
Dear Marissa: Think Different - spsaaibi
http://500hats.com/pink-is-the-new-purple
======
ericabiz
As one of the few women on Hacker News, I'm going to come right out and say
it: I think this is a _fantastic_ idea, and Marissa Mayer would do well to
take it to heart.

Imagine if Yahoo made a serious bid for Pinterest, and then Marissa went
really crazy and made their homepage into a Pinterest-like site. Not only
would it cause a great sensational uproar in the press, but it would make
Yahoo a serious contender again.

P.S. Not offended by the fact that Dave said "pink".

~~~
dave1619
Yahoo acquiring Pinterest would definitely be interesting. I don't know though
how affordable Pinterest would be.

~~~
podperson
Step 1: acquire Pinterest.

Step 2: add no new features to it for five years, but force users to create a
yahoo account to use it.

Step 3: fire all the developers.

Step 4: ???

Step 5: profit.

Oh wait, that was Flickr.

~~~
noidexe
Oh, I thought you meant Geocities.

------
nostromo
My favorite success story of marketing towards the under-served gender is
Dyson.

Before Dyson vacuums were marketed to women exclusively. If you suggested
marketing a vacuum to men before Dyson, you'd be laughed out of the boardroom.
Dyson threw that all out the window and entered the market with a vacuum that
actually looks like a sci-fi weapon, and to great success.

~~~
alanh
Says the guy with a username of the ship in the sci-fi movie _Alien_! (Just
observing a humorous juxtaposition.)

Anyway, your point is noted. One of my favorite tweets ever was one by Amy
Jane Gruber, to the effect of: Boys say “If we get a dog, I’ll clean up after
it,” and men say, “If we get a Dyson, I’ll vacuum!”

------
realize
"What if Marissa made it known that Yahoo would be the best tech company in
the world for hiring women execs, putting women in leadership positions, and
advancing the opportunities for women in the workplace (as Sheryl Sandberg is
so well-known for promoting at Facebook)?"

Sounds discriminatory to me.

~~~
Cushman
This presupposes that the industry-wide preference for male employees is _not_
discriminatory, which scarcely goes without saying.

~~~
oh_sigh
You suppose that there is an "industry-wide preference for male employees".

Just like I suppose there is an "industry-wide preference for female
employees" in K-6 education.

~~~
Cushman
That there is a preference is a statistical fact; the controversial question
is what is the cause for the preference.

Incidentally, even if we were to pretend to compare the industries of
"technology" and "education of children between the ages of 6 and 12", your
quip fails the test: A majority of teachers may be female, but there is no
such majority among those in "leadership positions" (administrators,
principals and superintendants).

~~~
cellularmitosis
I think I misunderstand what you mean by "preference".

Take as example a company where 90% of the programmer applicants are male. As
I understand the word "preference", a resulting workforce of 90% males would
indicate no preference one way or the other (assuming the men and women were
equally skilled).

Further, a 91% male workforce would be evidence of a male preference, while an
89% male workforce evidence of a female preference.

Is that what you mean by "preference"?

~~~
Cushman
Yeah, obviously a lot of people misunderstood that. I apologize for the
confusion.

I was using "preference" in a more generic complex-systems-analysis sense. We
begin with a potential workforce, at birth, of half men and half women. Over
time, the further you go into the industry, you see more and more men and
fewer and fewer women. The women are being rejected, the men are being
selected for, this demonstrates a preference. Again, not imputing any
consciousness here, it's just what the system is doing.

The claim we are asked to accept is that this reflects a something real and
measurable, such as my transportation preference for cars over horses, rather
than something subjective and arbitrary, such as my berry preference for
blueberries over strawberries.

------
djt
Err, Yahoo is making less profit, but it's still making $1B profit on the
bottom line last year. Why is everyone acting like it's on it's beyond
redemption?

Sure, Yahoo and Microsoft are boring, but they're still profitable.

[http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/financials...](http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/financials/financials.asp?ticker=YHOO:US)

~~~
drgath
> Why is everyone acting like it's on it's beyond redemption?

Because the only things that get attention in SV are products with growth.
Yahoo is a very profitable company and has billions in the bank, so it'll be
around for a while, with or without a rebound.

~~~
nkohari
Who cares about attention in the valley when you're netting $1B?

------
mikeleeorg
Just an FYI: two of Yahoo's stronger properties are Yahoo Sports and Yahoo
Finance, both of whom haven't historically had a large female audience. The
other properties that might attract a female audience haven't done as well.

That's not to say Yahoo can't sell these and purchase the properties Dave
mentions, of course. It's just that Yahoo currently doesn't have a core
strength in targeting women and would need to reach out a lot to build that
competency.

~~~
dtran
I remember when I interned at Yahoo! several years ago, Yahoo! Shine, their
women's lifestyle portal, had a fairly large audience. According to Alexa,
it's still one of their larger web properties:

    
    
      mail.yahoo.com 48.76%
      login.yahoo.com 29.14%
      yahoo.com 24.39%
      search.yahoo.com 19.22%
      answers.yahoo.com 16.42%
      news.yahoo.com 15.16%
      sports.yahoo.com 6.35%
      finance.yahoo.com 6.25%
      omg.yahoo.com 5.86%
      my.yahoo.com 4.71%
      in.yahoo.com 4.67%
      tw.yahoo.com 3.39%
      docs.yahoo.com 2.78%
      movies.yahoo.com 2.75%
      shine.yahoo.com 2.59%

~~~
Terretta
<http://omg.yahoo.com> is the more relevant "portal" from that list, and
<http://answers.yahoo.com> is the kind of demographic very few of us HN users
rub shoulders with.

~~~
mikeleeorg
Just for curiosity's sake, I looked up Quantcast's demographic metrics on
Yahoo! Answers:

[http://www.quantcast.com/answers.yahoo.com#!demo&anchor=...](http://www.quantcast.com/answers.yahoo.com#!demo&anchor=panel-
GENDER)

Female: 53%

Male: 47%

And interestingly, Yahoo.com's demographics are:

[http://www.quantcast.com/yahoo.com#!demo&anchor=panel-
GE...](http://www.quantcast.com/yahoo.com#!demo&anchor=panel-GENDER)

Female: 52%

Male: 48%

Whereas Google is:

[http://www.quantcast.com/google.com#!demo&anchor=panel-G...](http://www.quantcast.com/google.com#!demo&anchor=panel-
GENDER)

Female: 50%

Male: 50%

Looks like Yahoo does indeed have a slight skew towards a female audience.
Dave may be on to something.

------
kyro
Dave, just curious, did you properly capitalize and punctuate this or did
Svbtle do that for you?

~~~
davemc500hats
nope that was me, not svbtle. just occasional change of pace, maybe give the
trolls less to blather on about (altho seems like i got plenty of shit for
using too much pink).

personally, i think proper grammar is mostly a waste of time... as has
happened previously, its use will be eroded by pop culture and mainstream
behaviors rather quickly.

also, for some reason i think capitalizing the word 'I' is somehow king of
arrogant. don't know why that is, but just seems that way to me.

~~~
patio11
On the spectrum of adherence to an arbitrary standard of Proper Written
English (TM), there's counter-signaling, a great region of "You just can't
write well", a region where one writes very well with errors, and then things
bifurcate at the top where a) you write perfectly like the New York Times and
this signals status or b) you use non-standard grammar, and that is OK,
because you're a better writer than any English teacher and everyone knows it.

Just a bit of literary criticism here, take it or leave it: when I read the
classic articles on your site, with the ransom-note formatting, the
presentation often overwhelmed the content. I mean, anyone drawing _that_ much
attention to their rejection of social norms must mean that to be the primary
purpose of the performance. I often slogged through -- and it was a slog -- to
get at the meaty arguments hidden somewhere in the pink/green/etc text.

I'm totally on-board with grammar being essentially arbitrary and fluid (this
is a True Statement about material reality), but given that this is true, the
Dave-maximizing approach is probably not to say "stufz da grammerz!!1" but
rather to write well-enough-to-be-understood and not care about the occasional
transgression or three.

(There are other writers who make the stylistic choice to be near-perfect
paragons of English grammar -- that totally works, too. It communicates
something a wee bit different, for example that one is really going for
university professor levels of erudition, but that works for some people. PG's
writing style, for example, causes me to pull out a dictionary if I see a
spelling mistake because it means there is probably a word I haven't learned
yet. On the other hand, I generally tend to aim for about a 98% on the
mechanics of standard English, don't sweat the last 2% all that much, and
frequently break the rules for comedic/dramatic/etc effect. It's much more
noticeable when you aren't breaking the rules all of the time.)

This is entirely compatible with continuing the iconoclastic Dave McClure
branding, because that branding is a consequence of thinking fairly radical
thoughts and articulating them, rather than being entirely a consequence of
the packaging of thoughts that are under the surface exactly the same as every
other VC's.

------
gojomo
Interesting thoughts. Creepy stalker collage!

------
sp332
This is an interesting idea, but the title is dangerous. As has been pointed
out a lot lately, making something "pink" doesn't mean you can sell it to
women. :)

Edit: Just noticed that Gina Trapani helped forge the headline... It's
probably OK ;)

~~~
modarts
I don't think that Dave was going for a literal interpretation.

~~~
sp332
You're probably right, but it worries me a bit after Nokia sent women tech
journalists a box with pink lipstick as part of an ad campaign for the pink
Lumia 900. As well as all of this:
[http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/03/does-this-
smartphone-...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/03/does-this-smartphone-
make-me-look-stupid-meet-the-ladyphones/)

------
halayli
I don't think a gender focus, or discrimination should be part of any
strategy.

~~~
podperson
Depends on whether you differentiate between implicit gender focus (we mostly
hire guys, guys make most of our decisions, but we don't FOCUS on guys) and
expliciy (we need to appeal more to guys).

It seems to me that it's almost always better for a strategy to be explicit
rather than implicit. Plenty of successful strategies are gender focused, so
you're opting for some kind of ideological purity over possible success.

But I tend to agree with you on discrimination in the bad sense
("discrimination" just means telling things apart, but I assume you mean
"bias").

------
toomuchcoffee
_What if Yahoo went back to its vision for media and entertainment,_

i.e. what a lot of people think has been wrong with Yahoo for a long, long
time now.

------
joshfraser
I think this is a huge opportunity for companies in general. Let's face it,
most companies are run by dudes and we're largely clueless when it comes to
understanding what women want. I think there's a massive opportunity for any
company that chooses to focus on women right now, whether that's Yahoo or a
brand new startup.

~~~
andymurd
I agree that women are under-served by technology companies, but I'd argue
that it's vital to break the demographic down to actually provide anything
useful.

Tech firms don't build sites with the stated aim of being "for men", they make
sites that provide finance news, sports scores, gadget reviews etc. To redress
the gender bias, we should be looking to find what the
smart/wealthy/interesting women are doing and build sites that they love.

------
Tycho
The thing is, Yahoo is a really good portal site. Probably the best. It turns
out that being a portal isn't as lucrative as people thought it would be 15
years ago, but there's definitely still a demand for them. Yahoo just need to
focus on being the beat portal on the internet, IMO. It's a sound long term
strategy.

------
lwhi
IMO this isn't doing much to advance the cause of women in technology.

Suggesting the highest ranking woman CEO in the tech sector should concentrate
on serving women, is slightly sexist.

Both men and women use Yahoo. Demographic splits aren't necessarily as gender
specific as the author assumes. We're not living in the 1950s.

------
kmfrk
Thoughtful, inspiring article.

What's up with the spelling of the last line, though?

------
_pius
This would almost certainly be a winning strategy.

------
mkramlich
I'm not a woman, but I agree this is a great strategy to consider. I think one
of the reasons that both Pinterest and Instagram caught so many of the startup
& wantrepreneur crowd off-guard was that their success, to a large extent,
came from a predominantly female user base, and typically feminine interests.
Google, for all it's strengths, is mostly run by intelligent but geeky male
nerds. Same for Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, etc. I don't think a "pink strategy"
alone will save Yahoo -- I do think they need to import more of the cultural
strengths of Google, Apple and Facebook -- but it can be a competitive
advantage.

There's one potential negative to the "pink" strategy, however. Regardless of
how some might like it to be, the overwhelming majority of hackers do seem to
be male. If you evolve your company to be female oriented in their product
suite, you may make the company less attractive when recruiting and retaining
male hackers. And ultimately having talent on staff is the bottleneck. But
there may be a way to pursue a balanced path which gives the advantages of a
pink strategy while not being too bitten by the negative, so you come out
ahead.

I also wish they'd drop the "!". Just "Yahoo". Much cleaner.

~~~
evolve2k
'If you evolve your company to be female oriented in their product suite, you
may make the company less attractive when recruiting and retaining male
hackers.'

I think those currently working at companies like Pinterest and Etsy would
disagree.

I greatly admire those companies and as a developer seek teams with a good
culture that grt stuff done anf create great products. I would argue that the
market focus of a company is not the key determinate in attracting developers
but rather your reputation for valuing devs and being a great place to work.

