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How Marissa Mayer Failed to Turn Yahoo Around
- mwsherman 10y agoI don’t think there is a strong case to be made that the CEO matters much here. We’d need to see the counterfactual of what would have happened in her absence. Maybe the same, maybe better, maybe worse. And in any case, there is no reason to believe that Yahoo’s or any tech company’s continued existence is normal. Yahoo was of a time, as was Digg, MySpace, etc. It’s easy to say they “screwed up”, but success for any amount of time is the exceptional part. Regressing to the mean of “non-existent” or “not valuable” is…normal.
- erez 10y ago"The Yahoo way is, ‘We’ll throw 10 rocks against the wall, and maybe one of them will hit the bull’s-eye. But you need a sniper rifle in this business." That's a load of crap. If anything, 'this business' showed us what you need to do is grow to a level where you can throw not 10, but 100 rocks against the wall, and once one of them hits, get another 4 dozens and hurl them at the same spot immediately.
- HemanHeartYou 10y agotruth, thats how google does it
- 2close4comfort 10y agoJust goes to show that even if you did work/worked at Google you are really no better than anyone else...and planning on that to bring your business around may not actually be a plan.
- colmvp 10y agoReminds me a little bit of Ron Johnson of Apple with JC Penney.
- pinewurst 10y agoBut Ron Johnson brought and executed a coherent change plan. It wasn't at all successful, but it still existed. Mayer spent a lot of money on acquihires and self-aggrandizement but all that was externally visible was entropy. The changes that I've seen all involve the pollution of their various news aggregators with the lowest grade clickbait.
- whamlastxmas 10y agoThat's sort of a non sequitur. Maybe Meyer did better at holding Yahoo together than any of her non-Google competitors for the same role would have done. And a sample size of 1 isn't really anything to draw conclusions from in terms of the capabilities of ex Google employees.
- ZanyProgrammer 10y agoI'm not sure what Meyer brought to the table that non ex Googlers don't have, other than a general reputation for being successful uber geniuses. Which in this case did jack and shit for Yahoo, though they coasted along on her celebrity for a while.
- amelius 10y agoI think we should introduce a law that says that if a company does no better than random rock throwing, its net result should be at most zero.
- lintiness 10y agoshe parlayed not being any better into quite a payday. give the girl some props!
- Phlarp 10y agoGot a big payday, advanced the resume significantly and had two children. I think she should be applauded for those things personally, even if Yahoo was a sinking ship she couldn't save.
- jshevek 10y agoThis is just my impression, and I'm not trying to censor your speech nor make any assumptions about your thoughts nor intentions. In this context, the use word 'girl' seems needlessly sexist and patronizing, to me.
- Jtsummers 10y ago> If anything, 'this business' showed us what you need to do is grow to a level where you can throw not 10, but 100 rocks against the wall, and once one of them hits, get another 4 dozens and hurl them at the same spot immediately. Isn't this pretty much what Google does? Outside their core areas of search and advertisement, they try numerous projects until something gains friction. When something does, they work on variations on the theme (to their detriment perhaps, see their numerous chat offerings now). If it doesn't, or it isn't profitable, they scrap it.
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- bryanlarsen 10y agoThe interesting question: is that what Apple does too? Where "hitting" is defined as "Tim Cook thinks it would be good enough for Steve Jobs".
- danieldk 10y agoYour sibling comment mentions that Google depends for 90% on search (and webpage) advertisement. For Apple, the iPhone was 65% of their revenue in the last quarter, but the remaining 35% is divided among other products (with some dependency of 'services' on iPhone). It's still not healthy, but their bets are spread quite a bit better than Google's. (I think there is quite a bit of monetization potential for Google in Google Apps and Chromebooks. They could move to a position/market that Microsoft was in. But it takes time to grow that business.)
- ZanyProgrammer 10y agoDoesn't Android bring in $$ for Google?
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- samfisher83 10y agoLook at google and all their various endeavors. How many of them are all that profitable. Their primary revenue generator is search/advertising. Android which is super successful is to ensure people use google search. How much money does youtube really make compared to search. The profit margin is not anywhere close to their search ad business.
- imaginenore 10y ago"Android which is super successful is to ensure people use google search" - WAT? I use Android all the time, and at no point Google pushes me to use their search. It's an app platform, and it primarily makes money through paid apps and ads/paid features inside the apps.
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- frade33 10y agoThey are utterly 'irrelevant' i don't care if they make money or not. but they are barely relevant. and this is actually worse than dying. They are everywhere yet nowhere. What exactly Yahoo is, can someone explain LIM5. and who their target customers are consumer or corporate??? I am not talking their subsidiaries, just Yahoo. Alibaba is cool, but that's not enough. They are not even trying at anything. They are not even exploring anything. All I can say, they can do better than this.
- ramy_d 10y ago> What exactly Yahoo is, can someone explain LIM5. and who their target customers are consumer or corporate??? Not commenting on the general sentiment of what you wrote but I think that's a tough question even in the context of a successful business like google.
- Grue3 10y agoExactly, this kind of comment might as well have been written about Berkshire Hathaway. Who are they? What do they even do? Down with that false prophet Warren Buffett! /sarcasm
- roymurdock 10y agoYahoo! Inc., together with its consolidated subsidiaries (“Yahoo,” the “Company,” “we,” or “us”), is a guide to digital information discovery, focused on informing, connecting, and entertaining our users through our search, communications, and digital content products. By creating highly personalized experiences, we help users discover the information that matters most to them around the world—on mobile or desktop. We create value for advertisers with a streamlined, simple advertising technology stack that leverages Yahoo’s data, content, and technology to connect advertisers with their target audiences. Advertisers can build their businesses through advertisements targeted to audiences on our online properties and services (“Yahoo Properties”) and a distribution network of third-party entities (“Affiliates”) who integrate our advertising offerings into their websites or other offerings (“Affiliate sites”). Our revenue is generated principally from display and search advertising. We are proud of our rich history that has evolved with the Internet, beginning in 1994 when our founders, Jerry Yang and David Filo, then graduate students at Stanford University, created Jerry and Dave’s Guide to the World Wide Web, a simple directory of websites to help people navigate the Internet. Yahoo was incorporated in 1995 and is a Delaware corporation. We completed our initial public offering on April 12, 1996, and our stock is listed on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol “YHOO.” Yahoo is a global company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Seek and ye shall find: http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/YHOO/2121517153x0x893458/96E76DB6-C10F-4514-AAB0-24BFC488B422/yahoo_ar15_annual_report.pdf http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/YHOO/2121517153x0x893...
- lintiness 10y ago$117M over 5 years with $37M paid in year one: human beings have a real need for "leaders" and pay dearly in their search (pardon the pun).
- funkyy 10y agoI wonder if people blindly defending Marisa and painting her as a female hero will finally ope their eyes and see clearly that she is - at most - a very average CEO... Yahoo needed someone amazing and it failed to find one.
- mc32 10y agoWell, it's not like they didn't have a longish list of other CEOs who tried to turn the ship around and failed to even slow its demise --at least she gave them breathing room and hope. It was probably just too late to be consequnetial.
- exelius 10y agoThe problem was that someone who was skilled enough to have taken on the job of turning Yahoo around would have just started their own company -- without the baggage of Yahoo's culture. VC is easy enough to get that any tech executive capable of a Yahoo turnaround would have had no trouble raising $50-200 million. Anyone capable of the job also probably wouldn't be interested -- Yahoo does not play in any big growth markets right now.
- Bartweiss 10y agoEven for a CEO who wasn't looking to found a company, Yahoo can't have been an attractive bet. Jack Dorsey was (apparently) in the market for a job change around 2011, was a two-time winner already, and has since shown that he's willing to take on turnarounds. Sounds great, but I can't imagine what offer would have gotten him to take over a bloated, directionless horror like Yahoo. The entire job offer was an ugly one only suited to people without the independence and focus needed to succeed at it. Someone market-savvy enough to claw out a profitable place for Yahoo was bound to have options that didn't require mass layoffs and managing a dozen nearly-worthless side products.
- geodel 10y agoMoreover besides leadership skills 'silicon valley chops/cred' and 'good taste in design' did not get proper scrutiny in most of the articles about her post Google work. IMO her Google career itself was vastly exaggerated portrayal of her actual talent
- Tloewald 10y agoYahoo got where it was by being the first directory on the web. It was terrible — to get listed you had to submit an application and then whether and how you were listed was based on someone's arbitrary decision. It was like The App Store (hint to Apple — how'd that work out for Yahoo?). Yahoo then failed to fix its shitty directory (it eventually licensed results from third parties) and built a successful ad platform that was never bleeding edge. Meanwhile Yahoo passed on Google and Facebook…
- cableshaft 10y agoWhile I agree the App Store has it's fair share of issues, they do at least do more than 'here's the category an employee determined you should be, buried in subcategory after subcategory, and this is the only place people will ever find you' that the early Yahoo had. They have dynamic lists based on sales and downloads (which has its own issues, admittedly) for every category that may be algorithm-based but has no human making arbitrary decisions for each individual app. They also choose certain apps and feature them on the front page of the app store, which changes every week. They also let developers choose their categories (instead of employees choosing the categories), and developers can choose more than one category. They also let developers pick keywords (with some limitations) for users to find the apps via search terms. Each app page has its own url, so it can be landed on via other methods throughout the web. So all in all, it's very different from early Yahoo, and significantly better, and all of that would be plenty if they had like 1% of the total number of apps that they do, but they don't, so way too many apps get buried and unnoticed.
- exelius 10y agoI don't think the failure is on Mayer; Yahoo was a walking zombie before she arrived. They were the last remnant of the dot-com boom -- a media company without a significant role in content, advertising, shopping or computing. They had no technological advantage, or really any foundation for a competitive advantage to set them apart from the rest of the market. Quite simply, Yahoo was culturally never a technology company. They defined themselves as a "media" company in the mid 90s to avoid drawing Microsoft's ire, but they said it for so long they believed it. They underinvested in technology throughout the late 90s and early 2000s, and by that time Google was the behemoth that Yahoo should have been. Yahoo is only around today because they recognized the emergence of China and made a lucky investment in Alibaba. Without that investment, Yahoo would have gone bust years ago.
- amykhar 10y agoI was amazed that she took the job at all. Yahoo is dead, and has been for a very long time.
- Ressuder 10y agoI'm amazed that you were amazed. Seems like the perfect job to me. Not only because economically it's obviously fantastic, but also because she came to a company with significant resources and were basically given the freedom to do whatever the hell she wanted with it, without having to think much about an existing identify and business.
- Phlarp 10y agoWe can navel gaze at Yahoo as a company all we want, but I think Marissa's accomplishments as an individual should not be overlooked. She largely got to write her own ticket at Yahoo and had two healthy children while moving from a mid-upper management role at google into a real CEO position. Most women that have two children back to back like that in the professional world end up in a "mommy track" career path.
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- GantzGraf 10y agoI'm fascinated by the vitriol directed at Marissa. A lot of people seemed to take her hiring and subsequent performance as a personal offence to them.
- CaptSpify 10y agoIt's a couple of things from what I've seen: A) That she was paid so much money. A lot of people could have "not succeeded" for a lot less than what they paid her. B) Her attitude. I have never dealt with her, and am only basing this on what I've read: She seemed to push a lot of bad policies, that made employees upset, with the attitude of "All of this pain is for the Great Reward of turning Yahoo around." Yet at the end of the day, it seems that their sacrifices were for nothing. She talked big, but never delivered, and is making out quite successfully, for failing. Meanwhile the real brunt and struggle was pushed onto the employees. EDIT: I also think this resonates with a lot of people, as most of us have had similar execs. "No, we can't afford another server, you'll just have to work harder. Guess you'll just have to work through the night! Oops, it's 5 p.m., time for me to head out to my company-paid steak dinner, in my company-paid car, then time to head home to my company-paid apartment!"
- Tomte 10y agoAd A: on the other hand, few people here complain about the outrageous amounts of money that some founders have made. Yes, they built something. Still.
- CaptSpify 10y ago? I'm not sure what you mean. I think most people have much more respect for founders because they start from scratch and turn it into something. She didn't start from scratch, and she didn't turn it into anything.
- albedoa 10y ago> Yes, they built something. Still. Uh that part is pretty substantial.
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- dreamcompiler 10y agoYahoo.com is the address I ping when I'm testing a new wifi connection. This article seems to suggest they also have a website. Wow. Learn something new every day.
- stillusingvb6 10y ago2edgy4me
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- jbail 10y agoRemember when Mayer banned remote work at Yahoo? She still defends that choice even though she has clearly failed to prove her thesis that you need to sit next to someone collaborate successfully and deliver improved business results
- Bartweiss 10y agoI've always suspected that people took that decision too much at face value. Yahoo needed to make staff cuts, and too many layoffs are bad for the share price. Convincing all the remote employees to quit lets you claim "there's a plan!" while quietly thinning the ranks. The catch is that it doesn't work if you state your real reasons.
- jpmattia 10y agoThat would be about the worst form of leadership possible. By relying on attrition, you can pretty much guarantee that the people with the best offers waiting on the outside are going to leave, and that's pretty highly correlated with the people that you actually want to keep. If layoffs are required, there is no other way than to take the bull by the horns and make hard decisions about who has to go and who has to stay. Sometimes that involves making decisions about what programs are going to go/stay, which consequently leads to letting good people go when you shut down some of those programs. I'd also guess that shareholders have learned the lesson many years ago, which is why active layoffs often increase share price. Layoffs tend to increase near-term profitiability; whether long-term profitability is increased depends on whether you get the layoffs & refocusing done right.
- gaius 10y agoThat would be about the worst form of leadership possible. Not quite. The worst would be to do that, then have a office suite converted into a nursery for just your own kids.
- ng12 10y agoThe problem is many of the remote employees were the truly valuable ones. Talented engineers get spooked pretty quickly and a flexible work schedule is a very good reason to stick it out at a struggling large company. The more of those reasons you take away the more you'll find yourself with less desirable engineers.
- drdoom 10y agoSome people caught on earlier to the direction she was going (i.e., down). It was so alarmingly clear that some journalists even floated the idea that she may in fact be an agent of a competitor to bring Yahoo down. In other words, she was suspected of being an insider agent working for the other side.
- 1024core 10y agoYou know those algae blooms that block off all sunlight and kill a pond? Yahoo has that in the form of middle managers. Marissa's biggest (and perhaps even the only) mistake was to not get rid of this oxygen-depriving algae. Had she eliminated the middle-managers and meeting junkies, she could have liberated the engineers to actually deliver some solid products. // source: wasted many years of my life at Yahoo, left after Marissa came and I realized that she was being hoodwinked by the manager-types.
- googletazer 10y agoShe got several millions out of it. The engineers might have been buried but hey at least someone came out on top. The only chance for yahoo was promoting someone from within not bringing a "professional" CEO that will jump ship in a few years.
- leroy_masochist 10y agoIt's interesting that people only get mad about golden parachutes given to "rock star" CEOs when things are going poorly for the company that hired them. I feel like we should do a better job about calling out these agreements whenever they're inked; it's publicly available information in the case of publicly traded companies. Some kind of severance guarantee for the new CEO in case they get fired, OK, I get it. You need to keep your kids in private school and continue to pay your mortgage for the period of time while you find something else to do, fine, no problem. I'd even be fine with a healthy multiple of what that kind of expensive lifestyle costs for 6 months. In Mayer's case I'd even say that a million bucks might be justified, given that it will probably take her a while to find something else to do. But an agreement that will likely soon result in a $55mm payment to an outgoing CEO who has spent nearly 4 years pissing money away in bad acquisitions and destroying value across multiple verticals is absurd.
- a_small_island 10y agoThe theory is that no one good would take the job because the likelihood of failure was so high without a parachute. This type of ousting will certainly hurt Mayer's future CEO options, or so the theory goes.
- leroy_masochist 10y agoI guess it depends on how you define failure. I agree that elevating Yahoo to its previous place in the SV hierarchy would have been a tall order, but I think that prudent management of healthy business verticals combined with a conservative and thoughtful approach to acquisitions would have been pretty doable.
- drdoom 10y ago> When she was at Google, Mayer oversaw the approval of each daily homepage “doodle.” I love this new career path. Beats working years just to advance to manage your old team. Now I can see the logic behind all the attention on emojis at the Google I/O event. They will be our new leaders.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoI would call it Yahoo's Failed Prophet given she made best attempt anyone had seen in forever to get her people to the Promised Land in a few years after they marched 20 extra years in the Wilderness in the wrong direction stepping on what manna they received. Even Moses or Joshua might say "Screw this!" in such a situation. Well, Moses basically did but you don't see people calling him a false prophet. ;)
- throwaway4123 10y ago2 years from now- Twitter's False Prophet: How Jack Dorsey Failed to Turn the Company Around (wsj.com) HN top comment: I don't think the failure is on Jack; Twitter was a walking zombie before he arrived. All the engineers left after writing their own version of popular well designed Scala libraries like Akka and Spark and Play because huge ego. They stuffed these rewrites into monorepo which came crashing down. The engineers ran away and Jack turned off the lights.
- known 10y agoCopy/Compete; Yahoo is doing neither;
- spajus 10y agoI knew this would happen the minute she banned remote work.