11 ms·

Advice for Marissa Mayer from an ex-Yahoo

474 points by sriramk 14y ago

ved_a 14y ago
Love this part - Marc Andreessen thinks you need to fire over 10K people. He’s probably right. I would start with anyone with the title ‘Architect’ or ‘Program Manager’ in their title. HR is probably another good place to look too
benwerd 14y ago
This is such an interesting inside look at Yahoo, which kind of makes it obvious why they've been faltering. But it also means that there are frustrated people there who want to make great products and services, if they can cut through the bureaucracy and the arbitrary rules. (I don't have recent inside information, so I'm extrapolating here.) There's so much potential here. I'm still very excited to see what Yahoo will become.
aaronbrethorst 14y ago
I know you're not joking on this, but seriously? "No more BlackBerries as the official devices at Yahoo." How is this even possible in 2012?
- sriramk 14y ago
  You have no idea how many flame wars I had with all levels of IT and security folks.
  - sbarre 14y ago
    It takes a lot of money and effort to migrate that kind of infrastructure, and as I'm sure everyone has noticed, Yahoo doesn't exactly have tons of money to spare to overhaul something that works just because it's not "cool". That said, I agree with OP that it should be done, if it's possible. Maybe if you wait until after you lay off 10k employees, you'll have less devices to migrate ;-)
    - squeed 14y ago
      According to http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bs?s=YHOO+Balance+Sheet&annual http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bs?s=YHOO+Balance+Sheet&annua..., Yahoo has $1.5 billion in the bank. I think they can afford it. For all this talk, everyone forgets that Yahoo is (still) profitable! Unlike Nokia or Blackberry, they have a fighting chance, financially.
    - aaronbrethorst 14y ago
      It's not just a question of "cool", it's a question of relevance. A good friend of mine was issued a BlackBerry by her corporate IT department (part of a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical firm). For her it's fine, since she's essentially a sales engineer for big pharma. She doesn't need access to a high end mobile web browser, or any of the other features you'll find on any 'normal' smartphone sold these days. But, if her job was to build next-generation web-hosted services, her notion of what was possible, normal, and bleeding-edge in the mobile web space would be hopelessly out of sync with the hundreds of millions of Android and iOS users out there.
      - icefox 14y ago
        Blackberry has had a webkit browser for two years now...
        aaronbrethorst 14y ago
        WebKit does not a great web browser make. It's an excellent foundation, but needs a great platform around it to amount to much.
        icefox 14y ago
        disclaimer: I am part of the WebKit team at RIM. RIM does seem to have a marketing problem as it seems most Blackberry users have only ever used the old built in house Java based browser. This is due to the fact that WebKit has only been on the newer devices and you can still get older devices so users that used to have a Blackberry, but have had an iphone for X years probably only experienced the Java browser. If someone gets a modern Blackberry from their IT department the WebKit browser that it comes with is good and can hold its own.
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    Presumably what people want is email and maybe chat on their personal device. Is that it? Clearly you dump Microsoft Exchange servers and the whole poisonous 'back office' cling that brings and what are you left? As an operations guy I hear people tell horror stories about blackberry integration and I'm wondering what it was that they 'got' in order to put up with that pain?
    - aaronbrethorst 14y ago
      iOS has Exchange integration. Offer a BYOD policy with a $$$-$$$$/year subsidy.
    - khill 14y ago
      Haha, Exchange. Try Lotus Notes.
      - ChuckMcM 14y ago
        I feel very badly for people who have to use Lotus notes
- jack-r-abbit 14y ago
  Sometimes big IT just doesn't want to change what is currently working. RIM may be dying but they're still shipping product. That is how it is possible. But that doesn't make it smart. :)
- mrtron 14y ago
  Oh come on - blackberries are a reasonable work phone even still. It handles corporate email and calendars quite well. Works great while travelling. More durable and cheaper than iphones/droids. As a personal phone they are obviously well behind the curve.
  - csallen 14y ago
    Someone else touched on this, but I'll reiterate. If you're trying to restore a tech company to its former glory as cutting-edge, do you really want your employees using technology that's outdated compared to what an average middle-class couple buys for their teenage daughter? More importantly, if you're a cutting-edge developer, do you really want to work at a company that's going to treat you like that?
  - waterlesscloud 14y ago
    Yahoo will have zero chance to reform if their product teams are using Blackberries. They won't have a chance. At all. It would be like putting them all on dos and expecting them to make websites for the future. I think this might be the single most important item on the whole list.
  - mikeash 14y ago
    Imagine a game company where the official game console of the company is the Atari 2600. Sure, it gets the job done, but to have an official piece of equipment that's vastly different (and markedly inferior) from what your users are using is a huge handicap. Yahoo is a web company, which means they're a mobile company. Having the official company mobile phone be something that's old and crusty and unpopular is dangerously stupid.
    - grannyg00se 14y ago
      What the hell? You're comparing a Blackberry to something that hasn't been in production for what...decades? Blackberry 9900 came out fairly recently and has a pretty damn good browser experience. I'm not sure why there's so much anti Blackberry sentiment here. I agree that that it probably shouldn't be official policy to have Blackberries for employees, but if you're going to allow Android and iPhone, you might as well allow Blackberry for those who still want to keep it. It's not like we're talking about an IE6 type of burden here. The BB9900 browser is not crusty at all.
- Gustomaximus 14y ago
  I'm currently contracting to a large organisation that has Blackberries only, Windows XP and Lotus Notes 7 as their basic worker setup. It is quite painful and is actually a consideration point for me to work elsewhere. And I wonder the inefficiency cost when you multiply this over 10's of thousands of employees.
  - aaronbrethorst 14y ago
    I was actually going to ask if this is the same company my friend works for, but she was recently given a Windows 7 laptop... ;-)
- ajays 14y ago
  Some organizations that require the ability to remotely wipe the phone should it be lost/misplaced. It is my understanding that BB is the only one that provides a solid ability to do so.
  - aero142 14y ago
    iPhone has it. If I remember right, this is a requirement of official exchange integration. http://www.apple.com/iphone/business/integration/ http://www.apple.com/iphone/business/integration/ There was quite a controversy when people discovered that joining their company's domain gave them the ability to remote wipe the device.
bluesnowmonkey 14y ago
> 8. Make a table with the columns ‘Invest’, ‘Maintenance Mode’, ‘Kill’ and fill it up with Yahoo’s product portfolio. Share it with the employees and the press so everyone finds out from you rather than AllThingsD as to what your priorities are. Favor the kill column whenever in doubt. Or maybe let the employees vote on it. Collectively, they probably have a much better idea than Marissa Mayer (or any one person) which products are dogs and which are going somewhere.
- gawker 14y ago
  I'd prefer to see which products they kill based on data rather than just votes by employees.
- michaelhoffman 14y ago
  This will either lead to the products currently employing the most staff being kept, or some bizarre Eurovision-style vote trading phenomenon.
  - TimJRobinson 14y ago
    I would be totally ok with a Yahoo reality tv show where the teams sell the world on their progress and vision we get to vote on what gets kept and what gets killed.
- wpietri 14y ago
  Employees have plenty of insight, but they also have a lot of biases. Like not getting fired. And part of Yahoo's problem is that they have a lot of people who are totally out of touch, so I'm not sure voting will work. A better way to extract information might be a prediction market: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market
jph 14y ago
Build the Yahoo phone. Mayer has the product experience to do it. What do people do most with their phones? Email, messaging, photos, news, small games. Yahoo is strong in every one of these and more established across the board than all its competitors. She can leverage Android/Ubuntu because she knows plenty of Unix developers, Amazon is paving the way for non-Google Android products, and the new Ubuntu mobile OS is pretty amazing. She can leverage Flickr. This is Yahoo's golden answer to Facebook's Instagram, a $1b equal. Imagine a Yahoo phone with built-in Flickr upload and sharing. She can leverage Yahoo media content alliances to provide a great content-driven phone, with news, music, and movies. I daresay Yahoo can pull ahead of even Apple and Amazon on these fronts. She can leverage social networking: Yahoo Instant Messenger is a leader, Games is a leader, and Social Bar had 90m users and was a significant leader of Facebook’s Open Graph. She can leverage Yahoo mail. Yahoo is still a huge player in email, ahead of Gmail in terms of users and IMHO interface as well. Manufacturing and distribution can be outsourced. HTC is great for this. Start with a small phone, 3G, for mom and pop, and a $99 price point. Compete with the iPhone on price, and with Google phones on content. Subsidize like Amazon Prime. Most important, Yahoo needs a rallying point-- a bold vision , something amazing to attract top developers and bring together diverse properties. The best way to do this is to go big. If you're a mobile developer, who do you look to for leadership right now? Google/Android is splintered, Microsoft/Nokia seems DOA, Apple/iOS is walled, Facebook is admittedly behind, and Amazon is just gearing up. Mobile is where all the action is happening, and it's where all these big competitors are going as fast as they can-- yet none has the mobile space well entrenched yet. This is Yahoo's perfect opportunity to bring it all together, to hire and inspire developers, and build a world-class integrated product. I believe the board knows this. Yahoo has all the pieces to make this a home run. What they've been missing is the product leader. My money's on Mayer to do this.
- ecspike 14y ago
  They don't have the supply chain to pull an Amazon or the gravitas with the open source community to pull a Mozilla. A Yahoo phone would be DOA.
- DeepDuh 14y ago
  Exactly! What could go wro..
chrisacky 14y ago
I know so much of this is a tongue-in-cheek suggestion. It's one of those, "yeah I meant that" if it turns out right, and, "no, I'm clearly enacting poe's law", when it's wrong scenarios. "I'm clearly joking wink". Anyway, you could have reduced all of those ten points in to a single bullet point and I still would have upvoted this story. > Make a huge sign with the phrase ‘the premier digital media company’. Then make a video of you running a bulldozer over it crushing that sign. No one knows what that phrase means. Come up with a goal that people can actually visualize. This is sooo true. Marissa needs to grab this opportunity and ride the Yahoo-bull-horn for all it's worth. Ignore investors... Reinvent the entire company that you have stepped up to take charge of. Don't do what BB's spineless CEO did, and start throwing out quotes like "not much has to change". http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-01-22/Blackberry-RIM/52748290/1 http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-01-22/Blackberr... Marissa needs to change everyones perspective of what Yahoo was, and what it can be. Yahoo are still on my shitlist from the whole FB debacle. Mayer has already shown that Yahoo can still be "cool", so reinvent everything that once was the old Yahoo. </end major rant>
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- sriramk 14y ago
  OP here. My issue with that phrase is that it means both nothing and everything. You can justify any product saying that it fits in with the vision of being the 'premium digital media' company. I once made the point internally that pretty much any website on the internet would fit within that umbrella.
- trotsky 14y ago
  Is the board changing? Not that I've heard. New CEO's are still beholden to their boards, and from what I can see the yahoo board is out to lunch.
  - yuhong 14y ago
    It changed when Thompson was forced out.
martythemaniak 14y ago
Seems like solid advice. I have an honest question, even if it's a quote from Office Space: What is it that Yahoo actually does? I honestly don't know. I know they have a random collection of services (news, photos, mail), but if they were to disappear tomorrow, would anyone really care?
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  They are good with customers.
  - notime 14y ago
    Customers of what, exactly? I've not heard of anyone using Yahoo, except those that are holding on to Yahoo email addresses because they don't know it makes them look old and technically illiterate.
    - _delirium 14y ago
      I use quite a few of their services, some for legacy reasons. I use Flickr, admin a few mailing lists on Yahoo Groups, and am just in the process of convincing my muscle memory to move over from finance.yahoo.com to finance.google.com.
      - spullara 14y ago
        My guess is that Google Finance and other copycat sites (albeit better sites in some cases) that they have built are not good investments. If it isn't core to them I don't expect them to keep working on them.
    - oskee80 14y ago
      I think he was referencing the Office Space comparison and Smykowski defending his job by saying he was good with customers.
    - timaelliott 14y ago
      He already told you, they are good with the goddamn customers. They have people skills, they are good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you?
lukejduncan 14y ago
Single best quote “We ship code, not slide decks”
- plinkplonk 14y ago
  “We ship code, not slide decks” Thousands[1] of middle managers throughout the organization would be out on the street -which is probably a good thing? [1] At one point Yahoo had 300+ VPs (source http://allthingsd.com/20070928/day-73-the-sleepy-attack-of-the-yahoo-vice-presidents/ http://allthingsd.com/20070928/day-73-the-sleepy-attack-of-t...) , so probably not an exaggeration
sakopov 14y ago
"Make a huge sign with the phrase ‘the premier digital media company’. Then make a video of you running a bulldozer over it crushing that sign. No one knows what that phrase means." No one knows what that phrase means because no one knows what the hell Yahoo! does anymore. Honestly, why does this company exist? What purpose do they serve? What is their focus? Hire the brightest engineers to build what?? Yahoo! should have died a long time ago. It's just riding a dwindling wave of its past glory.
- pmarsh 14y ago
  But it's a profitable business, why should it have died?
  - aeturnum 14y ago
    If all you want from an investment, or a buisness partner, is a predictable return, then that's fine. However, yahoo is in an industry experiencing explosive growth and doesnt have a lot to show for it (lately). Yahoo's history is riddled with failures to predict where things are going or failure to react correctly to when they do see. Consider that Instagram has taken off in an area Flickr has been in since before Instagram existed. The list goes on. People are frustrated when they see a buisness that has the money and background to do great stuff and consistantly fails to deliver. There are many mature tech buisnesses that deliver profits and new product successes (IBM, Google, Intel, etc). Why invest with yahoo? Put another way: if yahoo wants to coast on their current base, they should stop trying to expand. Otherwise they need to start seeing some ROI.
edw519 14y ago
11. Ignore all unsolicited advice that doesn't include the words "customer" or "user".
- pdeuchler 14y ago
  Normally I'd agree with you, however I think OP has a good (implied) point that the underlying structures and culture need serious overhaul before any real product work can be done.
  - sriramk 14y ago
    Yup. I'm hoping by hiring the best engineers/designers/etc and putting together great product teams, you implicitly get people who care about users.
- kyro 14y ago
  12. Ignore #11 because it's dismissive and ignorant of the important components required to run a company that aren't directly related to customers or users. Really. The author is a former Y! employee who's experienced firsthand what he thinks are a lot of the reasons behind the company's decline, and you step in with a snarky one-liner that basically says everything he's written is invalid.
- jusben1369 14y ago
  "Recently exited a short stint" - That seems like one step above "Stayed in a Holiday Inn last night" but not really enough to do more than give us a superficial insight into the issues.
- myhf 14y ago
  "A Yahoo app on every home screen" sounds like a pretty user-oriented goal, regardless of the words it uses.
- noahm 14y ago
  Actually, one of the conflicts I felt while I was at yahoo related to the fact that the customers aren't the same people as the users. "Customers" at yahoo are the advertisers, and they're the ones who generate the revenue. "Users" are just the eyeballs looking at the ads. When business is good, there's little conflict, which is why this isn't a big deal for Facebook or google. But when business falters, advertisers start making demands that ultimately compromise the user experience. Bigger, more prominent ads make the customers happy, and may generate more short-term revenue, but they ultimately drive users away. I feel like yahoo is in the middle of this right now, and I'm not sure what they can do to appeal to their users and their customers simultaneously.
CoolGuySteve 14y ago
I worked on video at Apple. While there, I once got a message on LinkedIn from some recruiter for Yahoo's TV widgets. Here's the thing: That Yahoo even has TV widgets is why I will never talk to them. If Mayer can shut all that bullshit down and actually do a small handful of things well enough for people like me to consider talking to them, I think she'll be one of the greatest CEOs in technology. (I realize this post is embarrassingly self aggrandizing, but seriously, what kind of self-respecting engineer works for Yahoo?)
- kruk 14y ago
  Douglas Crockfor?
  - jroseattle 14y ago
    I don't think he's there any longer.
  - smacktoward 14y ago
    Nope, he jumped to PayPal in May: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57427801-93/paypal-lures-javascript-bigwig-crockford-from-yahoo/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57427801-93/paypal-lures-ja...
  - CoolGuySteve 14y ago
    No, he bailed last May. But speaking of non-existent Scotsmen, the headliners, or fellows as they'd be called at Sun always stay way longer than the nobodies. I'm talking about the rank and file engineers. What bright young kid would look at an offer from Google/Apple/NVidia/AMD/Intel/AMD/PowerVR/etc. and say 'No, I'm going to Yahoo, I'm really going to be respected there'.
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  > I realize this post is embarrassingly self aggrandizing, Yes it is. > what kind of self-respecting engineer works for Yahoo? The kind that created Hadoop, YUI, YQL, Yahoo BOSS, etc. etc. I'd be pretty proud to work on any of those projects.
jarsj 14y ago
12. Hire sriramk as VP Engineering.
- sriramk 14y ago
  Jeff Atwood already tweeted that I should be made CEO so I'm not particularly inclined to demote myself. ;)
kyro 14y ago
A lot of you keep asking what it is that Yahoo! does, which is a valid question, but you're forgetting about what they own and what they could do with their properties. If there's one word that ties all of their more popular services together, it's "social". Tons of people still use Yahoo! Games, Y! Messenger, Flickr, Del.icio.us – all incredibly social communities. And Yahoo! Mail is still widely used. I think their issue is that they lack an underlying framework from which these services should be stemming. With proper structure and integration, they could really give Google and Facebook a run for their money. Google has been trying for ages to utilize their Gmail userbase to bolster their social plays, and it's worked with varying success. Yahoo! has both the email userbase and the social communities; they just need to find a way to tie the two together into a cohesive social platform.
- michaelhoffman 14y ago
  Sadly, they sold Delicious.
  - kyro 14y ago
    Woops – news to me!
- jaredsohn 14y ago
  They have some social APIs which you might find interesting if you weren't aware of them: http://developer.yahoo.com/social/ http://developer.yahoo.com/social/
- swivelmaster 14y ago
  If only they knew what they had several years ago! They had IMO the biggest, most comprehensive 'profiles' service on the web, pre-Myspace/Facebook, and they blew it by wiping all profiles and migrating to Yahoo 360 (or whatever it was called), then called that off, wiped the profiles again, and have a new thing called 'Pulse' that nobody uses.
  - inerte 14y ago
    Pulse was replaced. There's a newer Yahoo! Profile (I work close to the guys responsible for it).
dr_ 14y ago
Start by fixing Yahoo! Mail. It's become SPAM central, and there's no reason for that. Also, stop charging for POP mail access - is it really worth it? I've been a Yahoo mail user since the 1990's, but if anyone asks me for my email address now, it's gmail. Only because I know my mail that goes there will arrive relatively quickly, and I haven't had my account hacked by spammers ever with gmail. Don't try to make Yahoo mail look like an online version of Outlook, it gets so cramped. An inspiration to start with would be something along the lines of how mail is viewed on the iPad, but available in the same way on the desktop (yes, many people out there, especially long standing yahoo mail users, still use PC's).
nhashem 14y ago
This is actually reads like a pretty good list of suggestions for any new leadership team, not just Yahoo. Fire all the "architects" who get paid $250,000 to make gigantic UML diagrams and can't actually code. Pay top dollar to retain and recruit talent. Don't spend a whole lot of time with some broad marketing message that everyone will immediately denounce as meaningless fluff anyway. Stop re-inventing the wheel. Form great teams and empower them to make great products. I'd just like to add that I think it's important for Mayer or anyone else in this position to do this quickly. If you're two months into the job and you're still having "introductory meetings" with all the departments and putting together "the vision," then by the time you actually start to make any changes, it'll be that much harder because of how much your products have declined and your talent has hemorrhaged in the meantime.
- sriramk 14y ago
  Specifically on the architect issue, I think the system and the incentives are setting them up to fail. If you're a senior guy, measured on fluffy terms like 'influence', you're not going to get a promotion by saying you designed the simplest thing possible - or by saying you just took this project from Github that happens to solve your problems. You are incentivized to build grand, complex systems which will look good when you want to do a talk at an O'Reilly conference - which is exactly what winds up happening.
  - SonicSoul 14y ago
    I disagree. There is never a shortage of need to improve things (unless this is some perfect world company that has 1 tough problem a year that the architect can busy himself with). So by getting the project done in whatever means possible (github or simple solution that works) he can move on and solve more problems in a year. That's real value to the company and translates into $$$. Also, the more complex a solution is the more it costs the company to maintain.
  - 16s 14y ago
    I'm not sure the systems "look good", it's more like they "look too complex". That's the sign of a useless architect. Simple and efficient are so under-appreciated.
packetslave 14y ago
"No more pet projects to reinvent what everyone else in the open source world has already built. Fire anyone who uses the words ‘Yahoo scale’ to debate this with you." I seriously doubt this is going to come naturally to an ex-Googler.
- altcognito 14y ago
  I didn't really like this one. Oh and hey, don't do anything different. You might as well say "Don't create products that behave significantly different than your competition." They ought to look at some open source projects and find ways to improve and monetize them. Lucene (bah to solr) might be interesting.
jroseattle 14y ago
Reading this sort of reminds of that moment detailed in the Jobs biography. Upon Jobs return to Apple, he asks the product managers to present their current product offerings. They're detailing all sorts of minutiae, differing versions to address different sub-markets, yada yada yada. Jobs waves them all off, draws a grid and says they need four products. It certainly seems that Yahoo could use a moment like that.
ksolanki 14y ago
I really like and admire #2 Spend $$ in finding great talent all the way down to the front-line product managers and engineers. This will often mean paying some hot-shot 23-year old coder 5x more than what she would make at Google or Facebook and beating ridiculous counter offers. Do it. That one great engineer will be worth more than the five engineers you have on the payroll today. However I do not know if there is a easy way (a "litmus paper") that could say she is 5x better. In all seriousness, I'd like to ask how to make such a determination. I think this advise looks good on paper, but really really hard to implement.
- david_shaw 14y ago
  > However I do not know if there is a easy way (a "litmus paper") that could say she is 5x better. Quantitatively? Not my area, but you could boil it down to something as simple as "number of features shipped in a quarter." However, I think the real value comes in when you're talking about non quantitative analysis of these coders. What awesome, innovative products has Yahoo! shipped in the last year?[1] What are they doing to make Yahoo! Mail better than GMail, or to make people stop laughing if you give them an @yahoo.com address? No, registering ymail.com does not count for much. A single, highly productive programmer that's shipping useful features, inspiring ingenuity within the team, giving back to open source communities and, at a high enough level, giving interesting tech talks at conferences/hackerspaces/etc, can easily be as useful to the company as five average coders. Maybe not 5x as productive, depending on measurement, but definitely that much more useful. Rock stars, when they aren't full of themselves or throwing that term around like little kids, really can make giant differences. Think about it - would you trade five of your company's management team for Paul Graham? I sure as hell would. [1] Okay, Hadoop is pretty cool, but even that is based off of Google research.
- aaronbrethorst 14y ago
  I realized while reading your comment (and the reply) that I haven't heard of Yahoo acquiring (or acquihiring) anyone in a long time. Why did a CAD/CAM software company acquire Socialcam? That should've been Yahoo. I think they'd do well to snatch up a bunch of small co's or individuals and make them ridiculous offers that are almost entirely stock-based. If Yahoo came to me tomorrow and said "we'll pay you a million bucks in two years time, but it's ALL going to be in YHOO shares," I'd: a) Very seriously consider it, and b) Do everything in my power to ensure that the stock price goes up.
notJim 14y ago
Are there really 23 year-olds making $600,000 per year (=5x what I'm told Google pays) at large tech companies writing javascript? Or is that just hyperbole?
- sriramk 14y ago
  I know of a 25 year old who got a 7-digit counter offer from Google when a friend tried to recruit him so I was hoping the 23 year old example wasn't too much hyperbole. Plus, the idea is to pay a big premium over what everyone else pays anyway.
  - simplekoala 14y ago
    Wow! Google counter offer numbers always fun to hear. Without the risk of divulging too much info, would you share, if he was a back-end, front-end or mobile app developer?
  - notJim 14y ago
    I mean, I would consider doubling or even 1.5ing a pretty big premium. That's insane though. It's hard to imagine a single programmer being worth a million dollars a year to a company.
    - sriramk 14y ago
      I'm pretty sure there was a vesting period - it wasn't for one year.
    - patio11 14y ago
      It's hard to imagine a single programmer being worth a million dollars a year to a company. AdWords is worth, round numbers because I'm lazy, $100 billion a year. One million dollars is 10^-5 times AdWords. Want to make a guesstimate as to how many engineers are associated with 10^-2 improvements in AdWords in a given year?
  - stephencanon 14y ago
    A 7-digit salary, or a 7-digit retention bonus / stock grant / whatever? A 7-digit salary would be absurd (Tim Cook didn't even have a 7-digit salary when he was COO), whereas a 7-digit retention bonus is plausible (and lines up much better with your follow-up comment about a "vesting period").
potch 14y ago
My advice? Take the layers of middle managers who have been there for years, give them their gumball machines or espresso makers, offer to buy out a percentage of their long-underwater options, and make them promise to go work somewhere else. The inertia is so ingrown there the only way is to cut out the "lifers" who were given their incentives in equity and clog up the system with incompetence or resentment.
MyNewAccount99 14y ago
... and how long exactly did you work at Yahoo?
- logistopath 14y ago
  He has worked for only a year there.
  - sriramk 14y ago
    Yes but this channels a lot of what other people told me and some of them have spent over a decade there.
edwinnathaniel 14y ago
Sounds like a step-by-step legacy code refactoring from an engineer :). I'm sure in the real-world, executing any of the advises will have unknown repercussion. 1. It's hard to fire 10k people _correctly_ and expect things to still work without crushing morale (you may fired potential heroes as well), or perhaps even being poked by government over job losses? 2. I'm not sure a 23 years old hot-shot developer exist. No way Jose. There may be some smart and talented 23 year old, but they're by no mean "hot shot developer". You may get a better result by hiring a 26-32 years old developers. But not fresh grad. Unless your point being to work them like there is no tomorrow, a typical scenario in Silicon Valley startups. Or: today's mess will become tomorrow problem, so you're back to square one with Yahoo! sooner or later => uncontrolled legacy codebases. [Nobody will come out and say that Yahoo has one of the best codebase out there, even Flickr is notoriously bad]. 3. Rounding up the smartest people in the planet is hard to begin with, making sure they all can work together without brushing ego is even harder (especially when everyone wants to leave their mark), finally, expecting rainbows and unicorns to show up is magical I would say. 5. Yeah, whatever, BYOD, use standard toolset, sure. If sys-admin needs their BB, be it. The rest are generics and nothing to complain/argue/discuss. Yahoo! should definitely shed its fat: people and products, no doubt. Next they should think hard on what needs to be done with the successful products they have left. Once stabilization and culture are in place, then you can start doing something more extreme. Rocking the almost tumbling boat seems to be a recipe to drown everybody.
brackin 14y ago
They have so much value in the products, yet they aren't even being developed. I can see Yahoo Answers being a far bigger brand, News could be important as well as Flickr if as you said they actually develop it. Any products that aren't being improved after a certain amount of time should be killed.
- petitmiam 14y ago
  I agree. Yahoo Answers has huge potential to be a StackExchange for the masses.
bvi 14y ago
First things first. Figure out "what is Yahoo!" immediately. Remember Carol Bartz? http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/28/ok-seriously-what-is-yahoo/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/28/ok-seriously-what-is-yahoo/
umeshunni 14y ago
The best one: Make a huge sign with the phrase ‘the premier digital media company’. Then make a video of you running a bulldozer over it crushing that sign. Yes, Yahoo, you're not a media company, you're a technology company. You don't want to be a media company. Media companies make shitty profits (see AOL, Time Warner, NBC), technology companies make amazing profits (see Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple).
teyc 14y ago
Yahoo has fantastic loyal customers. It also has niche consumer businesses - finance, weather, groups, mail. These are very big niches. However, precisely because Yahoo is a conglomerate of diverse businesses, it has been difficult to describe Yahoo. Yahoo is a portfolio company. However, Yahoo isn't a credible platform company. Microsoft is. Google is. Apple is. While Yahoo open sources a lot of its internal components, heck, it was one of the earliest adopters of OpenID - my StackOverflow account still uses my Yahoo login - this is not the same as building a platform. Android is a platform. Google apps is a platform. AWS is a platform. Even AdSesnse is a platform. Twitter is a platform. Here's my outline: 1. Yahoo needs to protect their base. Customers might move away from Yahoo mail when eventually people get their own domain names, or when they want to edit documents online on Google Docs. Yahoo should court the small businesses who already use Yahoo to spend more money with them. 2. Yahoo needs to aggressive court developers to leverage Yahoo signins, Yahoo mail to provide new services. If Yahoo would handle the payments, it would be even better. A 30% cut would make Yahoo a great affiliate for many devs trying to get traction. 3. On the Ad front, there is much Yahoo can do to copy Google in terms of display ad networks - once Yahoo has successfully courted smaller businesses.
shuri 14y ago
I suspect people will disagree but my top two would be: 1. Yahoo is not Google and that's o.k 2. Take the time to understand Yahoo before doing anything drastic.
joshu 14y ago
And for god's sake kill Connected Life. The fact that product teams aren't allowed to own the mobile app that goes with their products was just Marco's bullshit empire building, not a good organizational idea.
leephillips 14y ago
By an amusing coincidence the announcement of Mayer's new job came the day after I finished reading I'm Feeling Lucky[1], the memoirs of "Google employee #59". Its author makes it easy to read between the lines and get the impression that Marissa Mayer was an aggressively disruptive incompetent who could do whatever she pleased because she was sleeping with Larry Page. Whether that's actually fair I have no idea, but the book is interesting. The timing was such that the phrase "short sell!" popped into my head as soon as I saw the news. [1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0547737394 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0547737394
- ajays 14y ago
  Unfortunately, the male-dominated tech world is pretty chauvinistic when it comes to women in positions of power. If she's headstrong and takes no BS, then she must be sleeping with someone in a position of power. Now, I know that MM was LP's GF at one time; but that doesn't mean she's an incompetent person. If it was a guy, people would be crooning, "ooh! he's such a ballsy guy!".
  - philwelch 14y ago
    I don't think the "male-dominated tech world" would really respect a man for sleeping with the co-founder either.
    - ajays 14y ago
      Really? In my experience (and I'm being honest here), his colleagues would be high-fiving him for "bangin' the boss". I apologize for the crudeness, but I really think this would be the case.
      - encoderer 14y ago
        In my experience, I'm competing with my colleagues, at least by some definition of "competition", and if one of them is under-performing at my expense because of a personal relationship, he's not getting high-fived. Though at lower-skilled, lower-paid jobs I could see it being different.
ajays 14y ago
To all those asking "What is Yahoo?" ad nauseum, can you answer the corresponding question, "What is Google?" ? And once you've done that, tell us how G+, Picasa, GAE, GDrive, GMaps, Android, etc. fit into this definition? Thanks!
- MartinCron 14y ago
  Q: "What is Google?" A: Relevant.
- rurounijones 14y ago
  Er, I thought it was pretty well known that Google is an ad company. G+ = Consumer profiling Picasa = Get people sharing their photos on G+ (Now with tagging!) so that they can be profiled GMail = Consumer profiling GDrive = cannot tell since they insist on showing the pages in Japanese despite my browser telling them otherwise. But I wouldn't be surprised if they analysed your files for profiling (cannot read the japanese TOS to tell.) GMaps = Location based advertising, consumer profiling Android = Muscle in on mobile advertising and consumer profiling Almost every one of their services can be tied back to "How can we improve our profiling of consumers so that our ad-networks are more effective"
noahm 14y ago
One additional thing I'd like to see: Really strongly encourage dogfooding. One of the most depressing things I experienced while working at Yahoo was when I'd look around and see all my co-workers using competing email, search, maps, etc products. People looked at me funny when they noticed that I had taken some time to configure my.yahoo.com and set it as my home page. There was no sense of ownership of the various products, so nobody really cared whether or not they worked well. On a related note, on the rare occasion when somebody did try using yahoo properties and they found an issue or wanted to suggest a feature (e.g. more powerful mail filtering capabilities), the common refrain that typically came back was "You're not the target audience." It was as if yahoo only wanted to cater to the most basic use case. Yahoo needs hiding behind this "not the target audience" crap and challenge itself to make a product that is both powerful enough to appeal to sophisticated users and simple enough to appeal to users with more basic needs. It can be done, and I'd point to Google and Apple as examples of companies that are enjoying much success right now because they've seen the value of it.
cpeterso 14y ago
PS - Bring back Yahoo's SoMa billboard! Let people know that someone has turned the lights back on at Yahoo. (literally and figuratively) :D
tlogan 14y ago
Maybe they can just fix Yahoo! Mail? Less spam. Better API. If is not like Gmail become better over last 5 years.
thyy 14y ago
What advice? The new CEO will deliver in any case, Yahoo!
drhowarddrfine 14y ago
My advice: don't get pregnant....oops!
jetti 14y ago
Another idea would to stop paying sub-par writers to write the articles that appear on the front page. I can't take a company seriously that employs writers who only get read to see what other facts they get wrong or how badly an article is written (I'm looking at you Chris Chase). Fixing the quality of the articles would surely have me coming back for more. I remember reading a fitness article about "5 myths of fitness" or some stupid title like that. One of them was that "muscle weighs more than fat". They said it was a myth because a pound of muscle weighs the same as a pound of fat...I was just mortified that it was allowed to be published on a site like Yahoo. By that logic bricks and feathers weigh the same because a pound of bricks is the same as a pound of feathers...
cpeterso 14y ago
It will be interesting to see if Mayer leads Yahoo in the direction of a "Mini-Google" or an "Anti-Google".

474 points by sriramk 14y ago

ved_a 14y ago

Love this part - Marc Andreessen thinks you need to fire over 10K people. He’s probably right. I would start with anyone with the title ‘Architect’ or ‘Program Manager’ in their title. HR is probably another good place to look too

benwerd 14y ago

This is such an interesting inside look at Yahoo, which kind of makes it obvious why they've been faltering. But it also means that there are frustrated people there who want to make great products and services, if they can cut through the bureaucracy and the arbitrary rules. (I don't have recent inside information, so I'm extrapolating here.) There's so much potential here. I'm still very excited to see what Yahoo will become.

aaronbrethorst 14y ago

I know you're not joking on this, but seriously? "No more BlackBerries as the official devices at Yahoo." How is this even possible in 2012?

sriramk 14y ago
You have no idea how many flame wars I had with all levels of IT and security folks.
- sbarre 14y ago
  It takes a lot of money and effort to migrate that kind of infrastructure, and as I'm sure everyone has noticed, Yahoo doesn't exactly have tons of money to spare to overhaul something that works just because it's not "cool". That said, I agree with OP that it should be done, if it's possible. Maybe if you wait until after you lay off 10k employees, you'll have less devices to migrate ;-)
  - squeed 14y ago
    According to http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bs?s=YHOO+Balance+Sheet&annual http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bs?s=YHOO+Balance+Sheet&annua..., Yahoo has $1.5 billion in the bank. I think they can afford it. For all this talk, everyone forgets that Yahoo is (still) profitable! Unlike Nokia or Blackberry, they have a fighting chance, financially.
  - aaronbrethorst 14y ago
    It's not just a question of "cool", it's a question of relevance. A good friend of mine was issued a BlackBerry by her corporate IT department (part of a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical firm). For her it's fine, since she's essentially a sales engineer for big pharma. She doesn't need access to a high end mobile web browser, or any of the other features you'll find on any 'normal' smartphone sold these days. But, if her job was to build next-generation web-hosted services, her notion of what was possible, normal, and bleeding-edge in the mobile web space would be hopelessly out of sync with the hundreds of millions of Android and iOS users out there.
    - icefox 14y ago
      Blackberry has had a webkit browser for two years now...
      - aaronbrethorst 14y ago
        WebKit does not a great web browser make. It's an excellent foundation, but needs a great platform around it to amount to much.
        icefox 14y ago
        disclaimer: I am part of the WebKit team at RIM. RIM does seem to have a marketing problem as it seems most Blackberry users have only ever used the old built in house Java based browser. This is due to the fact that WebKit has only been on the newer devices and you can still get older devices so users that used to have a Blackberry, but have had an iphone for X years probably only experienced the Java browser. If someone gets a modern Blackberry from their IT department the WebKit browser that it comes with is good and can hold its own.
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  Presumably what people want is email and maybe chat on their personal device. Is that it? Clearly you dump Microsoft Exchange servers and the whole poisonous 'back office' cling that brings and what are you left? As an operations guy I hear people tell horror stories about blackberry integration and I'm wondering what it was that they 'got' in order to put up with that pain?
  - aaronbrethorst 14y ago
    iOS has Exchange integration. Offer a BYOD policy with a $$$-$$$$/year subsidy.
  - khill 14y ago
    Haha, Exchange. Try Lotus Notes.
    - ChuckMcM 14y ago
      I feel very badly for people who have to use Lotus notes
jack-r-abbit 14y ago
Sometimes big IT just doesn't want to change what is currently working. RIM may be dying but they're still shipping product. That is how it is possible. But that doesn't make it smart. :)
mrtron 14y ago
Oh come on - blackberries are a reasonable work phone even still. It handles corporate email and calendars quite well. Works great while travelling. More durable and cheaper than iphones/droids. As a personal phone they are obviously well behind the curve.
- csallen 14y ago
  Someone else touched on this, but I'll reiterate. If you're trying to restore a tech company to its former glory as cutting-edge, do you really want your employees using technology that's outdated compared to what an average middle-class couple buys for their teenage daughter? More importantly, if you're a cutting-edge developer, do you really want to work at a company that's going to treat you like that?
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  Yahoo will have zero chance to reform if their product teams are using Blackberries. They won't have a chance. At all. It would be like putting them all on dos and expecting them to make websites for the future. I think this might be the single most important item on the whole list.
- mikeash 14y ago
  Imagine a game company where the official game console of the company is the Atari 2600. Sure, it gets the job done, but to have an official piece of equipment that's vastly different (and markedly inferior) from what your users are using is a huge handicap. Yahoo is a web company, which means they're a mobile company. Having the official company mobile phone be something that's old and crusty and unpopular is dangerously stupid.
  - grannyg00se 14y ago
    What the hell? You're comparing a Blackberry to something that hasn't been in production for what...decades? Blackberry 9900 came out fairly recently and has a pretty damn good browser experience. I'm not sure why there's so much anti Blackberry sentiment here. I agree that that it probably shouldn't be official policy to have Blackberries for employees, but if you're going to allow Android and iPhone, you might as well allow Blackberry for those who still want to keep it. It's not like we're talking about an IE6 type of burden here. The BB9900 browser is not crusty at all.
Gustomaximus 14y ago
I'm currently contracting to a large organisation that has Blackberries only, Windows XP and Lotus Notes 7 as their basic worker setup. It is quite painful and is actually a consideration point for me to work elsewhere. And I wonder the inefficiency cost when you multiply this over 10's of thousands of employees.
- aaronbrethorst 14y ago
  I was actually going to ask if this is the same company my friend works for, but she was recently given a Windows 7 laptop... ;-)
ajays 14y ago
Some organizations that require the ability to remotely wipe the phone should it be lost/misplaced. It is my understanding that BB is the only one that provides a solid ability to do so.
- aero142 14y ago
  iPhone has it. If I remember right, this is a requirement of official exchange integration. http://www.apple.com/iphone/business/integration/ http://www.apple.com/iphone/business/integration/ There was quite a controversy when people discovered that joining their company's domain gave them the ability to remote wipe the device.

bluesnowmonkey 14y ago

> 8. Make a table with the columns ‘Invest’, ‘Maintenance Mode’, ‘Kill’ and fill it up with Yahoo’s product portfolio. Share it with the employees and the press so everyone finds out from you rather than AllThingsD as to what your priorities are. Favor the kill column whenever in doubt. Or maybe let the employees vote on it. Collectively, they probably have a much better idea than Marissa Mayer (or any one person) which products are dogs and which are going somewhere.

gawker 14y ago
I'd prefer to see which products they kill based on data rather than just votes by employees.
michaelhoffman 14y ago
This will either lead to the products currently employing the most staff being kept, or some bizarre Eurovision-style vote trading phenomenon.
- TimJRobinson 14y ago
  I would be totally ok with a Yahoo reality tv show where the teams sell the world on their progress and vision we get to vote on what gets kept and what gets killed.
wpietri 14y ago
Employees have plenty of insight, but they also have a lot of biases. Like not getting fired. And part of Yahoo's problem is that they have a lot of people who are totally out of touch, so I'm not sure voting will work. A better way to extract information might be a prediction market: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market

jph 14y ago

Build the Yahoo phone. Mayer has the product experience to do it. What do people do most with their phones? Email, messaging, photos, news, small games. Yahoo is strong in every one of these and more established across the board than all its competitors. She can leverage Android/Ubuntu because she knows plenty of Unix developers, Amazon is paving the way for non-Google Android products, and the new Ubuntu mobile OS is pretty amazing. She can leverage Flickr. This is Yahoo's golden answer to Facebook's Instagram, a $1b equal. Imagine a Yahoo phone with built-in Flickr upload and sharing. She can leverage Yahoo media content alliances to provide a great content-driven phone, with news, music, and movies. I daresay Yahoo can pull ahead of even Apple and Amazon on these fronts. She can leverage social networking: Yahoo Instant Messenger is a leader, Games is a leader, and Social Bar had 90m users and was a significant leader of Facebook’s Open Graph. She can leverage Yahoo mail. Yahoo is still a huge player in email, ahead of Gmail in terms of users and IMHO interface as well. Manufacturing and distribution can be outsourced. HTC is great for this. Start with a small phone, 3G, for mom and pop, and a $99 price point. Compete with the iPhone on price, and with Google phones on content. Subsidize like Amazon Prime. Most important, Yahoo needs a rallying point-- a bold vision , something amazing to attract top developers and bring together diverse properties. The best way to do this is to go big. If you're a mobile developer, who do you look to for leadership right now? Google/Android is splintered, Microsoft/Nokia seems DOA, Apple/iOS is walled, Facebook is admittedly behind, and Amazon is just gearing up. Mobile is where all the action is happening, and it's where all these big competitors are going as fast as they can-- yet none has the mobile space well entrenched yet. This is Yahoo's perfect opportunity to bring it all together, to hire and inspire developers, and build a world-class integrated product. I believe the board knows this. Yahoo has all the pieces to make this a home run. What they've been missing is the product leader. My money's on Mayer to do this.

ecspike 14y ago
They don't have the supply chain to pull an Amazon or the gravitas with the open source community to pull a Mozilla. A Yahoo phone would be DOA.
DeepDuh 14y ago
Exactly! What could go wro..

chrisacky 14y ago

I know so much of this is a tongue-in-cheek suggestion. It's one of those, "yeah I meant that" if it turns out right, and, "no, I'm clearly enacting poe's law", when it's wrong scenarios. "I'm clearly joking wink". Anyway, you could have reduced all of those ten points in to a single bullet point and I still would have upvoted this story. > Make a huge sign with the phrase ‘the premier digital media company’. Then make a video of you running a bulldozer over it crushing that sign. No one knows what that phrase means. Come up with a goal that people can actually visualize. This is sooo true. Marissa needs to grab this opportunity and ride the Yahoo-bull-horn for all it's worth. Ignore investors... Reinvent the entire company that you have stepped up to take charge of. Don't do what BB's spineless CEO did, and start throwing out quotes like "not much has to change". http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-01-22/Blackberry-RIM/52748290/1 http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-01-22/Blackberr... Marissa needs to change everyones perspective of what Yahoo was, and what it can be. Yahoo are still on my shitlist from the whole FB debacle. Mayer has already shown that Yahoo can still be "cool", so reinvent everything that once was the old Yahoo. </end major rant>

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
sriramk 14y ago
OP here. My issue with that phrase is that it means both nothing and everything. You can justify any product saying that it fits in with the vision of being the 'premium digital media' company. I once made the point internally that pretty much any website on the internet would fit within that umbrella.
trotsky 14y ago
Is the board changing? Not that I've heard. New CEO's are still beholden to their boards, and from what I can see the yahoo board is out to lunch.
- yuhong 14y ago
  It changed when Thompson was forced out.

martythemaniak 14y ago

Seems like solid advice. I have an honest question, even if it's a quote from Office Space: What is it that Yahoo actually does? I honestly don't know. I know they have a random collection of services (news, photos, mail), but if they were to disappear tomorrow, would anyone really care?

ChuckMcM 14y ago
They are good with customers.
- notime 14y ago
  Customers of what, exactly? I've not heard of anyone using Yahoo, except those that are holding on to Yahoo email addresses because they don't know it makes them look old and technically illiterate.
  - _delirium 14y ago
    I use quite a few of their services, some for legacy reasons. I use Flickr, admin a few mailing lists on Yahoo Groups, and am just in the process of convincing my muscle memory to move over from finance.yahoo.com to finance.google.com.
    - spullara 14y ago
      My guess is that Google Finance and other copycat sites (albeit better sites in some cases) that they have built are not good investments. If it isn't core to them I don't expect them to keep working on them.
  - oskee80 14y ago
    I think he was referencing the Office Space comparison and Smykowski defending his job by saying he was good with customers.
  - timaelliott 14y ago
    He already told you, they are good with the goddamn customers. They have people skills, they are good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you?

lukejduncan 14y ago

Single best quote “We ship code, not slide decks”

plinkplonk 14y ago
“We ship code, not slide decks” Thousands[1] of middle managers throughout the organization would be out on the street -which is probably a good thing? [1] At one point Yahoo had 300+ VPs (source http://allthingsd.com/20070928/day-73-the-sleepy-attack-of-the-yahoo-vice-presidents/ http://allthingsd.com/20070928/day-73-the-sleepy-attack-of-t...) , so probably not an exaggeration

sakopov 14y ago

"Make a huge sign with the phrase ‘the premier digital media company’. Then make a video of you running a bulldozer over it crushing that sign. No one knows what that phrase means." No one knows what that phrase means because no one knows what the hell Yahoo! does anymore. Honestly, why does this company exist? What purpose do they serve? What is their focus? Hire the brightest engineers to build what?? Yahoo! should have died a long time ago. It's just riding a dwindling wave of its past glory.

pmarsh 14y ago
But it's a profitable business, why should it have died?
- aeturnum 14y ago
  If all you want from an investment, or a buisness partner, is a predictable return, then that's fine. However, yahoo is in an industry experiencing explosive growth and doesnt have a lot to show for it (lately). Yahoo's history is riddled with failures to predict where things are going or failure to react correctly to when they do see. Consider that Instagram has taken off in an area Flickr has been in since before Instagram existed. The list goes on. People are frustrated when they see a buisness that has the money and background to do great stuff and consistantly fails to deliver. There are many mature tech buisnesses that deliver profits and new product successes (IBM, Google, Intel, etc). Why invest with yahoo? Put another way: if yahoo wants to coast on their current base, they should stop trying to expand. Otherwise they need to start seeing some ROI.

edw519 14y ago

11. Ignore all unsolicited advice that doesn't include the words "customer" or "user".

pdeuchler 14y ago
Normally I'd agree with you, however I think OP has a good (implied) point that the underlying structures and culture need serious overhaul before any real product work can be done.
- sriramk 14y ago
  Yup. I'm hoping by hiring the best engineers/designers/etc and putting together great product teams, you implicitly get people who care about users.
kyro 14y ago
12. Ignore #11 because it's dismissive and ignorant of the important components required to run a company that aren't directly related to customers or users. Really. The author is a former Y! employee who's experienced firsthand what he thinks are a lot of the reasons behind the company's decline, and you step in with a snarky one-liner that basically says everything he's written is invalid.
jusben1369 14y ago
"Recently exited a short stint" - That seems like one step above "Stayed in a Holiday Inn last night" but not really enough to do more than give us a superficial insight into the issues.
myhf 14y ago
"A Yahoo app on every home screen" sounds like a pretty user-oriented goal, regardless of the words it uses.
noahm 14y ago
Actually, one of the conflicts I felt while I was at yahoo related to the fact that the customers aren't the same people as the users. "Customers" at yahoo are the advertisers, and they're the ones who generate the revenue. "Users" are just the eyeballs looking at the ads. When business is good, there's little conflict, which is why this isn't a big deal for Facebook or google. But when business falters, advertisers start making demands that ultimately compromise the user experience. Bigger, more prominent ads make the customers happy, and may generate more short-term revenue, but they ultimately drive users away. I feel like yahoo is in the middle of this right now, and I'm not sure what they can do to appeal to their users and their customers simultaneously.

CoolGuySteve 14y ago

I worked on video at Apple. While there, I once got a message on LinkedIn from some recruiter for Yahoo's TV widgets. Here's the thing: That Yahoo even has TV widgets is why I will never talk to them. If Mayer can shut all that bullshit down and actually do a small handful of things well enough for people like me to consider talking to them, I think she'll be one of the greatest CEOs in technology. (I realize this post is embarrassingly self aggrandizing, but seriously, what kind of self-respecting engineer works for Yahoo?)

kruk 14y ago
Douglas Crockfor?
- jroseattle 14y ago
  I don't think he's there any longer.
- smacktoward 14y ago
  Nope, he jumped to PayPal in May: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57427801-93/paypal-lures-javascript-bigwig-crockford-from-yahoo/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57427801-93/paypal-lures-ja...
- CoolGuySteve 14y ago
  No, he bailed last May. But speaking of non-existent Scotsmen, the headliners, or fellows as they'd be called at Sun always stay way longer than the nobodies. I'm talking about the rank and file engineers. What bright young kid would look at an offer from Google/Apple/NVidia/AMD/Intel/AMD/PowerVR/etc. and say 'No, I'm going to Yahoo, I'm really going to be respected there'.
MatthewPhillips 14y ago
> I realize this post is embarrassingly self aggrandizing, Yes it is. > what kind of self-respecting engineer works for Yahoo? The kind that created Hadoop, YUI, YQL, Yahoo BOSS, etc. etc. I'd be pretty proud to work on any of those projects.

jarsj 14y ago

12. Hire sriramk as VP Engineering.

sriramk 14y ago
Jeff Atwood already tweeted that I should be made CEO so I'm not particularly inclined to demote myself. ;)

kyro 14y ago

A lot of you keep asking what it is that Yahoo! does, which is a valid question, but you're forgetting about what they own and what they could do with their properties. If there's one word that ties all of their more popular services together, it's "social". Tons of people still use Yahoo! Games, Y! Messenger, Flickr, Del.icio.us – all incredibly social communities. And Yahoo! Mail is still widely used. I think their issue is that they lack an underlying framework from which these services should be stemming. With proper structure and integration, they could really give Google and Facebook a run for their money. Google has been trying for ages to utilize their Gmail userbase to bolster their social plays, and it's worked with varying success. Yahoo! has both the email userbase and the social communities; they just need to find a way to tie the two together into a cohesive social platform.

michaelhoffman 14y ago
Sadly, they sold Delicious.
- kyro 14y ago
  Woops – news to me!
jaredsohn 14y ago
They have some social APIs which you might find interesting if you weren't aware of them: http://developer.yahoo.com/social/ http://developer.yahoo.com/social/
swivelmaster 14y ago
If only they knew what they had several years ago! They had IMO the biggest, most comprehensive 'profiles' service on the web, pre-Myspace/Facebook, and they blew it by wiping all profiles and migrating to Yahoo 360 (or whatever it was called), then called that off, wiped the profiles again, and have a new thing called 'Pulse' that nobody uses.
- inerte 14y ago
  Pulse was replaced. There's a newer Yahoo! Profile (I work close to the guys responsible for it).

dr_ 14y ago

Start by fixing Yahoo! Mail. It's become SPAM central, and there's no reason for that. Also, stop charging for POP mail access - is it really worth it? I've been a Yahoo mail user since the 1990's, but if anyone asks me for my email address now, it's gmail. Only because I know my mail that goes there will arrive relatively quickly, and I haven't had my account hacked by spammers ever with gmail. Don't try to make Yahoo mail look like an online version of Outlook, it gets so cramped. An inspiration to start with would be something along the lines of how mail is viewed on the iPad, but available in the same way on the desktop (yes, many people out there, especially long standing yahoo mail users, still use PC's).

nhashem 14y ago

This is actually reads like a pretty good list of suggestions for any new leadership team, not just Yahoo. Fire all the "architects" who get paid $250,000 to make gigantic UML diagrams and can't actually code. Pay top dollar to retain and recruit talent. Don't spend a whole lot of time with some broad marketing message that everyone will immediately denounce as meaningless fluff anyway. Stop re-inventing the wheel. Form great teams and empower them to make great products. I'd just like to add that I think it's important for Mayer or anyone else in this position to do this quickly. If you're two months into the job and you're still having "introductory meetings" with all the departments and putting together "the vision," then by the time you actually start to make any changes, it'll be that much harder because of how much your products have declined and your talent has hemorrhaged in the meantime.

sriramk 14y ago
Specifically on the architect issue, I think the system and the incentives are setting them up to fail. If you're a senior guy, measured on fluffy terms like 'influence', you're not going to get a promotion by saying you designed the simplest thing possible - or by saying you just took this project from Github that happens to solve your problems. You are incentivized to build grand, complex systems which will look good when you want to do a talk at an O'Reilly conference - which is exactly what winds up happening.
- SonicSoul 14y ago
  I disagree. There is never a shortage of need to improve things (unless this is some perfect world company that has 1 tough problem a year that the architect can busy himself with). So by getting the project done in whatever means possible (github or simple solution that works) he can move on and solve more problems in a year. That's real value to the company and translates into $$$. Also, the more complex a solution is the more it costs the company to maintain.
- 16s 14y ago
  I'm not sure the systems "look good", it's more like they "look too complex". That's the sign of a useless architect. Simple and efficient are so under-appreciated.

packetslave 14y ago

"No more pet projects to reinvent what everyone else in the open source world has already built. Fire anyone who uses the words ‘Yahoo scale’ to debate this with you." I seriously doubt this is going to come naturally to an ex-Googler.

altcognito 14y ago
I didn't really like this one. Oh and hey, don't do anything different. You might as well say "Don't create products that behave significantly different than your competition." They ought to look at some open source projects and find ways to improve and monetize them. Lucene (bah to solr) might be interesting.

jroseattle 14y ago

Reading this sort of reminds of that moment detailed in the Jobs biography. Upon Jobs return to Apple, he asks the product managers to present their current product offerings. They're detailing all sorts of minutiae, differing versions to address different sub-markets, yada yada yada. Jobs waves them all off, draws a grid and says they need four products. It certainly seems that Yahoo could use a moment like that.

ksolanki 14y ago

I really like and admire #2 Spend $$ in finding great talent all the way down to the front-line product managers and engineers. This will often mean paying some hot-shot 23-year old coder 5x more than what she would make at Google or Facebook and beating ridiculous counter offers. Do it. That one great engineer will be worth more than the five engineers you have on the payroll today. However I do not know if there is a easy way (a "litmus paper") that could say she is 5x better. In all seriousness, I'd like to ask how to make such a determination. I think this advise looks good on paper, but really really hard to implement.

david_shaw 14y ago
> However I do not know if there is a easy way (a "litmus paper") that could say she is 5x better. Quantitatively? Not my area, but you could boil it down to something as simple as "number of features shipped in a quarter." However, I think the real value comes in when you're talking about non quantitative analysis of these coders. What awesome, innovative products has Yahoo! shipped in the last year?[1] What are they doing to make Yahoo! Mail better than GMail, or to make people stop laughing if you give them an @yahoo.com address? No, registering ymail.com does not count for much. A single, highly productive programmer that's shipping useful features, inspiring ingenuity within the team, giving back to open source communities and, at a high enough level, giving interesting tech talks at conferences/hackerspaces/etc, can easily be as useful to the company as five average coders. Maybe not 5x as productive, depending on measurement, but definitely that much more useful. Rock stars, when they aren't full of themselves or throwing that term around like little kids, really can make giant differences. Think about it - would you trade five of your company's management team for Paul Graham? I sure as hell would. [1] Okay, Hadoop is pretty cool, but even that is based off of Google research.
aaronbrethorst 14y ago
I realized while reading your comment (and the reply) that I haven't heard of Yahoo acquiring (or acquihiring) anyone in a long time. Why did a CAD/CAM software company acquire Socialcam? That should've been Yahoo. I think they'd do well to snatch up a bunch of small co's or individuals and make them ridiculous offers that are almost entirely stock-based. If Yahoo came to me tomorrow and said "we'll pay you a million bucks in two years time, but it's ALL going to be in YHOO shares," I'd: a) Very seriously consider it, and b) Do everything in my power to ensure that the stock price goes up.

notJim 14y ago

Are there really 23 year-olds making $600,000 per year (=5x what I'm told Google pays) at large tech companies writing javascript? Or is that just hyperbole?

sriramk 14y ago
I know of a 25 year old who got a 7-digit counter offer from Google when a friend tried to recruit him so I was hoping the 23 year old example wasn't too much hyperbole. Plus, the idea is to pay a big premium over what everyone else pays anyway.
- simplekoala 14y ago
  Wow! Google counter offer numbers always fun to hear. Without the risk of divulging too much info, would you share, if he was a back-end, front-end or mobile app developer?
- notJim 14y ago
  I mean, I would consider doubling or even 1.5ing a pretty big premium. That's insane though. It's hard to imagine a single programmer being worth a million dollars a year to a company.
  - sriramk 14y ago
    I'm pretty sure there was a vesting period - it wasn't for one year.
  - patio11 14y ago
    It's hard to imagine a single programmer being worth a million dollars a year to a company. AdWords is worth, round numbers because I'm lazy, $100 billion a year. One million dollars is 10^-5 times AdWords. Want to make a guesstimate as to how many engineers are associated with 10^-2 improvements in AdWords in a given year?
- stephencanon 14y ago
  A 7-digit salary, or a 7-digit retention bonus / stock grant / whatever? A 7-digit salary would be absurd (Tim Cook didn't even have a 7-digit salary when he was COO), whereas a 7-digit retention bonus is plausible (and lines up much better with your follow-up comment about a "vesting period").

potch 14y ago

My advice? Take the layers of middle managers who have been there for years, give them their gumball machines or espresso makers, offer to buy out a percentage of their long-underwater options, and make them promise to go work somewhere else. The inertia is so ingrown there the only way is to cut out the "lifers" who were given their incentives in equity and clog up the system with incompetence or resentment.

MyNewAccount99 14y ago

... and how long exactly did you work at Yahoo?

logistopath 14y ago
He has worked for only a year there.
- sriramk 14y ago
  Yes but this channels a lot of what other people told me and some of them have spent over a decade there.

edwinnathaniel 14y ago

Sounds like a step-by-step legacy code refactoring from an engineer :). I'm sure in the real-world, executing any of the advises will have unknown repercussion. 1. It's hard to fire 10k people _correctly_ and expect things to still work without crushing morale (you may fired potential heroes as well), or perhaps even being poked by government over job losses? 2. I'm not sure a 23 years old hot-shot developer exist. No way Jose. There may be some smart and talented 23 year old, but they're by no mean "hot shot developer". You may get a better result by hiring a 26-32 years old developers. But not fresh grad. Unless your point being to work them like there is no tomorrow, a typical scenario in Silicon Valley startups. Or: today's mess will become tomorrow problem, so you're back to square one with Yahoo! sooner or later => uncontrolled legacy codebases. [Nobody will come out and say that Yahoo has one of the best codebase out there, even Flickr is notoriously bad]. 3. Rounding up the smartest people in the planet is hard to begin with, making sure they all can work together without brushing ego is even harder (especially when everyone wants to leave their mark), finally, expecting rainbows and unicorns to show up is magical I would say. 5. Yeah, whatever, BYOD, use standard toolset, sure. If sys-admin needs their BB, be it. The rest are generics and nothing to complain/argue/discuss. Yahoo! should definitely shed its fat: people and products, no doubt. Next they should think hard on what needs to be done with the successful products they have left. Once stabilization and culture are in place, then you can start doing something more extreme. Rocking the almost tumbling boat seems to be a recipe to drown everybody.

brackin 14y ago

They have so much value in the products, yet they aren't even being developed. I can see Yahoo Answers being a far bigger brand, News could be important as well as Flickr if as you said they actually develop it. Any products that aren't being improved after a certain amount of time should be killed.

petitmiam 14y ago
I agree. Yahoo Answers has huge potential to be a StackExchange for the masses.

bvi 14y ago

First things first. Figure out "what is Yahoo!" immediately. Remember Carol Bartz? http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/28/ok-seriously-what-is-yahoo/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/28/ok-seriously-what-is-yahoo/

umeshunni 14y ago

The best one: Make a huge sign with the phrase ‘the premier digital media company’. Then make a video of you running a bulldozer over it crushing that sign. Yes, Yahoo, you're not a media company, you're a technology company. You don't want to be a media company. Media companies make shitty profits (see AOL, Time Warner, NBC), technology companies make amazing profits (see Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple).

teyc 14y ago

Yahoo has fantastic loyal customers. It also has niche consumer businesses - finance, weather, groups, mail. These are very big niches. However, precisely because Yahoo is a conglomerate of diverse businesses, it has been difficult to describe Yahoo. Yahoo is a portfolio company. However, Yahoo isn't a credible platform company. Microsoft is. Google is. Apple is. While Yahoo open sources a lot of its internal components, heck, it was one of the earliest adopters of OpenID - my StackOverflow account still uses my Yahoo login - this is not the same as building a platform. Android is a platform. Google apps is a platform. AWS is a platform. Even AdSesnse is a platform. Twitter is a platform. Here's my outline: 1. Yahoo needs to protect their base. Customers might move away from Yahoo mail when eventually people get their own domain names, or when they want to edit documents online on Google Docs. Yahoo should court the small businesses who already use Yahoo to spend more money with them. 2. Yahoo needs to aggressive court developers to leverage Yahoo signins, Yahoo mail to provide new services. If Yahoo would handle the payments, it would be even better. A 30% cut would make Yahoo a great affiliate for many devs trying to get traction. 3. On the Ad front, there is much Yahoo can do to copy Google in terms of display ad networks - once Yahoo has successfully courted smaller businesses.

shuri 14y ago

I suspect people will disagree but my top two would be: 1. Yahoo is not Google and that's o.k 2. Take the time to understand Yahoo before doing anything drastic.

joshu 14y ago

And for god's sake kill Connected Life. The fact that product teams aren't allowed to own the mobile app that goes with their products was just Marco's bullshit empire building, not a good organizational idea.

leephillips 14y ago

By an amusing coincidence the announcement of Mayer's new job came the day after I finished reading I'm Feeling Lucky[1], the memoirs of "Google employee #59". Its author makes it easy to read between the lines and get the impression that Marissa Mayer was an aggressively disruptive incompetent who could do whatever she pleased because she was sleeping with Larry Page. Whether that's actually fair I have no idea, but the book is interesting. The timing was such that the phrase "short sell!" popped into my head as soon as I saw the news. [1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0547737394 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0547737394

ajays 14y ago
Unfortunately, the male-dominated tech world is pretty chauvinistic when it comes to women in positions of power. If she's headstrong and takes no BS, then she must be sleeping with someone in a position of power. Now, I know that MM was LP's GF at one time; but that doesn't mean she's an incompetent person. If it was a guy, people would be crooning, "ooh! he's such a ballsy guy!".
- philwelch 14y ago
  I don't think the "male-dominated tech world" would really respect a man for sleeping with the co-founder either.
  - ajays 14y ago
    Really? In my experience (and I'm being honest here), his colleagues would be high-fiving him for "bangin' the boss". I apologize for the crudeness, but I really think this would be the case.
    - encoderer 14y ago
      In my experience, I'm competing with my colleagues, at least by some definition of "competition", and if one of them is under-performing at my expense because of a personal relationship, he's not getting high-fived. Though at lower-skilled, lower-paid jobs I could see it being different.

ajays 14y ago

To all those asking "What is Yahoo?" ad nauseum, can you answer the corresponding question, "What is Google?" ? And once you've done that, tell us how G+, Picasa, GAE, GDrive, GMaps, Android, etc. fit into this definition? Thanks!

MartinCron 14y ago
Q: "What is Google?" A: Relevant.
rurounijones 14y ago
Er, I thought it was pretty well known that Google is an ad company. G+ = Consumer profiling Picasa = Get people sharing their photos on G+ (Now with tagging!) so that they can be profiled GMail = Consumer profiling GDrive = cannot tell since they insist on showing the pages in Japanese despite my browser telling them otherwise. But I wouldn't be surprised if they analysed your files for profiling (cannot read the japanese TOS to tell.) GMaps = Location based advertising, consumer profiling Android = Muscle in on mobile advertising and consumer profiling Almost every one of their services can be tied back to "How can we improve our profiling of consumers so that our ad-networks are more effective"

noahm 14y ago

One additional thing I'd like to see: Really strongly encourage dogfooding. One of the most depressing things I experienced while working at Yahoo was when I'd look around and see all my co-workers using competing email, search, maps, etc products. People looked at me funny when they noticed that I had taken some time to configure my.yahoo.com and set it as my home page. There was no sense of ownership of the various products, so nobody really cared whether or not they worked well. On a related note, on the rare occasion when somebody did try using yahoo properties and they found an issue or wanted to suggest a feature (e.g. more powerful mail filtering capabilities), the common refrain that typically came back was "You're not the target audience." It was as if yahoo only wanted to cater to the most basic use case. Yahoo needs hiding behind this "not the target audience" crap and challenge itself to make a product that is both powerful enough to appeal to sophisticated users and simple enough to appeal to users with more basic needs. It can be done, and I'd point to Google and Apple as examples of companies that are enjoying much success right now because they've seen the value of it.

cpeterso 14y ago

PS - Bring back Yahoo's SoMa billboard! Let people know that someone has turned the lights back on at Yahoo. (literally and figuratively) :D

tlogan 14y ago

Maybe they can just fix Yahoo! Mail? Less spam. Better API. If is not like Gmail become better over last 5 years.

thyy 14y ago

What advice? The new CEO will deliver in any case, Yahoo!

drhowarddrfine 14y ago

My advice: don't get pregnant....oops!

jetti 14y ago

Another idea would to stop paying sub-par writers to write the articles that appear on the front page. I can't take a company seriously that employs writers who only get read to see what other facts they get wrong or how badly an article is written (I'm looking at you Chris Chase). Fixing the quality of the articles would surely have me coming back for more. I remember reading a fitness article about "5 myths of fitness" or some stupid title like that. One of them was that "muscle weighs more than fat". They said it was a myth because a pound of muscle weighs the same as a pound of fat...I was just mortified that it was allowed to be published on a site like Yahoo. By that logic bricks and feathers weigh the same because a pound of bricks is the same as a pound of feathers...

cpeterso 14y ago

It will be interesting to see if Mayer leads Yahoo in the direction of a "Mini-Google" or an "Anti-Google".