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> like Marissa Mayer did to Yahoo Sorry to nitpick, but for some reason this comment irks me. Your comment seems to imply that yahoo was healthy, they hired Ma

> like Marissa Mayer did to Yahoo Sorry to nitpick, but for some reason this comment irks me. Your comment seems to imply that yahoo was healthy, they hired Mayer, and then Yahoo died as a result. Yahoo was a sinking ship, and it would have been a tough turn around for anyone. Not that I think Mayer was the world’s best CEO or anything, but the idea that she “killed” yahoo seems absurd. It’s like accusing a surgeon of killing someone that died in ER surgery; the reason the person was in the ER in the first place was because they were dying. Microsoft dying under Ballmer would have been night and day different as Microsoft was basically the world’s most valuable company, not a clusterfuck like 2012 yahoo.

nojvek 8y ago
Yahoo was behind, agreed! They had so many opportunities to sell though. Microsoft was willing to buy Yahoo at a huge premium and it didn’t go through. Good for MSFT. In ER terms, the surgeon could have cut the leg off and saved the person, but got a bit too greedy and ended up killing the person by trying to save everything.
- cepth 8y ago
  Just to be clear, Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo for $45 billion in 2008, long before Marissa Mayer was CEO. As the parent comment notes, your previous comment seems to suggest some kind of causation between Mayer’s tenure as CEO and the eventual breakup and sale of Yahoo. This is the fallacy known in poker as “resulting”. Nicholas Carlson’s “Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo” is a fair account of her first few years at Yahoo. Keep in mind that when she joined, there was something like a total dozen mobile engineers at Yahoo. The company had burned through 3 CEOs in a decade, etc. Mayer was not a perfect CEO in terms of strategic vision or her choice of acquisition targets, but I don’t think her time as CEO was particularly bad either.
  - nojvek 8y ago
    I believe I got my facts wrong. Thanks for changing my perspective.

nojvek 8y ago

Yahoo was behind, agreed! They had so many opportunities to sell though. Microsoft was willing to buy Yahoo at a huge premium and it didn’t go through. Good for MSFT. In ER terms, the surgeon could have cut the leg off and saved the person, but got a bit too greedy and ended up killing the person by trying to save everything.

cepth 8y ago
Just to be clear, Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo for $45 billion in 2008, long before Marissa Mayer was CEO. As the parent comment notes, your previous comment seems to suggest some kind of causation between Mayer’s tenure as CEO and the eventual breakup and sale of Yahoo. This is the fallacy known in poker as “resulting”. Nicholas Carlson’s “Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo” is a fair account of her first few years at Yahoo. Keep in mind that when she joined, there was something like a total dozen mobile engineers at Yahoo. The company had burned through 3 CEOs in a decade, etc. Mayer was not a perfect CEO in terms of strategic vision or her choice of acquisition targets, but I don’t think her time as CEO was particularly bad either.
- nojvek 8y ago
  I believe I got my facts wrong. Thanks for changing my perspective.