11y ago
    Amazon has been successful far more than 3 times, all under Bezos, so it's pretty clearly not luck.
    • homero 11y ago
      Aws was an absurd success, no one saw it coming except bezos
  • robotresearcher 11y ago
    There are so many companies out there that the chances of a few of them being lucky 3 or more times in a row are very high. People are bad at statistical reasoning.
• static_noise 11y ago
  For the money they paid her she should have been much more lucky. Race horses aren't applauded for their competence, elegant walks and good looks. They need to win.
• gaius 11y ago
  But I bet she's far more competent than most of us. Pretty sure that anyone could sit on a pile of Alibaba stock and just do nothing, and come out ahead of where Yahoo is today. This payout actually incentivizes her to want to be ousted, and that doesn't bode well for any of the rank-and-file.
  • 0xmohit 11y ago
    I wish there were an update to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
    • crikli 11y ago
      I've said in other threads that Marissa is the highest profile example of this principle.
      • patkai 11y ago
        When they published the new logo design of Yahoo I came to the same conclusion. A stunningly professional answer to the wrong question. Mayer might be - and I emphasise "might", as I don't know enough about her - the archetype of the engineer who executes the wrong programme without flaw.
    • everly 11y ago
      http://i.imgur.com/3Cq2bGP.png http://i.imgur.com/3Cq2bGP.png
  • ZeroGravitas 11y ago
    By the same token, she could have fired all the rank and file on day one and sat on that pile of stock all by herself.
    • gaius 11y ago
      Quite; she seems to have chosen the worst course of action for everyone but herself. No writes "expert in converting investors money into my own" on their CV but it is the main skill of most CEOs these days.
• shubhamjain 11y ago
  I don't disregard the "Luck" Factor but in that case I think it boils down to how many steps you take to fix the situation. I think in the timeframe, it should have been possible to take more steps to make Yahoo a focused business. It does seem Tumblr acquisition was step in that direction but sadly, it lost its charm similar to Yahoo's past acquisitions.
• potatosareok 11y ago
  I don't understand what point you're trying to make with this comment. I don't see anyone here attacking her, in fact only in the article does anyone bring up her specific performance. In fact you seem to be saying she did not do a good job yourself as you put this defense of "ceo can't do much and this ceo had bad luck" So what has she done to earn $55 million dollars? Without attacking anything about her personally, in the role of her job, did she do a good or bad job? I think a bad job or at most neutral job. In fact in writing this comment I looked at her bio and I came away really impressed, but at the same time Yahoos stack ranking wasn't popular, Tumblr I think was a fail move. Do I think anyone could have done a better job then her? I don't know...digital ad sales is huge but as a single person I don't know how much impact you can have. Could they not have found someone else to go down with the ship for less then $55 million (say $5 million) or is 50 million just so little money for a large company like Yahoo that people who offer hire ceo just don't give a fuck about the difference between the two numbers.
  • WalterBright 11y ago
    > Could they not have found someone else to go down with the ship for less then $55 million I'm available. I'd do it for $54m. Edit: Oh, who am I kidding. I'd do it for $50m.
  • Dagwoodie 11y ago
    Unless they've publicly choked a puppy to death or donated to right-wingers exclusively, anyone who advances the current Zeitgeist is not going to be judged too harshly, especially since Yahoo was already in deep trouble and her only sin appears to be she isn't their savior.
  • vasilipupkin 11y ago
    No. Yahoo has been a company on a downward trajectory for s long time. It's not easy to find a CEO who wants to take that on
• rdl 11y ago
  I think they fucked around too long in hiring her, to the point where even people who initially supported Product-Led-Yahoo would have preferred to keep the Media-Led-Yahoo of Ross Levinsohn. Personally, I think it was obvious what Yahoo! should have done, at least from ~2005 onward: become a brand/site for a specific cohort of people as they moved through life. No young people use Yahoo!, nor should they be pursued; just have Yahoo! provide an evolving set of products for their existing userbase. Yahoo! might have gone back even more and taken the even-older-people market who were on AOL still, or found other sites targeting 50-80 year olds vs. Yahoo!'s core 40-50 market. Buying Tumblr (which I dislike, personally; maybe too "young" for me?) was Mayer's dumb move. Everything else was either good or benign. Building decent mobile apps, maybe a mobile platform or other platform, etc. around existing Yahoo! services to support old Yahoo! users would make sense. My other strategy would be: Yahoo! for rural/small-town/etc. people in the US, and Yahoo! for black (older; not youth culture/urban culture, but middle class older black people), hispanic middle aged/family/etc., or other minority groups outside the mainstream. Yahoo! for black people, with an HQ in Detroit, Atlanta, New Orleans, Houston, etc., and Yahoo! Lat Am in South/Central America (and/or Miami) would be a way to move forward with new-to-Yahoo! people. Don't go after the silicon valley tech crowd (hyper competitive, tech based); a media strategy around other groups would have been viable. (and still might be) Mayer was totally the wrong person for that strategy. Oprah Winfrey would be the ideal "Yahoo! for black middle-aged people" leader; I'm sure there were other people. (My first move if I bought Yahoo! today would be to relocate the headquarters to either the midwest or Atlanta; anywhere but SFBA. Las Vegas might even work, but somewhere like Branson or St. Louis would make sense. Also makes it easier to do the mass layoffs. The Bay would be full of purple blood, unfortunately.)
  • dragonwriter 11y ago
    Being a brand for a specific cohort is a slow-death strategy, not a growth strategy. I don't think many people invested in Yahoo would prefer that to a high-risk strategy with a plausible upside.
    • rdl 11y ago
      That age cohort doesn't have the same Internet penetration as 20-30 year olds today. Even if boomers are declining in numbers now due to death, you can get a larger percentage of boomers on the Internet, and they can make more use of it. (The racial/ethnic minority markets, especially older people, are also dramatically under-saturated, so there's a huge amount of growth opportunity there.) And at some point slow-death while maximizing profits from each user actually is the right strategy for a business. I suspect Netflix DVD-by-mail business is largely operating on that model now.
• hueving 11y ago
  This is just as much an argument in support that she doesn't deserve to get 55 million. Just because you took the helm of the titanic as it was hitting the iceberg doesn't mean you deserve to make 250 times what a regular engineer makes.
  • cft 11y ago
    More than 250x. Her total compensation during her tenure at Yahoo was http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-365-million-5-year-compensation-package-2015-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-365-million-5-y... This is probably 365x what an engineer makes there, she makes in a day what an engineer makes in a year. With this kind of compensation, the actual outcome of Yahoo's business is irrelevant to her. That and the fact that it is not her own business. This is an illustration of the modern problem of separation of real ownership from control. Henry Ford for example strived to buy out his investors and became close to being the sole proprietor of Ford Motor.
    • yeukhon 11y ago
      > the actual outcome of Yahoo's business is irrelevant to her Maybe, but I doubt. An executive like her wouldn't settle just for a paycheck, success and image are way more important. Instead of becoming the CEO that saved Yahoo, her legacy is that she will become the last CEO of Yahoo (when the worst case happens) that didn't turn Yahoo around plus acquired a bunch of expensive startups. Oh yeah she did turn the culture around inside Yahoo more Google-like benefit, but history book usually tells the bad things first. In fact it doesn't take an executive role to understand. I wouldn't want to go to another job with little accomplishment in my previous job. I just feel shit if I do.
      • ohazi 11y ago
        > An executive like her wouldn't settle just for a paycheck, success and image are way more important. > I wouldn't want to go to another job with little accomplishment in my previous job. I just feel shit if I do. Bullshit. Most people would be fine feeling a little shitty for a few years for THREE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS. This theory that somehow executives are motivated "differently" is totally bonkers. They're just as selfish and short sighted and apathetic as you or me, but they're playing at the high-roller table with other people's money.
• nihonde 11y ago
  Isn't that a very long-winded way of saying that the quality of "managerial practices" are essentially irrelevant to outcomes?
• 0xmohit 11y ago
  > Mayer wasn't lucky. But I bet she's far more competent than most of us. Quoting from http://www.businessinsider.in/Marissa-Mayer-will-make-365-million-for-five-years-of-work-at-Yahoo/articleshow/50177369.cms http://www.businessinsider.in/Marissa-Mayer-will-make-365-mi... : > Only about 3.3% of her projected $365 million compensation package is tied to Yahoo performance, and that's the company's annual target bonus of $2 million. That would make one say that she is way too smart. Competence is another thing.
• neurobuddha 11y ago
  Early in her tenure Mayer spent days tweaking the Yahoo! logo. A bad "sign" to be sure.
  • takno 11y ago
    In retrospect I'm not sure she placed the exclamation mark at the right degree of whimsy at all. 3 degrees left and Yahoo would be in a very different place right now