10 ms·
Marissa Mayer admits Yahoo should have bought Netflix instead of Tumblr
- distortionfield 3y agoHilarious how god awful these CEOs are while still apparently being worth $23MM in severance.
- sickofparadox 3y agoFail objectively, get a huge payout, move on to the next company, crash the company, repeat. Being a CEO must be nice.
- tombert 3y agoAnd despite the fact that the CEOs are all able to have like five different side hustles, they still get to drone on endlessly about how hard they work, and do not see the hypocrisy with making all the employees sign overly broad "non-competes".
- JohnFen 3y agoWell, sure! We're untrustworthy plebes who would certainly drain company resources to support our "side hustles". The people who become CEOs are virtuous hyperperforming knights who always do everything right. /s
- tombert 3y agoProbably the most trouble I got into when I was at Apple was when I emailed a VP directly asking if I could maybe contribute some code (in my own time, on my own hardware, at home) to an open source project. The VP didn't just say "no", but also ratted me out to like the six managers between me and him, and each manager thought it was a good use of company time to schedule half-hour meetings explaining to me that I needed to go through the proper bureaucratic channels because the VP's time is "extremely valuable". Honestly kind of poisoned the entire job for me.
- erulabs 3y agoHaha, what's funny there is the idea that if they paid the VP less maybe it would be worth this time to engage with his employees.
- subw00f 3y agoWhy would you ask that? It’s literally your time and resources.
- tombert 3y agoApple made it pretty clear that they viewed pretty much any code that I wrote while I was employed by them, by default, belonged to them. If I contributed to an open source repo without legal's explicit approval, it was grounds for termination. It was ridiculous.
- JohnFen 3y agoI've encountered this sort of clause in about 2/3 of the employment contracts I've been presented with. Every time, I object to it and request that it be removed and replaced with wording to the effect of "I won't use company time, resources, or information in side projects". Every time I've done this, they've agreed to the change. If they don't, then I don't take the job.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoSounds like that happened a long time ago, my condolences. Non-competes don't mean shit and 99% of them in CA are illegal these days unless you are extremely high up (having 6 managers between you and a VP doesn't seem to satisfy that). Hope you did it anyway. No one should be able to tell you what you can do in your spare time.
- tombert 3y agoThis was early 2020; is that a long time ago? Time has no meaning after COVID. I mean, I wasn't worried about them suing me for contributing to open source (it would be pretty hard to prove any real damages), but I think being fired would have been on the table.
- dpkirchner 3y agoAnd then a lot of CEOs with their side hustles claim that remote work is "morally wrong" or whatever.
- NickC25 3y agoYeah, seriously. If you were in early with a hot company and that company hits hyperscale, people for some reason assume you're competent running a much larger legacy organization. I see very little parallels or overlap, but perhaps I'm blind. Mayer was an engineer, and for some reason people thought she'd be a great CEO. Surprise, she wasn't. Wasn't she really disliked within Yahoo!?
- lawn 3y agoBut "its so difficult to find competent people", "it's just that hard", "you don't get it", and my favorite: "you think you could do a better job?". At least I could crash the company without costing the company hundreds of millions.
- andy_ppp 3y agoWe were told at Yahoo! that it was pointless to compete with Google and Microsoft at search because Yahoo! were not willing to put in the money to have their own search engine. At the time they were still the most popular webpage on the Internet. What really irritated me about this was the idea you could just look at a spreadsheet and decide if you'll be successful at search or anything else for that matter, startups constantly prove that resources don't automatically equal success... it sort of summed up the jail Yahoo! and Carol Bartz created and the thought process involved in that company's demise. MBAs have a lot to answer for IMO.
- itronitron 3y agoHow do people deal with such poor leadership? One of the founders of Lucene worked at Yahoo for a time so Yahoo certainly could have done something distinctive in the search space.
- Joeri 3y agoThey don’t. They leave. When enough of them leave a negative spiral sets in, until most of whose left are people who have nowhere else to go. You would think that kills a company, but a big company can survive decades in that mode, just slowly riding the elevator all the way down.
- doubled112 3y agoThe Dead Sea effect?
- johnnyanmac 3y agoYou give feedback, they ignore it, and you leave. Most engineers don't want to spend their times fighting politics instead of doing their job. And if leadership doesn't have confidence in your job, why should you not seek a place that does? Not like there's really much employee retention factors these days.
- latchkey 3y agoDoug worked at Apple on v-twin [0]. He has a long history of building search related products. By the way, after co-founding Jakarta, I was the one who brought him and Lucene into the ASF and the rest is history. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Cutting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Cutting
- sdflhasjd 3y agoI'm sure there's some alternative universe where Yahoo bought Netflix and ruined that instead. It's not that they bought the wrong company, it's that they just don't get it.
- MonkeyIsNull 3y agoThe exodus of technical staff when she came aboard was astonishing. There was something definitely wrong with Yahoo back then .... wait, there's STILL something really wrong with them.
- mrweasel 3y agoIs Yahoo still Yahoo? Didn't Yahoo! have like a bunch of stocks in Alibaba, worth more than their actual business? So they sold the online "stuff" to Verizon and Yahoo Inc. became Altaba. Through it's history Yahoo! had the opportunity to buy a lot of successful companies, but they lacked the foresight to do so and trusted too much in their existing business. For a brief period they did manage to attract really talented people though.
- usrusr 3y agoWas it different before she came? Yahoo never made any sense to me, not now, not when I considered altavista.digital.com king of the hill.
- MonkeyIsNull 3y agoDouglas Crockford used to work there and several other JS programmers that were doing really interesting work. In a span of about 3 months they all left. I remember thinking WTH is going on there that they all bailed that quick?
- itronitron 3y agoKnowing Yahoo, they would probably have bought Qwikster instead.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
- m3kw9 3y agoAnd I should have brought Apple stock pre iPhone
- rhelz 3y agochuckle I had Apple stock pre iPhone. What did I have to do in order to be rich? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. If I would have just quit working, hung out on a beach, and not sold any Apple stock, I would have made far more money than anything I have done since.
- doubled112 3y agoHindsight is always 20/20, right?
- oh_sigh 3y agoSo you sold the stock...what did you buy with it?
- rhelz 3y agoA college education for my kids...who dropped out before they got their degree.
- IncreasePosts 3y agoWell...do they at least remember to call on mother's and father's day?
- rhelz 3y ago:) they do. And if I could go back, I'd do it all again. A father's role is to provide the opportunities, and that obligation does not go away even if you know your kids won't take full advantage of them.
- m3kw9 3y agoYou need to buy and hold till now. Most people flip it after 50% gain and used it to buy a shoe that looked “nice”
- frankfrank13 3y agoI know this is heretical but I think Marissa Meyer is one of the biggest scapegoats in tech history.
- Zigurd 3y agoEh. There's whatshername at Xitter. It takes a special kind of stupid to volunteer for a "glass cliff" position like that.
- CoastalCoder 3y agoMaybe a high risk tolerance? If she turns around Twitter despite Musk's involvement, she'll be deified by MBAs everywhere.
- tinus_hn 3y agoI would gladly take all the blame for $20 million. And after that, do it again for another $20 million.
- oh_sigh 3y agoShe needs to do something impressive then. It's hard to count her time at early Google as a real example of her genius, unless the argument is that literally every employee there was a supergenius somehow. After failing to do anything interesting, and getting a quarter of a billion dollars from Yahoo, she is now pushing some kind of smart phone contacts thing with AI.
- DanielHB 3y agoIt is called the Glass Cliff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff
- js2 3y agoArticle is from May and is reporting of an interview: https://www.emergingtechbrew.com/stories/2023/05/04/marissa-mayer-ai-yahoo-regrets https://www.emergingtechbrew.com/stories/2023/05/04/marissa-...
- unsupp0rted 3y agoThe best thing Yahoo! did at the time was create the show Other Space, which no other person but me has heard of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Space
- lotsofpulp 3y agoLooks like it's available to watch for free here: https://watchdust.com/otherspace https://watchdust.com/otherspace
- twostorytower 3y agoYahoo Screen was an impressively bad product but that show was great. I remember ads legitimately interrupting the middle of a scene (not clearly designed ad break) and when the ad finished, the show didn't even resume where it left off. It was {ad length} seconds later as if the show kept going in the background and then you'd have to rewind.
- Tommah 3y agoThey also had a service called Yahoo! Music that showed currently popular music videos. I thought it was cool at the time. I remember watching it during my senior year of college, in 2005-2006. Shortly after I graduated, I heard about another video site called YouTube. I wonder what ever became of that one!
- datadrivenangel 3y agoTumblr remains one of the least worst social media websites, and Yahoo losing a billion dollars on it makes it all the sweeter.
- DerekBickerton 3y agoTumblr is not NSFW content friendly, which is a slippery slope. I don't want my edgy meme taken down or censored, I would much rather run my own server that I control and having it not subject to arbitrary value judgements about what I post.
- motohagiography 3y agoI'm imagining the pitch. "So there's this popular blogging website, it has millions of users that we can onboard as a channel for our other properties, probable ARPU across integrations in high double digits per year. There's just one thing though, they hate everything. Yeah, literally everything. I don't actually know what that means or how it's possible, but it's millions of users and we pay product managers to figure this stuff out, we're thinking a round number like a billion, it sends all the right signals..."
- replyifuagree 3y ago>it sends all the right signals Wow that just drips frat house product manager!
- jedberg 3y agoBut man am I glad they didn't. I'm pretty sure it would have killed Netflix. At that time, a lot of the senior eng managers at Netflix were ex-Yahoo. They had left for a reason.
- IOT_Apprentice 3y agoMarissa appears to have reached her level of incompetence. That said she is fabulously wealthy from her google stock et al.
- replyifuagree 3y agoDid Mayer really just spend two years professionally coding before becoming a product manager? If true, that smells like a root cause for how bad Mayer is at running tech.
- whywhywhywhy 3y agoTumblr could have been a great purchase and kept Yahoo relevant today but they ruined it, and I mean with multiple compounding changes not just the explicit content ban.
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoDon't all mergers/acquisitions look like brilliance or idiocy in hindsight.
- game_the0ry 3y agoI think Ms Mayer was, and always will be, an incompetent leader. Tumblr was a cool website with potential and Yahoo leadership at the time could not figure out what to do with it.
- user3939382 3y agoI see Mozilla management and keep thinking of Yahoo! Wasting limited resources while the clock is ticking on useless side projects and neglecting your raison d’etre. Having no sense of purpose or central plan.
- motbus3 3y agoThis woman never ever made the right decision. You can actually take her decisions and make the contrary choice to find the correct one.
- ravenstine 3y agoWell... Mayer was running Yahoo into the ground, so I'm not sure whether her retrospective beliefs are worth anything. Yahoo already tried doing their own original content and failed at it. I don't see how a Netflix acquisition by Yahoo would have done anything but plummet Netflix. What Yahoo should have done was try to capitalize on the growing negative sentiment against The Google, social media, and Big Tech in general. By that I mean that Yahoo should have revamped itself to be privacy-oriented. This wouldn't be easy to pull off since Yahoo was (still is?) an advertising firm, but at this point they don't suffer the reputation of The Google in terms of having so much data that they "know what you want before you know it." So, for instance, Yahoo Mail should have been retooled to use end-to-end encryption and promised to never read your emails or share with third parties. Yahoo Search should have essentially become what Kagi is today; a search engine that gives power back to the user. Yahoo News should have been taken off the homepage and scoped exclusively to the News section unless the user opts-in to keeping the news one the homepage. Their news product should also have tried to distance itself from being a chum bucket of celebrity gossip and legacy entertainment news (today they still forward Buzzfeed articles for cripes sake). Yahoo made one semi-decent move with LastPass Premium being a part of Yahoo Plus Secure, but the problem here is that LastPass is fraught with controversy, and it's a product that's more or less tacked on to the Yahoo brand rather than being a true part of it. No one wants a glorified trial for some software that may no longer be offered through Yahoo someday. Would these changes have meant that Yahoo would maximize their profit? Certainly not, at least not in the beginning. However, it would give them a chance to become relevant and grow in the long term. Of course, I don't believe they're ever going to do that. They have been experiencing late-stage corporatism for most of their existence, and that's not going to change without getting rid of all the clowns from the C-level. Everything about Yahoo for most of its existence screams design by corporate committee. Their ecosystem is in a better shape than it was, but it's still baffling just how safe they want to play everything. Their whole site screams Web 1.0 but without any of the Web 1.0 charm. Making Yahoo Mail a safe haven from the likes of Gmail would have been such an obvious win, in my opinion. Yet the former CEO of Yahoo thinks they would have been better off buying a company that succeeds an area where Yahoo proves to have sucked hard at?
- kwanbix 3y agoI don't get how they could see tumblr as a strategic investment. I just don't get it.
- mixmastamyk 3y agoMore importantly, Yahoo should have let MS buy them and massively overpay… would have been a substantial blow to get MS out of the way.
- dave333 3y agoI remember a Cringely column around the time Mayer took over suggesting Yahoo's best strategy would be simply to invest in a large number of startups in early funding rounds, i.e. not expensive unicorns.
- dave333 3y agoLink to 2014 article: https://www.cringely.com/2014/09/30/one-way-maybe-way-yahoo-can-succeed/ https://www.cringely.com/2014/09/30/one-way-maybe-way-yahoo-... and follow up 2 yrs later: https://www.cringely.com/2016/07/26/15343/ https://www.cringely.com/2016/07/26/15343/
- tbyehl 3y agoI'd trade any startup Yahoo ruined for them killing Twitter instead.
- zzzcsgo 3y ago[flagged]
- latchkey 3y agoMayer is now running a company called Sunshine making a "better contacts" app. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y agoWhat's yahoo business currently? I can never think of them for anything IT related. I vaguely remember something about finances, but I could be wrong
- mediumsmart 3y agoYahoo is perfectly usable via thunderbird.