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What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried to Be Steve Jobs

329 points by r0h1n 12y ago

wcdolphin 12y ago
A very scathing article. Anyone who has interacted with Marissa have any inside information? Be interested to hear about what she has done well.
DodgyEggplant 12y ago
This is a nice article, that clearly demonstrates the great value that hedge fund managers contributed to humanity along the years
danso 12y ago
This anecdote is almost too perfectly aligned with the narrative to be true: > Reared in Google’s data-obsessed culture, Mayer tended to require countless tests about user preferences before making an important product decision. But when it came to media strategy, she seemed perfectly comfortable going with her gut. As a teenager in Wisconsin, she grew up sneaking into the living room to watch “Saturday Night Live” and occasionally recited sketches during meetings; in April 2013, Yahoo paid an estimated $10 million per year for the “S.N.L.” archives. Even though the actress Gwyneth Paltrow had created a best-selling cookbook and popular lifestyle blog, Mayer, who habitually asked deputies where they attended college, balked at hiring her as a contributing editor for Yahoo Food. According to one executive, Mayer disapproved of the fact that Paltrow did not graduate college. Well, I can think of one obvious difference between Mayer and Jobs...
- aikah 12y ago
  > Mayer disapproved of the fact that Paltrow did not graduate college. Wow , sorry but wow. Paltrow is famous,more famous than Mayer will ever be.If this thing is true,it tells a bit about her personality. In business,you want to associate with famous people that can drive their audience to your product.Does it matter they graduated or not?frankly?
  - corin_ 12y ago
    Presumably they wanted her to actually do the job, not just be the face of the job, so her skills beyond "being famous" would of course matter, like hiring anybody else. Of course that doesn't mean I agree with assuming that no qualifications means can't do the job, but that's unrelated to her being a celebrity (and indeed a commonly debated question with two big groups of people on both sides).
    - commandar 12y ago
      >Gwyneth Paltrow had created a best-selling cookbook and popular lifestyle blog A contributing editor job is essentially a writing position. That strongly indicates that she could do the job.
      - corin_ 12y ago
        I'm not arguing that she could (or couldn't), just that whether she could do the job was more than just "she's famous". Personally I fall in the camp of people who will judge on experience more than degrees, clearly Meyer is on the other side.
        commandar 12y ago
        That's kind of the thing, though. Contributing editors are often brought in because of their notoriety. There's valuing a particular quality in an employee, and then there's being completely misguided in weighting that quality.
        nerfhammer 12y ago
        Plenty of people could write as well as David Pogue, Nate Silver, Ezra Klein, etc., but the expectation is that those writers will bring the audience. They get seven figure salaries not because they can write articles really well, but that they can bring an audience wherever they go and create revenue worth what they're getting paid
    - tomp 12y ago
- deleted 12y ago
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jordigh 12y ago
Gah, call me lazy, but this article really is tl;dr. I feel like the web is the wrong medium for this. If I were offline with a printed copy of the NYT, and no internet access, I may more gladly spend like 15-30 minutes to read through the whole thing, but during my morning HN round-up, I really don't feel like it. If someone wants to summarise for me, I would be grateful. edit: Dear downvoters: you think I should just shut up and spend the 15-30 minutes to read the whole article instead of kindly requesting a summary, right?
- whorleater 12y ago
  Isn't that the point of services like Instapaper or Pocket though?
  - jordigh 12y ago
    Is either of them gonna snail mail me a printed copy of articles each morning so that I can read them without the distraction of the internet?
    - warp 12y ago
      instapaper can send the articles you've saved to instapaper to your kindle every day or every week. That's a fairly good approximation of what you're asking for.
      - jordigh 12y ago
        Kindles are not offline. I haven't found an ereader that (1) works with e-ink (2) does not require non-free software and (3) has no internet access at all. I know I'm picky, but these requirements are all met by a printed paper, so I know it's possible to have this.
        rbonvall 12y ago
        Browsing the web on the kindle is too inconvenient to be a distraction at all.
snlacks 12y ago
Something tells me the author started writing this article before the firefox news... (slightly after Napolean's invasion of Russia) While I can't speak to the intepersonal management practices, this article seems to feed the tech killing stockholder demand for quarterly profits. The company is doing much better than before, but "not good enough." Whether the conclusion is correct, this article, despite it's length, doesn't make a case for Mayer not achieving the long term goals so far. (edit: fixed some messed up wording)
- debacle 12y ago
  The Firefox news is going to do more to bring down Mozilla than bootstrap Yahoo. Yahoo's search IS inferior, and forcing it on people is bullshit. Mozilla should allow users to choose their default search provider on installation.
  - jamespo 12y ago
    Forcing? I didn't realise Firefox were hardcoding this in now.
    - debacle 12y ago
      I chose not to receive updates to my search. Mozilla updated my search anyway. That's forcing. It's underhanded. And now I have sponsored links when I open a new tab in Firefox, from Mozilla partners. It's starting to stink. The Mozilla foundation is losing sight of their mission.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
      - dhimes 12y ago
        They are running a donation campaign right now. I hope you donated.
    - ep103 12y ago
      You literally can't type a search query in firefox without it asking you which engine you would like to use.
gamesurgeon 12y ago
"A week later, Smith published an open letter calling for Yahoo to...merge with AOL. Redundancies could be eliminated, thousands of people could be fired and two former Internet superpowers would be downsized into a single and steady (if uninspiring) entity...'We trust the board and management will do the right thing for shareholders, even if this may mean accepting AOL as the surviving entity'" I see where Smith is coming from, but that doesn't make his case any less unsettling. Do some economists really believe that the "right" thing to do is fire thousands of people? Are a company's shareholders really more important than its employees?
- personlurking 12y ago
  While I can't answer your question(s), I do wonder why Yahoo and AOL fill me with no feeling whatsoever. This, for as long as I can remember (save a few select years in the mid 90s). It's amazing how these companies can still be around, though I understand "Middle America" still uses them.
  - ebiester 12y ago
    Yahoo sports is really good, for example. It's not a bad aggregator in general and has good original content mixed in. I don't understand the synergy with AOL at all. What does AOL bring to the table?
- debacle 12y ago
  I don't understand your sentiment here. If there is a large overlap and both companies are struggling (and struggling is dying when you're an Internet company), why not eradicate inefficiencies and try and build a stronger player? AOL and Yahoo are not beholden to provide for their employees in perpetuity. That's a very Japanese mindset.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- lmm 12y ago
  > Do some economists really believe that the "right" thing to do is fire thousands of people? Yes. The idea is that they'd be more productive in other companies (or start their own). In a country with decent employee protections, unemployment provisions, and public healthcare, it can even be more-or-less true. > Are a company's shareholders really more important than its employees? Yes. With employees, there is a contract, which in some fictional-economics sense was a negotiated agreement between equals, so the company only has those obligations laid out in that contract (just as with bondholders). With shareholders there is no contract, instead the company has a fiduciary duty to act in their best interests.
FlyingLawnmower 12y ago
This is only tangentially related, but I was surprised that Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google were considered the "big four" technology companies. The comparisons to Amazon, Facebook, and Google make sense in that those three (and Yahoo) are all internet companies, but I don't see how Apple fits into this paradigm. The author focuses on Apple's revenues from hardware sales, which has almost nothing to do with any of Yahoo's business. I also found it interesting that Microsoft wasn't mentioned once in the article, considering the fact that it makes much more sense to draw parallels between two software giants trying to turn themselves around (not to mention the fact that Yahoo search is run on Bing). Surely Microsoft is still considered a "Big tech" company?
- bigdubs 12y ago
  Not mentioned in that list; Microsoft.
- hyperpape 12y ago
  It's true that Apple has nothing like the direct revenue streams of Facebook or Google coming from the web via advertising (but Amazon isn't in the same business either). What I think the point is that all four companies operate very large online services. There's even significant overlap on a lot of key products: maps, messaging, email.
  - atmosx 12y ago
    What are you talking about? Last time I checked Apple was the corp with the deepest cash pockets from all the corps mentioned.
- ep103 12y ago
  yeah, the big 4 are Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft.
- huxley 12y ago
  Apple's software & services revenues are pretty significant, its gross revenue from iTunes Store, App Store, etc comes to $7+ billion per quarter: http://www.asymco.com/2014/02/10/fortune-130/ http://www.asymco.com/2014/02/10/fortune-130/ Presumably Yahoo aspires to reach the level of [Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google], Microsoft is in the process of a major pivot so it probably wasn't considered an aspirational target (even if they do make massive amounts of money)
jeswin 12y ago
"Steve Jobs"-type people are rare. Marissa Mayer I'm sure has her strengths, but this comparison is unnecessary or perhaps, unfair. This 1996 Microsoft Developer's Conference is one of my favorite Steve Jobs presentations http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/PDC/PDC-1996/PDC-1996-Keynote-with-Bob-Muglia-and-Steve-Jobs http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/PDC/PDC-1996/PDC-1996-Keynot...
- WalterSear 12y ago
  According to the article, she's the one who keeps making the comparison.
easytiger 12y ago
> Ask.com, a search engine that no longer innovates but happily takes in $400 million in annual revenue Holy crap. I must have taken a wrong turn in life. HOW?!
- patio11 12y ago
  Toolbars and arbitrage.
  - scott_karana 12y ago
    What arbitrage, exactly?...
    - GeneralMayhem 12y ago
      They advertise their own search result pages on Google, then sell a bunch of ads at higher CPC on their page, with the idea being that they'll make enough on the commission from the second ad to pay for the Google ad with a profit.
      - Rzor 12y ago
        Didn't Google cut that out a long time ago? I didn't find any evidence that Ask was still doing this.
    - patio11 12y ago
      http://searchengineland.com/will-ask-com-google-arbitrage-ever-stop-203565 http://searchengineland.com/will-ask-com-google-arbitrage-ev...
- kyrre 12y ago
  basically malware (ask toolbar)
- Domenic_S 12y ago
  They have a massive office building in the East Bay, too, every time I passed it I asked myself how in the????
hyperpape 12y ago
Can someone explain to me how you value a company turning a $500 million annual profit at -$4billion? I could understand if the company had $6 billion in debt, but it doesn't. What am I missing about the accounting?
- refurb 12y ago
  There was a big thread a while back on HN that went into the details. What I got out of it was that the negative price reflects the market view that despite the cash coming into Yahoo, they are more likely to destroy value than create it.
- RockyMcNuts 12y ago
  They owned shares in Alibaba that had a market value of $4b more than Yahoo's market cap, which in theory should have reflected the value of Alibaba plus all the other assets.
  - hyperpape 12y ago
    I mean, yes, I understand that they're doing that calculation. But it doesn't make sense to me.
    - gbhn 12y ago
      You may be thinking that stock prices always make sense. :-)
    - venomsnake 12y ago
      Alibaba is good at making money. Yahoo is good at burning them. If you take $1bn from alibaba -> $1BN goes to shareholders. If yahoo takes $1bn from alibaba -> they pay a hundred million for a golden parachute, stagnate tumblr with the other 500$, buy startups for $499 million and return some loose change and pocket lint to investors.
- tome 12y ago
  It just means that the share price doesn't reflect the true value of Yahoo.
HillRat 12y ago
[Mayer] highlighted various signs of promise. ... Display advertising revenue was down 6 percent, but the number of ads sold had actually increased by 24 percent. Good news, everybody! We're doing more and making less! Yahoo isn't a products company -- it's a pile of cash with long audience reach. This isn't a bad thing (and indeed was the situation at Apple when Jobs returned), but it does mean that the company has lots of options but no core mission. The danger is that such a company can kill its cows while searching for stars. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Mayer has failed to develop any kind of coherent strategy, let alone execution. Instead, she appears to have substituted chaotic action as a metric of progress (new home pages every day! Purple everywhere!), mistaken her hobbies as evidence of expertise (e.g., deciding Yahoo could become a destination for high-end prêt-à-porter fashion consumers), and taken on high-concept strategies without any kind of plan for generating revenue and income (e.g., going deep on content). This doesn't even get to Yahoo's constant overpaying for startups that are inevitably killed by indigestion -- I like to say that VCs operate on the greater fool theory, and right now the greatest fool is Yahoo. Couple this with what is evidently a tendency to micromanage without attention to detail, a constant reworking of HR aspects without any comprehension of how such changes affected loyal employees, and an almost imperial demeanor -- no surprise that her tenure is already being prepped for postmortems. Mayer's failures have at best led to drift and at worst burned the little remaining daylight left for Yahoo. Were I a major shareholder at the company, I think I'd rather have little Bobby and his nickel in charge than Marissa and her $2.08 billion.
- smacktoward 12y ago
  > It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Mayer has failed to develop any kind of coherent strategy, let alone execution. This has been my impression since she got the gig -- that she doesn't really have a strategy, just a collection of tactics. So she runs around doing stuff and hoping that some of it will improve things. For all the comparisons to Jobs, this approach shows a key difference, namely that Jobs had a strategy. When he took over Apple the first thing he did was brutally cut down the company's product lines. By the time he was done Apple really only sold four products: consumer and pro Mac, consumer and pro PowerBook. That was the entire Apple product line. This was a strategic decision: cut down to four products and absolutely nail the implementation of those products, rather than trying to have a half-baked product for every possible customer.
georgeecollins 12y ago
For what it is worth, I like the new Yahoo news app on my Android phone.
r0h1n 12y ago
Notwithstanding Meyer's faults or idiosyncracies, I wonder if there was anything anyone could have done to reinvigorate Yahoo?
- josefresco 12y ago
  The counter-Mayer argument is that Yahoo! should have focused on "media" and ad sales, two of their strengths and then maybe "dabbled" with enhancing their products. This theory of course cannot be proven, however the closest evidence we may have is AOL.
- q2 12y ago
  They should have built youtube competitor in house rather than looking at dailymotion. Given yahoo user base and talented developers, it should have reached respectable market share and ad revenue.
aikah 12y ago
I like this part : > " Mayer also favored a system of quarterly performance reviews, or Q.P.R.s, that required every Yahoo employee, on every team, be ranked from 1 to 5. The system was meant to encourage hard work and weed out underperformers, but it soon produced the exact opposite. Because only so many 4s and 5s could be allotted, talented people no longer wanted to work together; " Can somebody talk about his experience in the same conditions?
- chiph 12y ago
  Look up MiniMsft's blog -- he talked a lot about stack/ranking at Microsoft and the effect it had on the business. It wasn't a positive, let's just say that.
  - hga 12y ago
    Yeah, I learned, probably from it, that that's exactly one of the results from this sort of stack ranking. At the extreme, it's almost impossible to assemble a "dream team", tiger team or whatever because absent sustained political cover, some of them will have to be assigned a 1 or 2, and be shown the door or otherwise have their career zapped.
    - vonmoltke 12y ago
      Raytheon has a four-bin(Far exceeds, Exceeds, Meets, and needs Improvement) ranking system that, while officially not a stack-ranking system, unofficially is because managers are under significant pressure to have their sections roughly meet corporate's expected rating distribution. The system is not a total clusterfuck because the "I" category, which gets you put on a Performance Improvement Plan, is allowed to have nobody assigned. A manager still needs to respect the E and F targets, though, so awesome sections end up screwing people over and mediocre sections end up rewarding people who don't deserve it.
      - redstripe 12y ago
        How can someone far exceed expectations more than once or twice. Aren't the managers just bad at judging expectations at that point?
kanamekun 12y ago
I've seen this a lot as well: execs that are so busy re-inventing their business that they don't manage their core operations. << Aswath Damodaran, a professor at N.Y.U.'s Stern School of Business, has long argued about the danger of companies that try to return to the growth stage of their life cycle. These technology companies, he said, are run by people afflicted with something he calls the Steve Jobs syndrome. “We have created an incentive structure where C.E.O.s want to be stars,” Damodaran explained. “To be a star, you’ve got to be the next Steve Jobs — somebody who has actually grown a company to be a massive, large-market cap company.” But, he went on, “it’s extremely dangerous at companies when you focus on the exception rather than the rule.” He pointed out that “for every Apple, there are a hundred companies that tried to do what Apple did and fell flat on their faces.” >> It's probably not a coincidence that Steve Jobs had Tim Cook there to manage core operations, while Steve spent a lot of time focused on reinventing the business.
- sremani 12y ago
  It awfully sounds like Yahoo is JCPenney of tech. A super-star was brought in to revive the growth in to JCP, Ron Johnson. He tried it too hard and too fast, and almost ruined JCP beyond recovery. "Alibaba" is the one silver-lining that gives Yahoo something to play along, but this just reminds me JCP & Ron Johnson.
  - freditup 12y ago
    I really liked what Ron Johnson tried to do with JCP, and I loved his straightforward pricing (no more of that standard department store mark it up 300% and then perpetually have it on 50% off discount). Guess it ended up being a little bit too idealistic of a strategy though and JCP customers weren't able to see that it really benefited them. A shame it didn't work out.
    - zaroth 12y ago
      I would love to be able to pop open a web page, login, and click off some great clothes at consistently great prices and never a mention of "sale", "discount", "promotion", "free", or "almost out of stock" and just be done. For kids in particular who are outgrowing their entire wardrobe every 6-12 months, streamlining the process would be incredibly useful. But I think you need one more thing -- you need branded product lines which set expectations on the product and consistently back them up. I think JCP, without the draw of a big sale, didn't have enough draw left over. No one showed up to ever see all those consistently great prices.
danielweber 12y ago
“Like an actual hundred,” Mayer responded, “or like 60 rounded up to 100 to make me feel better?” The department responded that it was more like 60. Being a CEO is often a job of pulling teeth.
- wavefunction 12y ago
  Only if you have unreliable direct reports or you comport yourself in such a way that people feel obligated to "shape the truth." I'm guessing it's the second of these two for Marissa.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
waterlesscloud 12y ago
" Every Monday at 3 p.m. Pacific, she asked her direct reports to gather for a three-hour meeting. Mayer demanded all of her staff across the world join the call, so executives from New York, where it was 6 p.m., and Europe, where it was 11 p.m. or later, would dial in, too. Invariably, Mayer herself would be at least 45 minutes late; some calls were so delayed that Yahoo executives in Europe couldn’t hang up till after 3 a.m." This is completely unacceptable behavior from anyone aspiring to be an actual leader.
- echoless 12y ago
  Depends on the reasons why she was late and if they were legitimate or not.
  - jonnathanson 12y ago
    "Depends on the reasons why she was late and if they were legitimate or not." It really depends on how "invariably" she was late. If she was late almost all the time, and by 45 minutes or more each time, then it's patently irresponsible. She should have set a different time for the meeting every week. Or she should have blocked out her schedule to make the time. On the other hand, if she was late maybe 25% of the time, that's a different story. The CEO of a huge corporation is going to be late to a lot of meetings. It's the nature of the job. There isn't enough time in the working day for all the people, situations, and projects she needs to handle. Having worked every now and then with C-level executives at huge companies, some much bigger than Yahoo, I can tell you that they're often late to meetings. Staff meetings especially, because staff meetings are standing, and standing meetings usually lose in an ad-hoc triage battle against spur-of-the-moment meetings. Almost axiomatically, anyone or anything important enough to hijack a CEO's time is going to be important enough to win the priority battle against a standing staff meeting. All of that said, "invariably" needs to be defined here. Especially given the circumstances, i.e., requiring all direct reports in various timezones to be there every Monday on Mayer's clock. If it was, indeed, "invariable" -- as in, she was always at least 45 minutes late -- then she should have found a new time for the meeting. That's completely unacceptable.
yourad_io 12y ago
What happened when you tried to select text on the nytimes.com: * Left-to-right: nothing * Right-to-left: taken to a new page! Sweet. I love surprises. (this is on a desktop browser - chromium) If only I could plug in a second mouse to pinch-to-zoom! >:-[
- zodiakzz 12y ago
  Click on the page icon in your address bar and set JavaScript to "Always block on this site". Also gets rid of their pay-wall ;)
- coldpie 12y ago
  NoScript's kind of a pain to live with, but it's better than this crap.
- GrinningFool 12y ago
  I don't have these troubles in FF or Chrome (on linux). Any plugins that could be interfering?
  - yourad_io 12y ago
    I'm on Chriomium Version 37.0.2062.120 Ubuntu 12.04 (281580) (64-bit). No extensions or plugins are active for nytimes.com. My UA spoofer was off as well.
iblaine 12y ago
Does she park in handicap spaces without permission? That could help her become more like Steve Jobs.
bsaul 12y ago
Do people forget that when Jobs came back to apple, he did it with a whole team of people coming in the boat with him, as well as their technology ( Next ) that would become the ground technology for rebuilding the company ??? I'm sorry, but it's not just about one man returning. It's about a team led by one man.
thejerz 12y ago
If Marissa hired me, I'd tell her, "Throw away everything and focus your team 100% on search." Search is her core competency -- so stop pretending to be a media mogul and get down to what you know best. Web search is far from done, and it has loads of potential. It's her "iPod." How ironic would it be Yahoo displaced Google, because Google had lost their focus on doing one thing (search) and doing it really well?
- facepalm 12y ago
  I thought they dropped search years ago. Nowadays their search is powered by Bing?
  - xyahoo 12y ago
    It is. But that doesn't mean they can't rebuild it (it will NOT be easy, but they have the $$$ to splurge on a talented team)
- tmorton 12y ago
  Funny, I got the opposite impression. I would tell her "Throw away everything and focus 100% on mid- to low-brow content." More celebrity blogs, fantasy sports, etc. Yahoo has a lot of unsophisticated eyeballs, but they're not a tech leader.
- defen 12y ago
  I don't know, that seems like fighting the last war ("Generals always fight the last war"...) Microsoft has a 5 year head start and has spent billions on this and they are nowhere close to Google (I'm not even talking tech, just market share). I think the only way to beat Google at this point is by winning the next war (Yahoo! already missed mobile). Just like no one beat Microsoft at operating systems or productivity software; the world just moved on from caring about those things. Of course, no one knows what the next battle will be. Of course, beating Google is somewhat of a red herring; they don't necessarily need to lose for Yahoo! to win.
- thrillgore 12y ago
  Yahoo has never been about search! They've always been a portal. They're a content company. A tabloid. They should focus on that first, services like Mail, Pipes, BOSS etc second.
jlukanta 12y ago
"Generally speaking, there are only a few ways to make money on the Internet." And the article goes on claiming that e-commerce and marketplaces, hardware, and ads are those few ways. This can't be true considering how much money Netflix (subscription), AWS (metered pay), mobile games (IAP) are making.
- projectramo 12y ago
  The thrust of his article was not about this, but these are good points. The three ways of making money -- transaction fee, selling hardware, and selling ads -- exclude just paying for an internet service (where I would call subscription, metered, and IAP different ways for paying for a service). You could call that a subset of e-commerce except that he defines e-commerce companies as those that "that profit from transactions occurring on their platforms," and uses Amazon, ebay and Uber as examples.
- xyahoo 12y ago
  Agreed. This article starts with a hypothesis ("Marissa Mayer bad!"), and then lays out cherry-picked 'facts' and anecdotes around it. It could as easily have started with "Marissa Mayer great!", and done the same (but with a different set of 'facts' and anecdotes).
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  They did say generally. Also, they were presumably only talking about consumer web services. AWS doesn't fall into that category.
q2 12y ago
Is Marissa Mayer on the way out of Yahoo? This article which lists all her faults, summary of mistakes suggest a sort of open warning. Mainstream media like New York Times won't list mistakes of acting CEO because of the fear of backlash unless something is happening in the background like merger/replacement or some influential person(s) are actively leaking out his/her disappointment/frustrations. Some how, I am getting impressions of HP's former CEO Carly Florina, while reading this article. Hope it won't end like that. It appears Marissa Mayer is in hurry to prove something but without proper strategy. She is sort of mixing Apple's Steve Jobs way, netflix way, Google's data obsessive ways to somehow create some recipe for success. I feel she has to cool down and make some original recipe rather than mixing from various other companies.Wall street, Yahoo Board and investors need to be told that turnaround may take at least five years and there should be no hurry in between just like HP's current CEO Meg Whitman did, irrespective of consequences. This can give her peace of mind and helps in creating a better strategy. It appears, she wants to rush but do not know where to and meanwhile falling. She has to slow down and rethink. Also, this article can be condensed. It lists about yahoo from its start to previous CEO's, her hiring ...etc. Yahoo's past before Mayer may be irrelevant in the context of this article.If needed, URL to past article may be sufficient.
- venomsnake 12y ago
  My first thought: "Is this a PR leak to prepare us for new CEO"
  - canvia 12y ago
    or a hostile takeover
- mathattack 12y ago
  You're right on several points. - It could very well be a strategic leak. - It's brazen tone suggests that she's very weak. - It's much too long an article. The one thing I'd differ is she did appear to have a strategy, it just didn't work. (Upscale media, original content, mobile emphasis, more sales, etc...) I don't think she gets 5 years to execute on it.
- 12y ago
xyahoo 12y ago
(Time to dust off ye olde account again) This article, while making good points, is written with a slant: to sell a book. Broadly speaking, Marissa's big weakness is that she's a tad naive. She thinks too logically, and believes that if she has a system in place, it will be followed in spirit by logically-thinking people like herself. This may have worked in Google, because Google was heavily engineer-focused during its early years; but Yahoo is different: it's a (nearly) 20-year old company, with many people who are lifers. They have honed their skills at survival; and as one middle manager put it to me, "I've seen lots of CEOs; she'll also be gone, but I'll still be here". She can come up with the best laid plans; but the middle management will do what it thinks is in its best interest. And they look out for themselves, always. One of the major reasons why she embarked on the acquihire spree was to do an end-run around these people. She knows that if she has to count on them, she won't get anything done. This is also why she initiated the 'stack ranking' process. Her goal was noble: to weed out the underperformers. And yes, they did weed out a fair bit of deadwood. But the elephant in the room went untouched: the middle managers. There is no accountability for them! I've seen people join a manager's team and quit (or switch) within months; by any objective evaluation, he should have been fired a long time ago. And yet he survives, because he's been there a long time and knows how to play the game. I have also seen stellar performers quit because their manager was not willing to go to bat for them in the calibration meetings, so they always ended up with "achieves" (which is average, and forms the bulk (70%) of the ratings). This article cherry picks mistakes; but who amongst us hasn't made a mistake? The HdC hiring was a big mistake, for sure. But once again: she was being naive, and thought he could deliver, when all he was doing was blowing smoke up her ass. She still can't get her mind wrapped around the smoke-and-mirrors that is sales, which is why Sales is still suffering. She needs a powerful, no-holds-barred Sales head, so she can go back to being a Product person. People in HN can diss her all they want, but I was at a trade show, and half the outfits (startups) I talked to wanted to be bought out by Yahoo. Money talks; and right now she has gob loads of it that'll give her a lot of rope.
- FD3SA 12y ago
  " De Castro would leave the company in January 2014. For about 15 months of work, he would be paid $109 million." Costly mistakes.
leoc 12y ago
"But in Silicon Valley, the big money, and most of the prestige, is in making cool products. This is partly because product businesses, based on technology, are easier to scale than content ones, which require more human labor. It also reflects a cultural bias. The Valley’s greatest companies, from Hewlett-Packard onward, have been built around technological ingenuity. Tech executives know how to hire engineers and designers; they’re less adroit at recruiting editors or producers. When Loeb joined the Yahoo board, he recruited Michael J. Wolf, the former president of MTV, and the two consulted the noted venture capitalist Marc Andreessen about who should become the next C.E.O. of Yahoo. Andreessen made the case for a product executive." This seems to be missing part of the story. Didn't Yahoo! previously try hard to reinvent itself as primarily a "content" business under a CEO recruited from Hollywood, Terry Semel? IIRC it was Yahoo! failure to thrive using that strategy that got it into (relative) trouble in the first place.
bane 12y ago
The difference is that Jobs was an asshole, everything I've ever heard about Mayer is that she's probably a psychopath. My guess is that she was able to cover it up well at Google by burying everybody in data-driven decision making processes and working hard. But a data-driven decision making process about creative stuff is precisely the kind of approach an emotionally disconnected person would use as a tool to do their job. She was a long-shot try for CEO and has done some good things. But it may be time for her to move on. My sympathies for whatever group ends up with her in charge next.
- phaus 12y ago
  >The difference is that Jobs was an asshole, everything I've ever heard about Mayer is that she's probably a psychopath. Replying to an email with a smiley emoticon because you ruined someone's career when all the person did was exactly what their fucking job expects them to do is kind of a psychopathic thing to do. Also, starting and running a wage-fixing ring that inflicts the most damage upon those upon which you rely the most to make you wealthy is also kind of a psychopathic thing to do.
  - PhantomGremlin 12y ago
    You're quite right. Steve Jobs was both an asshole and a psychopath. Still, he was one hell of a visionary.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
bsg75 12y ago
> One of the Yahoo board’s hesitations upon hiring Mayer was her relative lack of experience as a manager. Something executives seem to not be able to understand: Experience counts. Its one thing to ride the wave of success when you are in at the beginning. Its something entirely more difficult to right a large, floundering ship when you have never actually been captain.
gcb0 12y ago
Article is about the opinions of a guy whose job is to "link CEOs and investors", whatever that job is called. from a newspaper Meyer stole the most well know tech editor. from a writter that found a lame excuse to write 'jobs' on the headline, knowing the gang here would eat up anything with that on the title.
harmonicon 12y ago
The story is told from a very critical angle and I wonder if there are another less the-sky-is-falling side. On the other hand, I did not think yahoo.com got better (yes i am a frequent user): - Yahoo mail actually got worse. 2 Years ago the UI looked bad and straight out of 1990s, but at least it worked reliably and efficiently as a junk email address. In the 2 year since it got a modern makeover and looked better but still very yahoo-y and not good. However the UX design became more complex and more of a hassle to use. Meanwhile the speed and performance has really gone down, presumably due all the Javascript involved in the make over. The worst problem is mail outage. Login issues and mail outage started to happen much more frequently. It was a stable product at least, now it's just bad. I stopped using that address. -Many changes has been made to Yahoo home pages but one would be hard pressed to find users that unequivocally liked the changes. It is still churning more of the low quality, info lacking and grammar error strewn articles. The only fun(if you are that bored) is in the comment section. Lastly one has to wonder about her frequent tardiness. I am all for gender equality in the workplace but one has to wonder that trying to turn a massive company around as its CEO during and immediately after pregnancy is a good idea.
- billsossoon 12y ago
  Yeah, while I agree with many of the points made in the article, I wondered why the article has such a one-sided narrative and brutally critical tone. Do the activist investors have enough power to get this piece pushed forward?
- astrange 12y ago
  > Lastly one has to wonder about her frequent tardiness. I am all for gender equality in the workplace but one has to wonder that trying to turn a massive company around as its CEO during and immediately after pregnancy is a good idea. Didn't she have an in-office nanny taking care of everything? It's more likely she's losing her mind from that 4 hours of sleep. Of course, that is one great reason to take maternity/paternity leave.
- sytelus 12y ago
  There are few good changes from Yahoo lately. For example, Flickr is now giving 1TB space. The team seem to write cool technical things on their blog. Yahoo Mail Plus version is essentially free now. It was refreshing to see so many new iOS apps from Yahoo but I haven't used them so don't know their usefulness. Before Mayer, there was hardly anything at all coming out from Yahoo.
CmonDev 12y ago
"Big Four: Apple, Facebook, Amazon or Google" - he made 9 mistakes in the word 'Microsoft'.
tacree 12y ago
Just a quick glance at the way she has butchered the sports section of the website should be enough to condemn her. It went from being the best on the net to being too complicated, full of mistakes and unreadable. It forced me to go to ESPN (which I also don't like). You don't make changes just to make changes. Without a clear sense of purpose and clear vision of what you're doing and who you're aiming at, a CEO is a failure.

329 points by r0h1n 12y ago

A very scathing article. Anyone who has interacted with Marissa have any inside information? Be interested to hear about what she has done well.

DodgyEggplant 12y ago

This is a nice article, that clearly demonstrates the great value that hedge fund managers contributed to humanity along the years

danso 12y ago

This anecdote is almost too perfectly aligned with the narrative to be true: > Reared in Google’s data-obsessed culture, Mayer tended to require countless tests about user preferences before making an important product decision. But when it came to media strategy, she seemed perfectly comfortable going with her gut. As a teenager in Wisconsin, she grew up sneaking into the living room to watch “Saturday Night Live” and occasionally recited sketches during meetings; in April 2013, Yahoo paid an estimated $10 million per year for the “S.N.L.” archives. Even though the actress Gwyneth Paltrow had created a best-selling cookbook and popular lifestyle blog, Mayer, who habitually asked deputies where they attended college, balked at hiring her as a contributing editor for Yahoo Food. According to one executive, Mayer disapproved of the fact that Paltrow did not graduate college. Well, I can think of one obvious difference between Mayer and Jobs...

aikah 12y ago
> Mayer disapproved of the fact that Paltrow did not graduate college. Wow , sorry but wow. Paltrow is famous,more famous than Mayer will ever be.If this thing is true,it tells a bit about her personality. In business,you want to associate with famous people that can drive their audience to your product.Does it matter they graduated or not?frankly?
- corin_ 12y ago
  Presumably they wanted her to actually do the job, not just be the face of the job, so her skills beyond "being famous" would of course matter, like hiring anybody else. Of course that doesn't mean I agree with assuming that no qualifications means can't do the job, but that's unrelated to her being a celebrity (and indeed a commonly debated question with two big groups of people on both sides).
  - commandar 12y ago
    >Gwyneth Paltrow had created a best-selling cookbook and popular lifestyle blog A contributing editor job is essentially a writing position. That strongly indicates that she could do the job.
    - corin_ 12y ago
      I'm not arguing that she could (or couldn't), just that whether she could do the job was more than just "she's famous". Personally I fall in the camp of people who will judge on experience more than degrees, clearly Meyer is on the other side.
      - commandar 12y ago
        That's kind of the thing, though. Contributing editors are often brought in because of their notoriety. There's valuing a particular quality in an employee, and then there's being completely misguided in weighting that quality.
      - nerfhammer 12y ago
        Plenty of people could write as well as David Pogue, Nate Silver, Ezra Klein, etc., but the expectation is that those writers will bring the audience. They get seven figure salaries not because they can write articles really well, but that they can bring an audience wherever they go and create revenue worth what they're getting paid
  - tomp 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

jordigh 12y ago

Gah, call me lazy, but this article really is tl;dr. I feel like the web is the wrong medium for this. If I were offline with a printed copy of the NYT, and no internet access, I may more gladly spend like 15-30 minutes to read through the whole thing, but during my morning HN round-up, I really don't feel like it. If someone wants to summarise for me, I would be grateful. edit: Dear downvoters: you think I should just shut up and spend the 15-30 minutes to read the whole article instead of kindly requesting a summary, right?

whorleater 12y ago
Isn't that the point of services like Instapaper or Pocket though?
- jordigh 12y ago
  Is either of them gonna snail mail me a printed copy of articles each morning so that I can read them without the distraction of the internet?
  - warp 12y ago
    instapaper can send the articles you've saved to instapaper to your kindle every day or every week. That's a fairly good approximation of what you're asking for.
    - jordigh 12y ago
      Kindles are not offline. I haven't found an ereader that (1) works with e-ink (2) does not require non-free software and (3) has no internet access at all. I know I'm picky, but these requirements are all met by a printed paper, so I know it's possible to have this.
      - rbonvall 12y ago
        Browsing the web on the kindle is too inconvenient to be a distraction at all.

snlacks 12y ago

Something tells me the author started writing this article before the firefox news... (slightly after Napolean's invasion of Russia) While I can't speak to the intepersonal management practices, this article seems to feed the tech killing stockholder demand for quarterly profits. The company is doing much better than before, but "not good enough." Whether the conclusion is correct, this article, despite it's length, doesn't make a case for Mayer not achieving the long term goals so far. (edit: fixed some messed up wording)

debacle 12y ago
The Firefox news is going to do more to bring down Mozilla than bootstrap Yahoo. Yahoo's search IS inferior, and forcing it on people is bullshit. Mozilla should allow users to choose their default search provider on installation.
- jamespo 12y ago
  Forcing? I didn't realise Firefox were hardcoding this in now.
  - debacle 12y ago
    I chose not to receive updates to my search. Mozilla updated my search anyway. That's forcing. It's underhanded. And now I have sponsored links when I open a new tab in Firefox, from Mozilla partners. It's starting to stink. The Mozilla foundation is losing sight of their mission.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - dhimes 12y ago
      They are running a donation campaign right now. I hope you donated.
  - ep103 12y ago
    You literally can't type a search query in firefox without it asking you which engine you would like to use.

gamesurgeon 12y ago

"A week later, Smith published an open letter calling for Yahoo to...merge with AOL. Redundancies could be eliminated, thousands of people could be fired and two former Internet superpowers would be downsized into a single and steady (if uninspiring) entity...'We trust the board and management will do the right thing for shareholders, even if this may mean accepting AOL as the surviving entity'" I see where Smith is coming from, but that doesn't make his case any less unsettling. Do some economists really believe that the "right" thing to do is fire thousands of people? Are a company's shareholders really more important than its employees?

personlurking 12y ago
While I can't answer your question(s), I do wonder why Yahoo and AOL fill me with no feeling whatsoever. This, for as long as I can remember (save a few select years in the mid 90s). It's amazing how these companies can still be around, though I understand "Middle America" still uses them.
- ebiester 12y ago
  Yahoo sports is really good, for example. It's not a bad aggregator in general and has good original content mixed in. I don't understand the synergy with AOL at all. What does AOL bring to the table?
debacle 12y ago
I don't understand your sentiment here. If there is a large overlap and both companies are struggling (and struggling is dying when you're an Internet company), why not eradicate inefficiencies and try and build a stronger player? AOL and Yahoo are not beholden to provide for their employees in perpetuity. That's a very Japanese mindset.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
lmm 12y ago
> Do some economists really believe that the "right" thing to do is fire thousands of people? Yes. The idea is that they'd be more productive in other companies (or start their own). In a country with decent employee protections, unemployment provisions, and public healthcare, it can even be more-or-less true. > Are a company's shareholders really more important than its employees? Yes. With employees, there is a contract, which in some fictional-economics sense was a negotiated agreement between equals, so the company only has those obligations laid out in that contract (just as with bondholders). With shareholders there is no contract, instead the company has a fiduciary duty to act in their best interests.

FlyingLawnmower 12y ago

This is only tangentially related, but I was surprised that Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google were considered the "big four" technology companies. The comparisons to Amazon, Facebook, and Google make sense in that those three (and Yahoo) are all internet companies, but I don't see how Apple fits into this paradigm. The author focuses on Apple's revenues from hardware sales, which has almost nothing to do with any of Yahoo's business. I also found it interesting that Microsoft wasn't mentioned once in the article, considering the fact that it makes much more sense to draw parallels between two software giants trying to turn themselves around (not to mention the fact that Yahoo search is run on Bing). Surely Microsoft is still considered a "Big tech" company?

bigdubs 12y ago
Not mentioned in that list; Microsoft.
hyperpape 12y ago
It's true that Apple has nothing like the direct revenue streams of Facebook or Google coming from the web via advertising (but Amazon isn't in the same business either). What I think the point is that all four companies operate very large online services. There's even significant overlap on a lot of key products: maps, messaging, email.
- atmosx 12y ago
  What are you talking about? Last time I checked Apple was the corp with the deepest cash pockets from all the corps mentioned.
ep103 12y ago
yeah, the big 4 are Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft.
huxley 12y ago
Apple's software & services revenues are pretty significant, its gross revenue from iTunes Store, App Store, etc comes to $7+ billion per quarter: http://www.asymco.com/2014/02/10/fortune-130/ http://www.asymco.com/2014/02/10/fortune-130/ Presumably Yahoo aspires to reach the level of [Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google], Microsoft is in the process of a major pivot so it probably wasn't considered an aspirational target (even if they do make massive amounts of money)

jeswin 12y ago

"Steve Jobs"-type people are rare. Marissa Mayer I'm sure has her strengths, but this comparison is unnecessary or perhaps, unfair. This 1996 Microsoft Developer's Conference is one of my favorite Steve Jobs presentations http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/PDC/PDC-1996/PDC-1996-Keynote-with-Bob-Muglia-and-Steve-Jobs http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/PDC/PDC-1996/PDC-1996-Keynot...

WalterSear 12y ago
According to the article, she's the one who keeps making the comparison.

easytiger 12y ago

> Ask.com, a search engine that no longer innovates but happily takes in $400 million in annual revenue Holy crap. I must have taken a wrong turn in life. HOW?!

patio11 12y ago
Toolbars and arbitrage.
- scott_karana 12y ago
  What arbitrage, exactly?...
  - GeneralMayhem 12y ago
    They advertise their own search result pages on Google, then sell a bunch of ads at higher CPC on their page, with the idea being that they'll make enough on the commission from the second ad to pay for the Google ad with a profit.
    - Rzor 12y ago
      Didn't Google cut that out a long time ago? I didn't find any evidence that Ask was still doing this.
  - patio11 12y ago
    http://searchengineland.com/will-ask-com-google-arbitrage-ever-stop-203565 http://searchengineland.com/will-ask-com-google-arbitrage-ev...
kyrre 12y ago
basically malware (ask toolbar)
Domenic_S 12y ago
They have a massive office building in the East Bay, too, every time I passed it I asked myself how in the????

hyperpape 12y ago

Can someone explain to me how you value a company turning a $500 million annual profit at -$4billion? I could understand if the company had $6 billion in debt, but it doesn't. What am I missing about the accounting?

refurb 12y ago
There was a big thread a while back on HN that went into the details. What I got out of it was that the negative price reflects the market view that despite the cash coming into Yahoo, they are more likely to destroy value than create it.
RockyMcNuts 12y ago
They owned shares in Alibaba that had a market value of $4b more than Yahoo's market cap, which in theory should have reflected the value of Alibaba plus all the other assets.
- hyperpape 12y ago
  I mean, yes, I understand that they're doing that calculation. But it doesn't make sense to me.
  - gbhn 12y ago
    You may be thinking that stock prices always make sense. :-)
  - venomsnake 12y ago
    Alibaba is good at making money. Yahoo is good at burning them. If you take $1bn from alibaba -> $1BN goes to shareholders. If yahoo takes $1bn from alibaba -> they pay a hundred million for a golden parachute, stagnate tumblr with the other 500$, buy startups for $499 million and return some loose change and pocket lint to investors.
tome 12y ago
It just means that the share price doesn't reflect the true value of Yahoo.

HillRat 12y ago

[Mayer] highlighted various signs of promise. ... Display advertising revenue was down 6 percent, but the number of ads sold had actually increased by 24 percent. Good news, everybody! We're doing more and making less! Yahoo isn't a products company -- it's a pile of cash with long audience reach. This isn't a bad thing (and indeed was the situation at Apple when Jobs returned), but it does mean that the company has lots of options but no core mission. The danger is that such a company can kill its cows while searching for stars. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Mayer has failed to develop any kind of coherent strategy, let alone execution. Instead, she appears to have substituted chaotic action as a metric of progress (new home pages every day! Purple everywhere!), mistaken her hobbies as evidence of expertise (e.g., deciding Yahoo could become a destination for high-end prêt-à-porter fashion consumers), and taken on high-concept strategies without any kind of plan for generating revenue and income (e.g., going deep on content). This doesn't even get to Yahoo's constant overpaying for startups that are inevitably killed by indigestion -- I like to say that VCs operate on the greater fool theory, and right now the greatest fool is Yahoo. Couple this with what is evidently a tendency to micromanage without attention to detail, a constant reworking of HR aspects without any comprehension of how such changes affected loyal employees, and an almost imperial demeanor -- no surprise that her tenure is already being prepped for postmortems. Mayer's failures have at best led to drift and at worst burned the little remaining daylight left for Yahoo. Were I a major shareholder at the company, I think I'd rather have little Bobby and his nickel in charge than Marissa and her $2.08 billion.

smacktoward 12y ago
> It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Mayer has failed to develop any kind of coherent strategy, let alone execution. This has been my impression since she got the gig -- that she doesn't really have a strategy, just a collection of tactics. So she runs around doing stuff and hoping that some of it will improve things. For all the comparisons to Jobs, this approach shows a key difference, namely that Jobs had a strategy. When he took over Apple the first thing he did was brutally cut down the company's product lines. By the time he was done Apple really only sold four products: consumer and pro Mac, consumer and pro PowerBook. That was the entire Apple product line. This was a strategic decision: cut down to four products and absolutely nail the implementation of those products, rather than trying to have a half-baked product for every possible customer.

georgeecollins 12y ago

For what it is worth, I like the new Yahoo news app on my Android phone.

r0h1n 12y ago

Notwithstanding Meyer's faults or idiosyncracies, I wonder if there was anything anyone could have done to reinvigorate Yahoo?

josefresco 12y ago
The counter-Mayer argument is that Yahoo! should have focused on "media" and ad sales, two of their strengths and then maybe "dabbled" with enhancing their products. This theory of course cannot be proven, however the closest evidence we may have is AOL.
q2 12y ago
They should have built youtube competitor in house rather than looking at dailymotion. Given yahoo user base and talented developers, it should have reached respectable market share and ad revenue.

aikah 12y ago

I like this part : > " Mayer also favored a system of quarterly performance reviews, or Q.P.R.s, that required every Yahoo employee, on every team, be ranked from 1 to 5. The system was meant to encourage hard work and weed out underperformers, but it soon produced the exact opposite. Because only so many 4s and 5s could be allotted, talented people no longer wanted to work together; " Can somebody talk about his experience in the same conditions?

chiph 12y ago
Look up MiniMsft's blog -- he talked a lot about stack/ranking at Microsoft and the effect it had on the business. It wasn't a positive, let's just say that.
- hga 12y ago
  Yeah, I learned, probably from it, that that's exactly one of the results from this sort of stack ranking. At the extreme, it's almost impossible to assemble a "dream team", tiger team or whatever because absent sustained political cover, some of them will have to be assigned a 1 or 2, and be shown the door or otherwise have their career zapped.
  - vonmoltke 12y ago
    Raytheon has a four-bin(Far exceeds, Exceeds, Meets, and needs Improvement) ranking system that, while officially not a stack-ranking system, unofficially is because managers are under significant pressure to have their sections roughly meet corporate's expected rating distribution. The system is not a total clusterfuck because the "I" category, which gets you put on a Performance Improvement Plan, is allowed to have nobody assigned. A manager still needs to respect the E and F targets, though, so awesome sections end up screwing people over and mediocre sections end up rewarding people who don't deserve it.
    - redstripe 12y ago
      How can someone far exceed expectations more than once or twice. Aren't the managers just bad at judging expectations at that point?

kanamekun 12y ago

I've seen this a lot as well: execs that are so busy re-inventing their business that they don't manage their core operations. << Aswath Damodaran, a professor at N.Y.U.'s Stern School of Business, has long argued about the danger of companies that try to return to the growth stage of their life cycle. These technology companies, he said, are run by people afflicted with something he calls the Steve Jobs syndrome. “We have created an incentive structure where C.E.O.s want to be stars,” Damodaran explained. “To be a star, you’ve got to be the next Steve Jobs — somebody who has actually grown a company to be a massive, large-market cap company.” But, he went on, “it’s extremely dangerous at companies when you focus on the exception rather than the rule.” He pointed out that “for every Apple, there are a hundred companies that tried to do what Apple did and fell flat on their faces.” >> It's probably not a coincidence that Steve Jobs had Tim Cook there to manage core operations, while Steve spent a lot of time focused on reinventing the business.

sremani 12y ago
It awfully sounds like Yahoo is JCPenney of tech. A super-star was brought in to revive the growth in to JCP, Ron Johnson. He tried it too hard and too fast, and almost ruined JCP beyond recovery. "Alibaba" is the one silver-lining that gives Yahoo something to play along, but this just reminds me JCP & Ron Johnson.
- freditup 12y ago
  I really liked what Ron Johnson tried to do with JCP, and I loved his straightforward pricing (no more of that standard department store mark it up 300% and then perpetually have it on 50% off discount). Guess it ended up being a little bit too idealistic of a strategy though and JCP customers weren't able to see that it really benefited them. A shame it didn't work out.
  - zaroth 12y ago
    I would love to be able to pop open a web page, login, and click off some great clothes at consistently great prices and never a mention of "sale", "discount", "promotion", "free", or "almost out of stock" and just be done. For kids in particular who are outgrowing their entire wardrobe every 6-12 months, streamlining the process would be incredibly useful. But I think you need one more thing -- you need branded product lines which set expectations on the product and consistently back them up. I think JCP, without the draw of a big sale, didn't have enough draw left over. No one showed up to ever see all those consistently great prices.

danielweber 12y ago

“Like an actual hundred,” Mayer responded, “or like 60 rounded up to 100 to make me feel better?” The department responded that it was more like 60. Being a CEO is often a job of pulling teeth.

wavefunction 12y ago
Only if you have unreliable direct reports or you comport yourself in such a way that people feel obligated to "shape the truth." I'm guessing it's the second of these two for Marissa.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

waterlesscloud 12y ago

" Every Monday at 3 p.m. Pacific, she asked her direct reports to gather for a three-hour meeting. Mayer demanded all of her staff across the world join the call, so executives from New York, where it was 6 p.m., and Europe, where it was 11 p.m. or later, would dial in, too. Invariably, Mayer herself would be at least 45 minutes late; some calls were so delayed that Yahoo executives in Europe couldn’t hang up till after 3 a.m." This is completely unacceptable behavior from anyone aspiring to be an actual leader.

echoless 12y ago
Depends on the reasons why she was late and if they were legitimate or not.
- jonnathanson 12y ago
  "Depends on the reasons why she was late and if they were legitimate or not." It really depends on how "invariably" she was late. If she was late almost all the time, and by 45 minutes or more each time, then it's patently irresponsible. She should have set a different time for the meeting every week. Or she should have blocked out her schedule to make the time. On the other hand, if she was late maybe 25% of the time, that's a different story. The CEO of a huge corporation is going to be late to a lot of meetings. It's the nature of the job. There isn't enough time in the working day for all the people, situations, and projects she needs to handle. Having worked every now and then with C-level executives at huge companies, some much bigger than Yahoo, I can tell you that they're often late to meetings. Staff meetings especially, because staff meetings are standing, and standing meetings usually lose in an ad-hoc triage battle against spur-of-the-moment meetings. Almost axiomatically, anyone or anything important enough to hijack a CEO's time is going to be important enough to win the priority battle against a standing staff meeting. All of that said, "invariably" needs to be defined here. Especially given the circumstances, i.e., requiring all direct reports in various timezones to be there every Monday on Mayer's clock. If it was, indeed, "invariable" -- as in, she was always at least 45 minutes late -- then she should have found a new time for the meeting. That's completely unacceptable.

yourad_io 12y ago

What happened when you tried to select text on the nytimes.com: * Left-to-right: nothing * Right-to-left: taken to a new page! Sweet. I love surprises. (this is on a desktop browser - chromium) If only I could plug in a second mouse to pinch-to-zoom! >:-[

zodiakzz 12y ago
Click on the page icon in your address bar and set JavaScript to "Always block on this site". Also gets rid of their pay-wall ;)
coldpie 12y ago
NoScript's kind of a pain to live with, but it's better than this crap.
GrinningFool 12y ago
I don't have these troubles in FF or Chrome (on linux). Any plugins that could be interfering?
- yourad_io 12y ago
  I'm on Chriomium Version 37.0.2062.120 Ubuntu 12.04 (281580) (64-bit). No extensions or plugins are active for nytimes.com. My UA spoofer was off as well.

iblaine 12y ago

Does she park in handicap spaces without permission? That could help her become more like Steve Jobs.

bsaul 12y ago

Do people forget that when Jobs came back to apple, he did it with a whole team of people coming in the boat with him, as well as their technology ( Next ) that would become the ground technology for rebuilding the company ??? I'm sorry, but it's not just about one man returning. It's about a team led by one man.

thejerz 12y ago

If Marissa hired me, I'd tell her, "Throw away everything and focus your team 100% on search." Search is her core competency -- so stop pretending to be a media mogul and get down to what you know best. Web search is far from done, and it has loads of potential. It's her "iPod." How ironic would it be Yahoo displaced Google, because Google had lost their focus on doing one thing (search) and doing it really well?

facepalm 12y ago
I thought they dropped search years ago. Nowadays their search is powered by Bing?
- xyahoo 12y ago
  It is. But that doesn't mean they can't rebuild it (it will NOT be easy, but they have the $$$ to splurge on a talented team)
tmorton 12y ago
Funny, I got the opposite impression. I would tell her "Throw away everything and focus 100% on mid- to low-brow content." More celebrity blogs, fantasy sports, etc. Yahoo has a lot of unsophisticated eyeballs, but they're not a tech leader.
defen 12y ago
I don't know, that seems like fighting the last war ("Generals always fight the last war"...) Microsoft has a 5 year head start and has spent billions on this and they are nowhere close to Google (I'm not even talking tech, just market share). I think the only way to beat Google at this point is by winning the next war (Yahoo! already missed mobile). Just like no one beat Microsoft at operating systems or productivity software; the world just moved on from caring about those things. Of course, no one knows what the next battle will be. Of course, beating Google is somewhat of a red herring; they don't necessarily need to lose for Yahoo! to win.
thrillgore 12y ago
Yahoo has never been about search! They've always been a portal. They're a content company. A tabloid. They should focus on that first, services like Mail, Pipes, BOSS etc second.

jlukanta 12y ago

"Generally speaking, there are only a few ways to make money on the Internet." And the article goes on claiming that e-commerce and marketplaces, hardware, and ads are those few ways. This can't be true considering how much money Netflix (subscription), AWS (metered pay), mobile games (IAP) are making.

projectramo 12y ago
The thrust of his article was not about this, but these are good points. The three ways of making money -- transaction fee, selling hardware, and selling ads -- exclude just paying for an internet service (where I would call subscription, metered, and IAP different ways for paying for a service). You could call that a subset of e-commerce except that he defines e-commerce companies as those that "that profit from transactions occurring on their platforms," and uses Amazon, ebay and Uber as examples.
xyahoo 12y ago
Agreed. This article starts with a hypothesis ("Marissa Mayer bad!"), and then lays out cherry-picked 'facts' and anecdotes around it. It could as easily have started with "Marissa Mayer great!", and done the same (but with a different set of 'facts' and anecdotes).
TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
They did say generally. Also, they were presumably only talking about consumer web services. AWS doesn't fall into that category.

q2 12y ago

Is Marissa Mayer on the way out of Yahoo? This article which lists all her faults, summary of mistakes suggest a sort of open warning. Mainstream media like New York Times won't list mistakes of acting CEO because of the fear of backlash unless something is happening in the background like merger/replacement or some influential person(s) are actively leaking out his/her disappointment/frustrations. Some how, I am getting impressions of HP's former CEO Carly Florina, while reading this article. Hope it won't end like that. It appears Marissa Mayer is in hurry to prove something but without proper strategy. She is sort of mixing Apple's Steve Jobs way, netflix way, Google's data obsessive ways to somehow create some recipe for success. I feel she has to cool down and make some original recipe rather than mixing from various other companies.Wall street, Yahoo Board and investors need to be told that turnaround may take at least five years and there should be no hurry in between just like HP's current CEO Meg Whitman did, irrespective of consequences. This can give her peace of mind and helps in creating a better strategy. It appears, she wants to rush but do not know where to and meanwhile falling. She has to slow down and rethink. Also, this article can be condensed. It lists about yahoo from its start to previous CEO's, her hiring ...etc. Yahoo's past before Mayer may be irrelevant in the context of this article.If needed, URL to past article may be sufficient.

venomsnake 12y ago
My first thought: "Is this a PR leak to prepare us for new CEO"
- canvia 12y ago
  or a hostile takeover
mathattack 12y ago
You're right on several points. - It could very well be a strategic leak. - It's brazen tone suggests that she's very weak. - It's much too long an article. The one thing I'd differ is she did appear to have a strategy, it just didn't work. (Upscale media, original content, mobile emphasis, more sales, etc...) I don't think she gets 5 years to execute on it.
12y ago

xyahoo 12y ago

(Time to dust off ye olde account again) This article, while making good points, is written with a slant: to sell a book. Broadly speaking, Marissa's big weakness is that she's a tad naive. She thinks too logically, and believes that if she has a system in place, it will be followed in spirit by logically-thinking people like herself. This may have worked in Google, because Google was heavily engineer-focused during its early years; but Yahoo is different: it's a (nearly) 20-year old company, with many people who are lifers. They have honed their skills at survival; and as one middle manager put it to me, "I've seen lots of CEOs; she'll also be gone, but I'll still be here". She can come up with the best laid plans; but the middle management will do what it thinks is in its best interest. And they look out for themselves, always. One of the major reasons why she embarked on the acquihire spree was to do an end-run around these people. She knows that if she has to count on them, she won't get anything done. This is also why she initiated the 'stack ranking' process. Her goal was noble: to weed out the underperformers. And yes, they did weed out a fair bit of deadwood. But the elephant in the room went untouched: the middle managers. There is no accountability for them! I've seen people join a manager's team and quit (or switch) within months; by any objective evaluation, he should have been fired a long time ago. And yet he survives, because he's been there a long time and knows how to play the game. I have also seen stellar performers quit because their manager was not willing to go to bat for them in the calibration meetings, so they always ended up with "achieves" (which is average, and forms the bulk (70%) of the ratings). This article cherry picks mistakes; but who amongst us hasn't made a mistake? The HdC hiring was a big mistake, for sure. But once again: she was being naive, and thought he could deliver, when all he was doing was blowing smoke up her ass. She still can't get her mind wrapped around the smoke-and-mirrors that is sales, which is why Sales is still suffering. She needs a powerful, no-holds-barred Sales head, so she can go back to being a Product person. People in HN can diss her all they want, but I was at a trade show, and half the outfits (startups) I talked to wanted to be bought out by Yahoo. Money talks; and right now she has gob loads of it that'll give her a lot of rope.

FD3SA 12y ago
" De Castro would leave the company in January 2014. For about 15 months of work, he would be paid $109 million." Costly mistakes.

leoc 12y ago

"But in Silicon Valley, the big money, and most of the prestige, is in making cool products. This is partly because product businesses, based on technology, are easier to scale than content ones, which require more human labor. It also reflects a cultural bias. The Valley’s greatest companies, from Hewlett-Packard onward, have been built around technological ingenuity. Tech executives know how to hire engineers and designers; they’re less adroit at recruiting editors or producers. When Loeb joined the Yahoo board, he recruited Michael J. Wolf, the former president of MTV, and the two consulted the noted venture capitalist Marc Andreessen about who should become the next C.E.O. of Yahoo. Andreessen made the case for a product executive." This seems to be missing part of the story. Didn't Yahoo! previously try hard to reinvent itself as primarily a "content" business under a CEO recruited from Hollywood, Terry Semel? IIRC it was Yahoo! failure to thrive using that strategy that got it into (relative) trouble in the first place.

bane 12y ago

The difference is that Jobs was an asshole, everything I've ever heard about Mayer is that she's probably a psychopath. My guess is that she was able to cover it up well at Google by burying everybody in data-driven decision making processes and working hard. But a data-driven decision making process about creative stuff is precisely the kind of approach an emotionally disconnected person would use as a tool to do their job. She was a long-shot try for CEO and has done some good things. But it may be time for her to move on. My sympathies for whatever group ends up with her in charge next.

phaus 12y ago
>The difference is that Jobs was an asshole, everything I've ever heard about Mayer is that she's probably a psychopath. Replying to an email with a smiley emoticon because you ruined someone's career when all the person did was exactly what their fucking job expects them to do is kind of a psychopathic thing to do. Also, starting and running a wage-fixing ring that inflicts the most damage upon those upon which you rely the most to make you wealthy is also kind of a psychopathic thing to do.
- PhantomGremlin 12y ago
  You're quite right. Steve Jobs was both an asshole and a psychopath. Still, he was one hell of a visionary.

deleted 12y ago

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bsg75 12y ago

> One of the Yahoo board’s hesitations upon hiring Mayer was her relative lack of experience as a manager. Something executives seem to not be able to understand: Experience counts. Its one thing to ride the wave of success when you are in at the beginning. Its something entirely more difficult to right a large, floundering ship when you have never actually been captain.

gcb0 12y ago

Article is about the opinions of a guy whose job is to "link CEOs and investors", whatever that job is called. from a newspaper Meyer stole the most well know tech editor. from a writter that found a lame excuse to write 'jobs' on the headline, knowing the gang here would eat up anything with that on the title.

harmonicon 12y ago

The story is told from a very critical angle and I wonder if there are another less the-sky-is-falling side. On the other hand, I did not think yahoo.com got better (yes i am a frequent user): - Yahoo mail actually got worse. 2 Years ago the UI looked bad and straight out of 1990s, but at least it worked reliably and efficiently as a junk email address. In the 2 year since it got a modern makeover and looked better but still very yahoo-y and not good. However the UX design became more complex and more of a hassle to use. Meanwhile the speed and performance has really gone down, presumably due all the Javascript involved in the make over. The worst problem is mail outage. Login issues and mail outage started to happen much more frequently. It was a stable product at least, now it's just bad. I stopped using that address. -Many changes has been made to Yahoo home pages but one would be hard pressed to find users that unequivocally liked the changes. It is still churning more of the low quality, info lacking and grammar error strewn articles. The only fun(if you are that bored) is in the comment section. Lastly one has to wonder about her frequent tardiness. I am all for gender equality in the workplace but one has to wonder that trying to turn a massive company around as its CEO during and immediately after pregnancy is a good idea.

billsossoon 12y ago
Yeah, while I agree with many of the points made in the article, I wondered why the article has such a one-sided narrative and brutally critical tone. Do the activist investors have enough power to get this piece pushed forward?
astrange 12y ago
> Lastly one has to wonder about her frequent tardiness. I am all for gender equality in the workplace but one has to wonder that trying to turn a massive company around as its CEO during and immediately after pregnancy is a good idea. Didn't she have an in-office nanny taking care of everything? It's more likely she's losing her mind from that 4 hours of sleep. Of course, that is one great reason to take maternity/paternity leave.
sytelus 12y ago
There are few good changes from Yahoo lately. For example, Flickr is now giving 1TB space. The team seem to write cool technical things on their blog. Yahoo Mail Plus version is essentially free now. It was refreshing to see so many new iOS apps from Yahoo but I haven't used them so don't know their usefulness. Before Mayer, there was hardly anything at all coming out from Yahoo.

CmonDev 12y ago

"Big Four: Apple, Facebook, Amazon or Google" - he made 9 mistakes in the word 'Microsoft'.

tacree 12y ago

Just a quick glance at the way she has butchered the sports section of the website should be enough to condemn her. It went from being the best on the net to being too complicated, full of mistakes and unreadable. It forced me to go to ESPN (which I also don't like). You don't make changes just to make changes. Without a clear sense of purpose and clear vision of what you're doing and who you're aiming at, a CEO is a failure.