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>I remember Yahoo had another candidate that planned to turn Yahoo into a media company. Which even at the time I thought was a much better idea and direction.

>I remember Yahoo had another candidate that planned to turn Yahoo into a media company. Which even at the time I thought was a much better idea and direction. Instead the broad choose Mayer, and try to compete head on with Google. This is exactly right, and it perfectly highlights the dilemma of Yahoo that made it an unwinnable battle. "Being a media company" would have been a real answer, and a real decision that gave Yahoo a spirit and a direction, and it would have been a declaration that is really true to the soul of Yahoo. However, a media company is just a bad thing to be, and competing with Google was a losing battle. Probably one of the biggest pieces of revisionist history out there today is that the decline of Yahoo was due to personal mismanagement from Marissa Mayer, when the reality was that Yahoo was in decline and her project was to reverse an existing decline, which was an impossible task. Once that reality is acknowledged, debate will ensue that tries to split the difference about how much is column a, how much is column b, but its beside the point when you step back and realize that Yahoo had fundamental challenges that transcended the tenure of any particular CEO. I've said it before, but I think that if there were any masterstroke Yahoo could have made to revitalize the company, to accomplish what Google could not, Yahoo really could have successfully launched a social network to compete with Facebook. People had been loyal to Yahoo for decades, plus it had some superstar properties like Tumblr, Flickr and Delicious, along with what might be termed its "legacy" properties like Groups, Answers and their massive email userbase. By contrast Google didn't have anything that behaved like a true organic, living and breathing social network when it launched Plus (well, with the exception of Reader). The puzzle pieces were there.

Lammy 5y ago
> the reality was that Yahoo was in decline and her project was to reverse an existing decline Also known as the "glass cliff" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff
dpark 5y ago
I find it really strange that Mayer gets the blame for Yahoo’s decline. Yahoo was racing downhill before Mayer was even considered for the CEO role there. I am doubtful anyone could have reversed Yahoo’s fortune. At least when Steve Jobs showed up to save Apple they had a core competency. Frankly Yahoo didn’t. Yahoo failed to capitalize on search until Google was entrenched. They failed to invest properly in targeted advertising until Google owned that as well. They sat on strategic investments like Flickr until they were nearly dead. They could have sold to Ballmer’s Microsoft for an unjustifiable fortune and somehow they fucked that up, too. They could have bought Google for change and said no. Yahoo lucked into success. It was literally started as a list of links. They realized people would pay a fortune for banner ads and raked in money hand over first until competent competitors appeared. They started Yahoo Mail which was a great idea but then made it feel low quality by sticking ads in outgoing email and then again just let it sit and rot. They bought a corporate mail app and then just sat on it, too. They didn’t even use it internally. Yahoo managed to treat every market opportunity the way Microsoft treated the post-iPhone mobile market. I worked at Yahoo during part of this decline. The frustrating thing was that Yahoo couldn’t decide what they were. They kept calling themselves a media company but that didn’t seem to mean anything. They didn’t have a plan to really grow their media presence and they were investing crazy in rebuilding an ad system that they couldn’t convince people to switch to. When Mayer came on board, lots of people (online at least) claimed that her real job was just to find an acquirer. That might not be far from the truth.
- petilon 5y ago
  > I find it really strange that Mayer gets the blame for Yahoo’s decline. Not strange at all. That's literally what a CEO gets paid to do: to not be in decline. Microsoft was in decline when Satya took over too. It is no longer in decline. He knows how to do the job, and he is doing it.
  - dpark 5y ago
    The previous CEOs were also paid to do that job, so yes, it’s extremely strange when people point to Mayer as the problem with Yahoo and not, say, Koogle or Semel, who presided over a decade of bad decisions. It’s like Mayer was brought in to manage a burning building and everyone acts like she’s incompetent because the fire department couldn’t save what was left. (P.S. Microsoft was not actually in decline under Ballmer by sane metrics. Microsoft revenue had been climbing consistently. Stock was flat for a very long time though.)
  - glenstein 5y ago
    That's an ok eli5 explainer of what a CEO is, but the positions of Microsoft and Yahoo are not remotely analogous, and the blame of Marissa Meyer flies in the face of any kind of appropriate portionality or historical context. I guess the part where I agree with you is the implicit acknowledgment that blame is merely a function of the job title, and not in any way correlated with any rational analysis of whether those expectations are realistic or accurate reflections of causality.
    - petilon 5y ago
      > blame is merely a function of the job title Marissa Meyer's name is indelibly linked to the Flickr fail. She promoted herself as a UX expert, then "improved" Flickr and ended up f??king it up. Excerpt from NYT story: “My focus at Google has been to deliver great end-user experiences, to delight and inspire our end users,” Ms. Mayer said in an interview. “That is what I plan to do at Yahoo, give the end user something valuable and delightful that makes them want to come to Yahoo every day.” https://www.wired.com/2013/04/flickr/ https://www.wired.com/2013/04/flickr/ https://gizmodo.com/flashback-how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost-the-interne-508852335 https://gizmodo.com/flashback-how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lo... https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/technology/marissa-mayer-hopes-to-brighten-user-experience-at-yahoo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/technology/marissa-mayer-...

Lammy 5y ago

> the reality was that Yahoo was in decline and her project was to reverse an existing decline Also known as the "glass cliff" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff

dpark 5y ago

I find it really strange that Mayer gets the blame for Yahoo’s decline. Yahoo was racing downhill before Mayer was even considered for the CEO role there. I am doubtful anyone could have reversed Yahoo’s fortune. At least when Steve Jobs showed up to save Apple they had a core competency. Frankly Yahoo didn’t. Yahoo failed to capitalize on search until Google was entrenched. They failed to invest properly in targeted advertising until Google owned that as well. They sat on strategic investments like Flickr until they were nearly dead. They could have sold to Ballmer’s Microsoft for an unjustifiable fortune and somehow they fucked that up, too. They could have bought Google for change and said no. Yahoo lucked into success. It was literally started as a list of links. They realized people would pay a fortune for banner ads and raked in money hand over first until competent competitors appeared. They started Yahoo Mail which was a great idea but then made it feel low quality by sticking ads in outgoing email and then again just let it sit and rot. They bought a corporate mail app and then just sat on it, too. They didn’t even use it internally. Yahoo managed to treat every market opportunity the way Microsoft treated the post-iPhone mobile market. I worked at Yahoo during part of this decline. The frustrating thing was that Yahoo couldn’t decide what they were. They kept calling themselves a media company but that didn’t seem to mean anything. They didn’t have a plan to really grow their media presence and they were investing crazy in rebuilding an ad system that they couldn’t convince people to switch to. When Mayer came on board, lots of people (online at least) claimed that her real job was just to find an acquirer. That might not be far from the truth.

petilon 5y ago
> I find it really strange that Mayer gets the blame for Yahoo’s decline. Not strange at all. That's literally what a CEO gets paid to do: to not be in decline. Microsoft was in decline when Satya took over too. It is no longer in decline. He knows how to do the job, and he is doing it.
- dpark 5y ago
  The previous CEOs were also paid to do that job, so yes, it’s extremely strange when people point to Mayer as the problem with Yahoo and not, say, Koogle or Semel, who presided over a decade of bad decisions. It’s like Mayer was brought in to manage a burning building and everyone acts like she’s incompetent because the fire department couldn’t save what was left. (P.S. Microsoft was not actually in decline under Ballmer by sane metrics. Microsoft revenue had been climbing consistently. Stock was flat for a very long time though.)
- glenstein 5y ago
  That's an ok eli5 explainer of what a CEO is, but the positions of Microsoft and Yahoo are not remotely analogous, and the blame of Marissa Meyer flies in the face of any kind of appropriate portionality or historical context. I guess the part where I agree with you is the implicit acknowledgment that blame is merely a function of the job title, and not in any way correlated with any rational analysis of whether those expectations are realistic or accurate reflections of causality.
  - petilon 5y ago
    > blame is merely a function of the job title Marissa Meyer's name is indelibly linked to the Flickr fail. She promoted herself as a UX expert, then "improved" Flickr and ended up f??king it up. Excerpt from NYT story: “My focus at Google has been to deliver great end-user experiences, to delight and inspire our end users,” Ms. Mayer said in an interview. “That is what I plan to do at Yahoo, give the end user something valuable and delightful that makes them want to come to Yahoo every day.” https://www.wired.com/2013/04/flickr/ https://www.wired.com/2013/04/flickr/ https://gizmodo.com/flashback-how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost-the-interne-508852335 https://gizmodo.com/flashback-how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lo... https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/technology/marissa-mayer-hopes-to-brighten-user-experience-at-yahoo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/technology/marissa-mayer-...