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It's very interesting to see so many people on the Internet complaining about Marissa's golden parachute. Honestly, the only remarkable thing about it is that s
by VonGuard 9y ago
It's very interesting to see so many people on the Internet complaining about Marissa's golden parachute. Honestly, the only remarkable thing about it is that she's a woman. These types of rewards are handed out all the time to CEO's of failed companies. Failed CEO's get them too, and frankly, I don't think Marissa failed.
Frankly, she did what she was supposed to do: sold the company, satisfied Carl Icahn, and improved internal morale. From what I heard anecdotally, she took an internal culture of rot and at least made it a place where people didn't dread going into work every morning. It's kinda like she pulled the teams out of the swamp, and rested them on a muddy, cold bank of the river. At least they weren't drowning anymore.
The pivot to mobile-first was a big deal, internally. They really lived and breathed that change, as is evidenced by the tremendous amount of engineering they put into simple things like their mobile weather app. It didn't ultimately work, but it was the right direction to be going, honestly.
Was it all misguided and doomed from the start? Sure! Yahoo! was the new AOL, and it was a miracle the company didn't get sold off to a media firm. But then, Verizon is kind of building its own media arm, and it already owns AOL. The fact that anyone bought Yahoo is a testament to Marissa's leadership. Would you have bought it, given the opportunity? I probably wouldn't have either. But she made the sale. If nothing else, that golden parachute is a commission just for ending the damn place as a going concern.
One of the things that really killed Yahoo, that no one talks about, is that they had these security people called Paranoids. They were great, super smart, always available, BUT, they held sway over everything and it was very very easy to just say, "naw, forget that 6 months of work, throw it all away, the Paranoids say we can't put it on production machines."
This was evidently an entirely acceptable thing to happen, internally, and it's why so many things were killed. It's also why you don't hear about constant data breaches at Yahoo! anymore, though.
- otoburb 9y ago>>One of the things that really killed Yahoo, that no one talks about, is that they had these security people called Paranoids. Did this group of Paranoids hold product-blocking sway after or before the highly publicized Yahoo! hacks? Lose-lose no matter which branch of the analysis tree we traverse.
- lovich 9y agoBased on the timeline of the higher up link about the leak and the below article, its hard to tell. They appear to have had sway before the leaks were public, but they could have been known privately or people could have just been aware of how many holes they had in their system. Seems like it might have been a case of closing the barn door after the cows are out https://www.cnet.com/news/lord-of-the-paranoids-new-yahoo-security-exec-on-protecting-a-billion-plus-accounts/ https://www.cnet.com/news/lord-of-the-paranoids-new-yahoo-se...
- schwarrrtz 9y ago> One of the things that really killed Yahoo, that no one talks about, is that they had these security people called Paranoids. They were great, super smart, always available, BUT, they held sway over everything and it was very very easy to just say, "naw, forget that 6 months of work, throw it all away, the Paranoids say we can't put it on production machines." I'm pretty surprised to hear that Yahoo had a security team with that much influence, given their leak of over 1bn accounts and subsequent failure to disclose that information for 3 years. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/14/yahoo-hack-security-of-one-billion-accounts-breached https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/14/yahoo-hac...
- yuhong 9y agoIt dates back to the 1990s I think.
- derptron 9y agoWould you have bought it, given the opportunity? I probably wouldn't have either. But she made the sale. If nothing else, that golden parachute is a commission just for ending the damn place as a going concern. Do you really think the CEO personally negotiates the sale?
- groby_b 9y agoUh... Any company that truly cares about security has a security team with veto powers. I'm surprised Yahoo cared that deeply, but blaming that team for its failure is completely missing the point.
- lawnchair_larry 9y agoNope, definitely not the case. Seen the inside of many big companies who have top tier security teams. None that I've seen have veto and none can block shipping. The best they can do is escalate, and the business owner gets to decide if they want to ship or not.
- WalterSear 9y agoSecurity is a business issue like anything else, and good security people can convincingly state their business case. It sounds a bit like they did security by cargo cult.