
Advice for Marissa Mayer from an ex-Yahoo - sriramk
http://sriramk.com/unsolicitedyahoo.html
======
nhashem
This is actually reads like a pretty good list of suggestions for any new
leadership team, not just Yahoo. Fire all the "architects" who get paid
$250,000 to make gigantic UML diagrams and can't actually code. Pay top dollar
to retain and recruit talent. Don't spend a whole lot of time with some broad
marketing message that everyone will immediately denounce as meaningless fluff
anyway. Stop re-inventing the wheel. Form great teams and empower them to make
great products.

I'd just like to add that I think it's important for Mayer or anyone else in
this position to do this _quickly._ If you're two months into the job and
you're still having "introductory meetings" with all the departments and
putting together "the vision," then by the time you actually start to make any
changes, it'll be that much harder because of how much your products have
declined and your talent has hemorrhaged in the meantime.

~~~
tptacek
Do companies still have absurdly well-compensated "architects" who do nothing
but diagram?

~~~
jordanb
Given how much money IBM still makes off of Rational, clearly somebody's
writing UML. I imagine that all that UML's being written at places like banks,
defense contractors, three letter agencies...

If there really are people at an internet company like Yahoo doing that, well,
wow. I don't see how a company where such a thing even was allowed to develop
could have a future in this industry.

~~~
larsberg
Having worked with some of the first few Rational employees, my understanding
is that Rational was/is very good at sales through their consulting arms
(hired a consultant? congrats, you just paid a member of their sales force to
wear your employee badge!). They don't have particularly great usage numbers
on those sold products, though.

That said, there are some very useful UML diagrams for non-architect-titled
folks. For people stuck using class-heavy systems (some of which are out of
their control), the UML Sequence Diagram is both useful and a very compact way
to explain "what happens when the user goes <poke>":
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_diagram>

~~~
bwooce
Sequence diagrams existed before UML and for getting stuff done, and being
able to maintain it, I prefer <http://www.websequencediagrams.com/>

I just paste the diagram description into my documents as "hidden text", and
everyones happy.

~~~
signa11
or use mscgen (<http://www.mcternan.me.uk/mscgen/>)

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

[1] <http://www.amazon.com/dp/0547737394>

~~~
ajays
Unfortunately, the male-dominated tech world is pretty chauvinistic when it
comes to women in positions of power. If she's headstrong and takes no BS,
then she must be sleeping with someone in a position of power. Now, I know
that MM was LP's GF at one time; but that doesn't mean she's an incompetent
person. If it was a guy, people would be crooning, "ooh! he's such a ballsy
guy!".

~~~
philwelch
I don't think the "male-dominated tech world" would really respect a man for
sleeping with the co-founder either.

~~~
ajays
Really? In my experience (and I'm being honest here), his colleagues would be
high-fiving him for "bangin' the boss". I apologize for the crudeness, but I
really think this would be the case.

~~~
philwelch
I was under the impression that the beneficiaries of nepotism are resented
regardless of their sex.

~~~
irahul
> I don't think the "male-dominated tech world" would really respect a man for
> sleeping with the co-founder either.

I won't have a problem with it unless that bestows special privileges.

> I was under the impression that the beneficiaries of nepotism are resented
> regardless of their sex. reply

They are resented, or at least they should be. If Marissa Mayer got away with
being incompetent or being an asshole, she should be resented. Now she might
be very competent(I have seen references to her papers), but that's no excuse
for getting the extra mileage due to being in relationship with the co-
founder.

~~~
kamaal
Imagine this scenario in a office space.

    
    
        X makes mistakes, but still gets promoted/awarded/recognized
        Y makes mistakes, sometimes good work too but is always reprimanded. Never promoted/rewarded/awarded/recognized.
    

If this happens enough number of times, this smells of a classic case of
nepotism. Now imagine if X is a women, Y is a man and the boss is man.

Can you imagine the rumors that would float around in this case?

------
noahm
One additional thing I'd like to see: Really strongly encourage dogfooding.
One of the most depressing things I experienced while working at Yahoo was
when I'd look around and see all my co-workers using competing email, search,
maps, etc products. People looked at me funny when they noticed that I had
taken some time to configure my.yahoo.com and set it as my home page. There
was no sense of ownership of the various products, so nobody really cared
whether or not they worked well.

On a related note, on the rare occasion when somebody did try using yahoo
properties and they found an issue or wanted to suggest a feature (e.g. more
powerful mail filtering capabilities), the common refrain that typically came
back was "You're not the target audience." It was as if yahoo only wanted to
cater to the most basic use case. Yahoo needs hiding behind this "not the
target audience" crap and challenge itself to make a product that is both
powerful enough to appeal to sophisticated users and simple enough to appeal
to users with more basic needs. It can be done, and I'd point to Google and
Apple as examples of companies that are enjoying much success right now
because they've seen the value of it.

------
jph
Build the Yahoo phone.

Mayer has the product experience to do it.

What do people do most with their phones? Email, messaging, photos, news,
small games. Yahoo is strong in every one of these and more established across
the board than all its competitors.

She can leverage Android/Ubuntu because she knows plenty of Unix developers,
Amazon is paving the way for non-Google Android products, and the new Ubuntu
mobile OS is pretty amazing.

She can leverage Flickr. This is Yahoo's golden answer to Facebook's
Instagram, a $1b equal. Imagine a Yahoo phone with built-in Flickr upload and
sharing.

She can leverage Yahoo media content alliances to provide a great content-
driven phone, with news, music, and movies. I daresay Yahoo can pull ahead of
even Apple and Amazon on these fronts.

She can leverage social networking: Yahoo Instant Messenger is a leader, Games
is a leader, and Social Bar had 90m users and was a significant leader of
Facebook’s Open Graph.

She can leverage Yahoo mail. Yahoo is still a huge player in email, ahead of
Gmail in terms of users and IMHO interface as well.

Manufacturing and distribution can be outsourced. HTC is great for this. Start
with a small phone, 3G, for mom and pop, and a $99 price point. Compete with
the iPhone on price, and with Google phones on content. Subsidize like Amazon
Prime.

Most important, Yahoo needs a rallying point-- a bold vision , something
amazing to attract top developers and bring together diverse properties. The
best way to do this is to go big.

If you're a mobile developer, who do you look to for leadership right now?
Google/Android is splintered, Microsoft/Nokia seems DOA, Apple/iOS is walled,
Facebook is admittedly behind, and Amazon is just gearing up.

Mobile is where all the action is happening, and it's where all these big
competitors are going as fast as they can-- yet none has the mobile space well
entrenched yet. This is Yahoo's perfect opportunity to bring it all together,
to hire and inspire developers, and build a world-class integrated product. I
believe the board knows this.

Yahoo has all the pieces to make this a home run. What they've been missing is
the product leader. My money's on Mayer to do this.

~~~
untog
"Imagine a phone with built-in Flickr". Right, I'm imagining it.. what's good
about it? Why does anyone want that over Facebook integration?

You make good points about Yahoo's content, but they should work on
integrating that content with someone else's device.

~~~
jph
Flickr is stronger IMHO at searching, sorting, browsing, organizing,
collaging, archiving, and sharing with loosely-connected groups. The HTML5
uploader is good and the Justified layout with thumbnail commenting is good
too (similar to Google photo results, Metro, skydrive).

Will you do all these on your phone? I think yes, especially given the
colossal success of Pinterest. People seem to love organizing, sorting,
tagging, and collaging. And with the Yahoo phone, photos can be connected with
your messenger, calendar, games, and email.

~~~
untog
Am I going to search, sort, organise, collage and archive on my phone? They
don't sound like everyday activities to me. The uploader and justified view
wouldn't even apply to a mobile platform.

------
edwinnathaniel
Sounds like a step-by-step legacy code refactoring from an engineer :).

I'm sure in the real-world, executing any of the advises will have unknown
repercussion.

1\. It's hard to fire 10k people _correctly_ and expect things to still work
without crushing morale (you may fired potential heroes as well), or perhaps
even being poked by government over job losses?

2\. I'm not sure a 23 years old hot-shot developer exist. No way Jose. There
may be some smart and talented 23 year old, but they're by no mean "hot shot
developer". You may get a better result by hiring a 26-32 years old
developers. But not fresh grad. Unless your point being to work them like
there is no tomorrow, a typical scenario in Silicon Valley startups. Or:
today's mess will become tomorrow problem, so you're back to square one with
Yahoo! sooner or later => uncontrolled legacy codebases. [Nobody will come out
and say that Yahoo has one of the best codebase out there, even Flickr is
notoriously bad].

3\. Rounding up the smartest people in the planet is hard to begin with,
making sure they all can work together without brushing ego is even harder
(especially when everyone wants to leave their mark), finally, expecting
rainbows and unicorns to show up is magical I would say.

5\. Yeah, whatever, BYOD, use standard toolset, sure. If sys-admin needs their
BB, be it.

The rest are generics and nothing to complain/argue/discuss.

Yahoo! should definitely shed its fat: people and products, no doubt. Next
they should think hard on what needs to be done with the successful products
they have left. Once stabilization and culture are in place, then you can
start doing something more extreme. Rocking the almost tumbling boat seems to
be a recipe to drown everybody.

------
chrisacky
I know so much of this is a tongue-in-cheek suggestion.

It's one of those, "yeah I meant that" if it turns out right, and, "no, I'm
clearly enacting poe's law", when it's wrong scenarios. "I'm clearly joking
_wink_ ".

Anyway, you could have reduced all of those ten points in to a single bullet
point and I still would have upvoted this story.

> Make a huge sign with the phrase ‘the premier digital media company’. Then
> make a video of you running a bulldozer over it crushing that sign. No one
> knows what that phrase means. Come up with a goal that people can actually
> visualize.

This is sooo true. Marissa needs to grab this opportunity and ride the Yahoo-
bull-horn for all it's worth. Ignore investors... Reinvent the entire company
that you have stepped up to take charge of.

Don't do what BB's spineless CEO did, and start throwing out quotes like "not
much has to change".
[http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-01-22/Blackberr...](http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-01-22/Blackberry-
RIM/52748290/1)

Marissa needs to change _everyones_ perspective of what Yahoo was, and what it
can be.

Yahoo are still on my shitlist from the whole FB debacle. Mayer has already
shown that Yahoo can still be "cool", so reinvent everything that once was the
old Yahoo.

</end major rant>

~~~
trotsky
Is the board changing? Not that I've heard. New CEO's are still beholden to
their boards, and from what I can see the yahoo board is out to lunch.

~~~
yuhong
It changed when Thompson was forced out.

------
martythemaniak
Seems like solid advice. I have an honest question, even if it's a quote from
Office Space: What is it that Yahoo actually does? I honestly don't know.

I know they have a random collection of services (news, photos, mail), but if
they were to disappear tomorrow, would anyone really care?

~~~
rokhayakebe
You, most of the HN crowd, and myself live in a world removed from the real
world. I work for a company which sells fancy business cards and print
products to dentists who easily spend more than $1000 on one order, and you
know what? They usually have an earthlink.net, aol.com, or yahoo.com email
address, and nothing in this world is going to make them change that. I tell
some customers we can set them up with your own business email FOR FREE, and
they simply politely refuse. Yahoo has the eyeballs of people who actually
spend money, not people like myself who want free email and who are trained to
never click on an ad.

~~~
Maro
I'm now part of a team working on a new product that just launched (not
Google).

Every morning I go in and look at the dashboard, which shows the email
addresses of the last 10 new signups. About 6-7 is gmail, 1 yahoo, 1 hotmail.
There's usually 1 that's a custom email like from an unknown domain.

I don't have hard stats as I don't have access to the user db, but I've been
playing this game for 1+ month every morning, and it's the same pattern all
the time. This is for early adopters.

Also, from personal experience, most of my acquaintances, whether technical or
not, are migrating from yahoo/hotmail to gmail. It's pretty common for me to
have to remove somebody's old yahoo email address from my contacts because
they finally got a gmail address.

~~~
ianbishop
Generally early adopters tend to be tech people though, which would explain
the gmail addresses.

~~~
Maro
I know, that's why I wrote "This is for early adopters."

~~~
ianbishop
Sorry, I misread that you concluded that people must be moving away from
hotmail/yahoo from this analysis.

------
aaronbrethorst
I know you're not joking on this, but _seriously?_

"No more BlackBerries as the official devices at Yahoo."

How is this even possible in 2012?

~~~
mrtron
Oh come on - blackberries are a reasonable work phone even still. It handles
corporate email and calendars quite well. Works great while travelling. More
durable and cheaper than iphones/droids.

As a personal phone they are obviously well behind the curve.

~~~
eitally
For frequent travelers, the several day battery life on BBs is by itself
compelling.

~~~
grannyg00se
I love my 9900, but I have to admit there's no way I'm getting even a single
full day out of it with a medium (in my opinion) level of usage.

~~~
corin_
Ditto - I'm incredibly happy with it, but pretty much any day I'm out of the
office there's a good chance that by the time I'm heading home I'll have to
call a taxi ahead of time because I know by the time I want it my phone will
be asleep.

It's my biggest issue with BBs now, especially when you think about how great
they used to be with battery life.

~~~
gaius
Switch back to 2G. You get all the important bits of the BB experience (email,
messaging) and easily 3 days battery life, compared to 1 day on 3G doing the
same things. I'm a happy 9900 owner.

~~~
corin_
Other than when I want to browse a few web pages without waiting ages, when I
switch on 3G or wifi, I'm on 2G all the time. It does help a huge amount, but
still not enough.

Admittedly I have a twitter client that gets updates regularly, plus three-
digit emails a day, plus usually a fair few calls... but still I feel it
should last way longer.

~~~
mrtron
I find bluetooth the biggest battery hog - I only switch it on to tether. Have
you tried that?

~~~
corin_
Stopped using a bt headset when I found that too, so yeah I have :(

------
kyro
A lot of you keep asking what it is that Yahoo! does, which is a valid
question, but you're forgetting about what they own and what they _could_ do
with their properties.

If there's one word that ties all of their more popular services together,
it's "social". Tons of people still use Yahoo! Games, Y! Messenger, Flickr,
Del.icio.us – all incredibly social communities. And Yahoo! Mail is still
widely used.

I think their issue is that they lack an underlying framework from which these
services should be stemming. With proper structure and integration, they could
really give Google and Facebook a run for their money. Google has been trying
for ages to utilize their Gmail userbase to bolster their social plays, and
it's worked with varying success. Yahoo! has both the email userbase _and_ the
social communities; they just need to find a way to tie the two together into
a cohesive social platform.

~~~
swivelmaster
If only they knew what they had several years ago! They had IMO the biggest,
most comprehensive 'profiles' service on the web, pre-Myspace/Facebook, and
they blew it by wiping all profiles and migrating to Yahoo 360 (or whatever it
was called), then called that off, wiped the profiles again, and have a new
thing called 'Pulse' that nobody uses.

~~~
inerte
Pulse was replaced. There's a newer Yahoo! Profile (I work close to the guys
responsible for it).

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

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

~~~
plinkplonk
“We ship code, not slide decks”

Thousands[1] of middle managers throughout the organization would be out on
the street -which is probably a good thing?

[1] At one point Yahoo had 300+ VPs (source
[http://allthingsd.com/20070928/day-73-the-sleepy-attack-
of-t...](http://allthingsd.com/20070928/day-73-the-sleepy-attack-of-the-yahoo-
vice-presidents/)) , so _probably_ not an exaggeration

------
packetslave
"No more pet projects to reinvent what everyone else in the open source world
has already built. Fire anyone who uses the words ‘Yahoo scale’ to debate this
with you."

I seriously doubt this is going to come naturally to an ex-Googler.

~~~
altcognito
I didn't really like this one. Oh and hey, don't do anything different. You
might as well say "Don't create products that behave significantly different
than your competition."

They ought to look at some open source projects and find ways to improve and
monetize them. Lucene (bah to solr) might be interesting.

------
jroseattle
Reading this sort of reminds of that moment detailed in the Jobs biography.

Upon Jobs return to Apple, he asks the product managers to present their
current product offerings. They're detailing all sorts of minutiae, differing
versions to address different sub-markets, yada yada yada. Jobs waves them all
off, draws a grid and says they need four products.

It certainly seems that Yahoo could use a moment like that.

------
potch
My advice? Take the layers of middle managers who have been there for years,
give them their gumball machines or espresso makers, offer to buy out a
percentage of their long-underwater options, and make them promise to go work
somewhere else.

The inertia is so ingrown there the only way is to cut out the "lifers" who
were given their incentives in equity and clog up the system with incompetence
or resentment.

------
jetti
Another idea would to stop paying sub-par writers to write the articles that
appear on the front page. I can't take a company seriously that employs
writers who only get read to see what other facts they get wrong or how badly
an article is written (I'm looking at you Chris Chase).

Fixing the quality of the articles would surely have me coming back for more.
I remember reading a fitness article about "5 myths of fitness" or some stupid
title like that. One of them was that "muscle weighs more than fat". They said
it was a myth because a pound of muscle weighs the same as a pound of fat...I
was just mortified that it was allowed to be published on a site like Yahoo.
By that logic bricks and feathers weigh the same because a pound of bricks is
the same as a pound of feathers...

------
ksolanki
I really like and admire #2 _Spend $$ in finding great talent all the way down
to the front-line product managers and engineers. This will often mean paying
some hot-shot 23-year old coder 5x more than what she would make at Google or
Facebook and beating ridiculous counter offers. Do it. That one great engineer
will be worth more than the five engineers you have on the payroll today._

However I do not know if there is a easy way (a "litmus paper") that could say
_she is 5x better_. In all seriousness, I'd like to ask how to make such a
determination. I think this advise looks good on paper, but really really hard
to implement.

~~~
david_shaw
_> However I do not know if there is a easy way (a "litmus paper") that could
say she is 5x better._

Quantitatively? Not my area, but you could boil it down to something as simple
as "number of features shipped in a quarter." However, I think the real value
comes in when you're talking about _non_ quantitative analysis of these
coders.

What _awesome,_ innovative products has Yahoo! shipped in the last year?[1]
What are they doing to make Yahoo! Mail better than GMail, or to make people
stop laughing if you give them an @yahoo.com address? No, registering
ymail.com does not count for much.

A single, highly productive programmer that's shipping useful features,
inspiring ingenuity within the team, giving back to open source communities
and, at a high enough level, giving interesting tech talks at
conferences/hackerspaces/etc, can _easily_ be as __useful __to the company as
five average coders. Maybe not 5x as productive, depending on measurement, but
definitely that much more useful. Rock stars, when they aren't full of
themselves or throwing that term around like little kids, really _can_ make
giant differences.

Think about it - would you trade five of your company's management team for
Paul Graham? I sure as hell would.

[1] Okay, Hadoop is pretty cool, but even that is based off of Google
research.

------
CoolGuySteve
I worked on video at Apple. While there, I once got a message on LinkedIn from
some recruiter for Yahoo's TV widgets.

Here's the thing: That Yahoo even has TV widgets is why I will never talk to
them.

If Mayer can shut all that bullshit down and actually do a small handful of
things well enough for people like me to consider talking to them, I think
she'll be one of the greatest CEOs in technology.

(I realize this post is embarrassingly self aggrandizing, but seriously, what
kind of self-respecting engineer works for Yahoo?)

~~~
MatthewPhillips
> I realize this post is embarrassingly self aggrandizing,

Yes it is.

> what kind of self-respecting engineer works for Yahoo?

The kind that created Hadoop, YUI, YQL, Yahoo BOSS, etc. etc. I'd be pretty
proud to work on any of those projects.

~~~
CoolGuySteve
I completely agree with you. Those are all very fine and nice technologies.

But I'm not a back-end engineer and I haven't dealt with web technologies at
all. The only one of those things I've ever considered using is Hadoop and I
didn't even know Yahoo had anything to do with it. Needless to say, none of
those technologies are things I would be working on.

I typically write embedded and high performance C/C++ applications and I
specialized in video at the time. I'm not going to jump ship for a position in
some also-ran fiefdom in a directionless corporation writing embedded JVM UIs.

And that's the problem. Most people who are good in that niche aren't going to
risk it with Yahoo vs some other firm or by starting their own company. Simply
put: Yahoo can't win at that game because they can't attract the talent. So
why do they even play at it?

~~~
MatthewPhillips
First it was no "self-respecting engineer", now it's "embedded C/C++
applications", well I guess Yahoo just isn't for you dude. No biggie. Yahoo
has had some great engineering talent well past it's time on top, and still
even retains some today. If Facebook can attract talent to work on "Timeline"
and "App Center" then I'm pretty sure Yahoo just needs to fix the fucking
poisonous culture.

~~~
CoolGuySteve
That's where the 'self-respecting' part comes in. If these engineers are so
good, why don't they jump ship to Facebook or Google or JP Morgan? There's no
way the culture could be any more poisonous, even in investment banking.

The only respectable answer I've heard concerns loss of security of changing
jobs when you already own a house in the valley, send your kids to private
school, lease a Lexus, etc.

~~~
petitmiam
Maybe they enjoy the work they do, despite the poisonous culture. If you put
time and effort into something and believe in it, then as a 'self-respecting'
person you probably wouldn't jump ship that easy.

YUI makes my life easier.

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

There's so much potential here. I'm still very excited to see what Yahoo will
become.

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

~~~
sriramk
I know of a 25 year old who got a 7-digit counter offer from Google when a
friend tried to recruit him so I was hoping the 23 year old example wasn't too
much hyperbole. Plus, the idea is to pay a big premium over what everyone else
pays anyway.

~~~
notJim
I mean, I would consider doubling or even 1.5ing a pretty big premium.

That's insane though. It's hard to imagine a single programmer being worth a
million dollars a year to a company.

~~~
patio11
_It's hard to imagine a single programmer being worth a million dollars a year
to a company._

AdWords is worth, round numbers because I'm lazy, $100 billion a year. One
million dollars is 10^-5 times AdWords. Want to make a guesstimate as to how
many engineers are associated with 10^-2 improvements in AdWords in a given
year?

------
sakopov
"Make a huge sign with the phrase ‘the premier digital media company’. Then
make a video of you running a bulldozer over it crushing that sign. No one
knows what that phrase means."

No one knows what that phrase means because no one knows what the hell Yahoo!
does anymore. Honestly, why does this company exist? What purpose do they
serve? What is their focus? Hire the brightest engineers to build what??
Yahoo! should have died a long time ago. It's just riding a dwindling wave of
its past glory.

~~~
pmarsh
But it's a profitable business, why should it have died?

~~~
aeturnum
If all you want from an investment, or a buisness partner, is a predictable
return, then that's fine. However, yahoo is in an industry experiencing
explosive growth and doesnt have a lot to show for it (lately).

Yahoo's history is riddled with failures to predict where things are going or
failure to react correctly to when they do see. Consider that Instagram has
taken off in an area Flickr has been in since before Instagram existed. The
list goes on.

People are frustrated when they see a buisness that has the money and
background to do great stuff and consistantly fails to deliver. There are many
mature tech buisnesses that deliver profits and new product successes (IBM,
Google, Intel, etc). Why invest with yahoo?

Put another way: if yahoo wants to coast on their current base, they should
stop trying to expand. Otherwise they need to start seeing some ROI.

------
teyc
Yahoo has fantastic loyal customers. It also has niche consumer businesses -
finance, weather, groups, mail. These are very big niches. However, precisely
because Yahoo is a conglomerate of diverse businesses, it has been difficult
to describe Yahoo. Yahoo is a portfolio company.

However, Yahoo isn't a credible platform company. Microsoft is. Google is.
Apple is.

While Yahoo open sources a lot of its internal components, heck, it was one of
the earliest adopters of OpenID - my StackOverflow account still uses my Yahoo
login - this is not the same as building a platform. Android is a platform.
Google apps is a platform. AWS is a platform. Even AdSesnse is a platform.
Twitter is a platform.

Here's my outline:

1\. Yahoo needs to protect their base. Customers might move away from Yahoo
mail when eventually people get their own domain names, or when they want to
edit documents online on Google Docs. Yahoo should court the small businesses
who already use Yahoo to spend more money with them.

2\. Yahoo needs to aggressive court developers to leverage Yahoo signins,
Yahoo mail to provide new services. If Yahoo would handle the payments, it
would be even better. A 30% cut would make Yahoo a great affiliate for many
devs trying to get traction.

3\. On the Ad front, there is much Yahoo can do to copy Google in terms of
display ad networks - once Yahoo has successfully courted smaller businesses.

------
bluesnowmonkey
> 8\. Make a table with the columns ‘Invest’, ‘Maintenance Mode’, ‘Kill’ and
> fill it up with Yahoo’s product portfolio. Share it with the employees and
> the press so everyone finds out from you rather than AllThingsD as to what
> your priorities are. Favor the kill column whenever in doubt.

Or maybe let the employees vote on it. Collectively, they probably have a much
better idea than Marissa Mayer (or any one person) which products are dogs and
which are going somewhere.

~~~
michaelhoffman
This will either lead to the products currently employing the most staff being
kept, or some bizarre Eurovision-style vote trading phenomenon.

~~~
TimJRobinson
I would be totally ok with a Yahoo reality tv show where the teams sell the
world on their progress and vision we get to vote on what gets kept and what
gets killed.

------
edw519
11\. Ignore all unsolicited advice that doesn't include the words "customer"
or "user".

~~~
pdeuchler
Normally I'd agree with you, however I think OP has a good (implied) point
that the underlying structures and culture need serious overhaul before any
real product work can be done.

~~~
sriramk
Yup. I'm hoping by hiring the best engineers/designers/etc and putting
together great product teams, you implicitly get people who care about users.

------
umeshunni
The best one:

Make a huge sign with the phrase ‘the premier digital media company’. Then
make a video of you running a bulldozer over it crushing that sign.

Yes, Yahoo, you're not a media company, you're a technology company. You don't
want to be a media company. Media companies make shitty profits (see AOL, Time
Warner, NBC), technology companies make amazing profits (see Google, Facebook,
Microsoft, Apple).﻿

------
jarsj
12\. Hire sriramk as VP Engineering.

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

------
bvi
First things first. Figure out "what is Yahoo!" immediately.

Remember Carol Bartz? <http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/28/ok-seriously-what-is-
yahoo/>

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

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

------
brackin
They have so much value in the products, yet they aren't even being developed.

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

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

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

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

Thanks!

~~~
rurounijones
Er, I thought it was pretty well known that Google is an ad company.

G+ = Consumer profiling

Picasa = Get people sharing their photos on G+ (Now with tagging!) so that
they can be profiled

GMail = Consumer profiling

GDrive = cannot tell since they insist on showing the pages in Japanese
despite my browser telling them otherwise. But I wouldn't be surprised if they
analysed your files for profiling (cannot read the japanese TOS to tell.)

GMaps = Location based advertising, consumer profiling

Android = Muscle in on mobile advertising and consumer profiling

Almost every one of their services can be tied back to "How can we improve our
profiling of consumers so that our ad-networks are more effective"

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

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

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

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

------
MyNewAccount99
... and how long exactly did you work at Yahoo?

~~~
logistopath
He has worked for only a year there.

~~~
sriramk
Yes but this channels a lot of what other people told me and some of them have
spent over a decade there.

