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I think the main problem was that Mayer never managed to answer one simple question: "what is Yahoo supposed to be good at?". I'm not sure the comparison to J

by bborud 5y ago

I think the main problem was that Mayer never managed to answer one simple question: "what is Yahoo supposed to be good at?". I'm not sure the comparison to Jobs is fair since Marissa had very limited leadership experience and completely lacked Jobs' ability to drive product development (I've sat through her reviews and regardless of whatever myth has been created around her, I don't think she was a driver of progress so much as an annoying, unfocused, unpleasant micro-manager who limited everyone around her to her myopic vision. That attitude doesn't scale beyond a junior VP position). Jobs actually did the one thing Marissa couldn't: he was exceedingly clear on what Apple was going to do well. Right down to simplifying the product strategy so much even consumers understood it. But in all fairness, even with a clear vision, there were sharks in the water at all sides distracting the leadership from doing their job.

dpark 5y ago
I think that’s fair. It’s the same struggle that Bartz had and Yang before her. As you said, there were sharks on all sides. Yahoo was no longer the leader in anything significant once Google showed up. Even in hindsight it’s hard to see a winning play for Mayer’s Yahoo. Even if Mayer had been visionary enough to build something like Chrome at Yahoo, Google would have beaten them to delivery or overwhelmed them shortly after. (Chrome might have been a compelling move for Bartz, who could have done it early enough to actually beat Google out the door.) Maybe if she’d seen Instagram coming she could have turned Flickr into that, but it’s not clear that would have changed the trajectory much, given that Instagram itself only sold for a billion in 2012 and Yahoo was trying to justify its continued existence while sitting on top of 30 billion of Alibaba. All this is to say that maybe Mayer is a terrible leader (I honestly don’t know), but I don’t see that she bears most of the blame for Yahoo collapsing.
- bborud 5y ago
  I think a winning play would have had to be based on some of their existing strengths rather than start something entirely green-field. For instance, there was a surprising amount of good platform technology at Yahoo! that could have gone somewhere interesting with more juice behind it. (It was managed like a means to and end, not an end in itself. This is what set companies like Google apart from Yahoo, Lycos and all the early 2000s portal companies) I'm not sure products like Flickr was salvageable. I think I would have just starter over with more stringent technical goals to allow for more flexibility in enabling a product strategy that could remain flexible. (First, it has to be able to serve images properly - at the very least). A winning play would have needed at least 3 if not 4 years to bear fruit as well. Without opportunists trying to force their way into a controlling position. And that wasn't going to happen. The problem with Yang, Bartz and Semel was that none of them were the kind of people who "get it". They were not part of Internet or tech culture so they lacked all instinct. On top of that, Semel was a greedy asshole I have absolutely no sympathy for.
  - dpark 5y ago
    > I think a winning play would have had to be based on some of their existing strengths rather than start something entirely green-field. For instance, there was a surprising amount of good platform technology at Yahoo! that could have gone somewhere interesting with more juice behind it. I’m curious what you have in mind. I don’t see what they had that they could have built a multibillion dollar company on. And that was the real challenge. They needed to build a core business worth at least several (10-20?) billion to fend off an inevitable hostile takeover breakup. > The problem with Yang, Bartz and Semel was that none of them were the kind of people who "get it". They were not part of Internet or tech culture so they lacked all instinct. It’s weird lumping Yang in with those others. Yang definitely was part of Internet/tech culture. He founded Yahoo and was responsible for the bulk of the value of Yahoo, as it came out of his investment in Alibaba. But he certainly made a lot of missteps as well.
    - bborud 5y ago
      All of the value of Yahoo was in the bits they could sell off. Yang did that right. That makes him a good/lucky investor. It doesn’t make him (or Filo) someone who gets it.
      - dpark 5y ago
        > It doesn’t make him (or Filo) someone who gets it. I don’t know what this means. If “gets it” means “capable of growing a $40 billion company “, then the set of people who “get it” seems exceedingly small.
        bborud 5y ago
        No it isn't really about money, but about having an instinct for products, users, quality, and which opportunities are important and which are not. Have those in place and financial success will eventually follow. This doesn't mean it is easily achievable. It certainly isn't. The distinction lies in not being delusional about how the important customers see you. And Yahoo was, for most of the time I paid attention, horribly delusional. If we're going to focus on financial success it is important to use the correct measuring stick. You have to look at the delta between the potential and the actual value realized. Conservatively, the potential for Yahoo was at least an order of magnitude higher than the peak value. It had money, it had the biggest email service in the world, it had lots of eyeballs, it owned a good chunk of the world's web search talent, it even owned certain key advertising patents. And it managed to squander every single one of those advantages - without exception. It was fucking painful to watch and even more painful to be part of it. At least until I decided to leave because none of the products I cared about were actually good enough that I'd use them myself. I remember one afternoon when I was trying to figure out a shortcoming in a Yahoo product - one of the five or so products featured prominently on the front page. I asked around who I should talk to and eventually I realized that the product had zero developers - they had all been absorbed into a team that was working on something entirely different. When poking around I was told that "the CEO uses the product and thinks it is fine - so it is done. There is no need for developers or any further development". This was Yahoo Calendar. If you think back to the early 2000s, calendar was the unsolved piece of the replace-Microsoft-Office problem. Calendar was strategically important for defending the email position. And they didn't even understand that. They had zero strategic understanding of the space their products were competing in. Of course they lost the position. As anyone who paid attention knew they would. The peak value of Yahoo was only that high to begin with because of very fortunate investments early on. Not because they actually knew how to do products. They had no idea how to build product. Be it search, email, or advertising platform. Not for lack of technical talent, but due to grossly incompetent leadership and an organization stuffed chock-full of useless middle managers. Yahoo had the potential. But not the leadership to realize it. Also, keep in mind that Yahoo itself had a negative valuation at one point - it was worth less than the value of its assets.

by bborud 5y ago

dpark 5y ago

I think that’s fair. It’s the same struggle that Bartz had and Yang before her. As you said, there were sharks on all sides. Yahoo was no longer the leader in anything significant once Google showed up. Even in hindsight it’s hard to see a winning play for Mayer’s Yahoo. Even if Mayer had been visionary enough to build something like Chrome at Yahoo, Google would have beaten them to delivery or overwhelmed them shortly after. (Chrome might have been a compelling move for Bartz, who could have done it early enough to actually beat Google out the door.) Maybe if she’d seen Instagram coming she could have turned Flickr into that, but it’s not clear that would have changed the trajectory much, given that Instagram itself only sold for a billion in 2012 and Yahoo was trying to justify its continued existence while sitting on top of 30 billion of Alibaba. All this is to say that maybe Mayer is a terrible leader (I honestly don’t know), but I don’t see that she bears most of the blame for Yahoo collapsing.

bborud 5y ago
I think a winning play would have had to be based on some of their existing strengths rather than start something entirely green-field. For instance, there was a surprising amount of good platform technology at Yahoo! that could have gone somewhere interesting with more juice behind it. (It was managed like a means to and end, not an end in itself. This is what set companies like Google apart from Yahoo, Lycos and all the early 2000s portal companies) I'm not sure products like Flickr was salvageable. I think I would have just starter over with more stringent technical goals to allow for more flexibility in enabling a product strategy that could remain flexible. (First, it has to be able to serve images properly - at the very least). A winning play would have needed at least 3 if not 4 years to bear fruit as well. Without opportunists trying to force their way into a controlling position. And that wasn't going to happen. The problem with Yang, Bartz and Semel was that none of them were the kind of people who "get it". They were not part of Internet or tech culture so they lacked all instinct. On top of that, Semel was a greedy asshole I have absolutely no sympathy for.
- dpark 5y ago
  > I think a winning play would have had to be based on some of their existing strengths rather than start something entirely green-field. For instance, there was a surprising amount of good platform technology at Yahoo! that could have gone somewhere interesting with more juice behind it. I’m curious what you have in mind. I don’t see what they had that they could have built a multibillion dollar company on. And that was the real challenge. They needed to build a core business worth at least several (10-20?) billion to fend off an inevitable hostile takeover breakup. > The problem with Yang, Bartz and Semel was that none of them were the kind of people who "get it". They were not part of Internet or tech culture so they lacked all instinct. It’s weird lumping Yang in with those others. Yang definitely was part of Internet/tech culture. He founded Yahoo and was responsible for the bulk of the value of Yahoo, as it came out of his investment in Alibaba. But he certainly made a lot of missteps as well.
  - bborud 5y ago
    All of the value of Yahoo was in the bits they could sell off. Yang did that right. That makes him a good/lucky investor. It doesn’t make him (or Filo) someone who gets it.
    - dpark 5y ago
      > It doesn’t make him (or Filo) someone who gets it. I don’t know what this means. If “gets it” means “capable of growing a $40 billion company “, then the set of people who “get it” seems exceedingly small.
      - bborud 5y ago
        No it isn't really about money, but about having an instinct for products, users, quality, and which opportunities are important and which are not. Have those in place and financial success will eventually follow. This doesn't mean it is easily achievable. It certainly isn't. The distinction lies in not being delusional about how the important customers see you. And Yahoo was, for most of the time I paid attention, horribly delusional. If we're going to focus on financial success it is important to use the correct measuring stick. You have to look at the delta between the potential and the actual value realized. Conservatively, the potential for Yahoo was at least an order of magnitude higher than the peak value. It had money, it had the biggest email service in the world, it had lots of eyeballs, it owned a good chunk of the world's web search talent, it even owned certain key advertising patents. And it managed to squander every single one of those advantages - without exception. It was fucking painful to watch and even more painful to be part of it. At least until I decided to leave because none of the products I cared about were actually good enough that I'd use them myself. I remember one afternoon when I was trying to figure out a shortcoming in a Yahoo product - one of the five or so products featured prominently on the front page. I asked around who I should talk to and eventually I realized that the product had zero developers - they had all been absorbed into a team that was working on something entirely different. When poking around I was told that "the CEO uses the product and thinks it is fine - so it is done. There is no need for developers or any further development". This was Yahoo Calendar. If you think back to the early 2000s, calendar was the unsolved piece of the replace-Microsoft-Office problem. Calendar was strategically important for defending the email position. And they didn't even understand that. They had zero strategic understanding of the space their products were competing in. Of course they lost the position. As anyone who paid attention knew they would. The peak value of Yahoo was only that high to begin with because of very fortunate investments early on. Not because they actually knew how to do products. They had no idea how to build product. Be it search, email, or advertising platform. Not for lack of technical talent, but due to grossly incompetent leadership and an organization stuffed chock-full of useless middle managers. Yahoo had the potential. But not the leadership to realize it. Also, keep in mind that Yahoo itself had a negative valuation at one point - it was worth less than the value of its assets.