
In Week Two, Marissa Mayer Googifies Yahoo - drgath
http://allthingsd.com/20120729/in-week-two-marissa-mayer-googifies-yahoo-free-food-friday-afternoon-all-hands-new-work-spaces-fab-swag/
======
ramanujan
One strategy for Yahoo:

Turn Google's strengths into weaknesses by opening up all of Yahoo's products
(Search, Mail, Finance, Maps, Sports, News) to developers to be maximally
programmable. Allow developers to monetize in any way they feel like (aside
from fraud) and let them link together apps in creative mashups. This links
together YQL, Yahoo Pipes, YUI, BOSS, and several other existing Yahoo
technologies into Yahoo as the platform for the Open Web.

If Marissa wanted to really push hard on this: buy Blekko, take a big stake in
Github, buy Mozilla, and possibly buy Meteor and/or DerbyJS. That gives you a
tech stack which is pretty strong in search, best of class among developers,
pretty strong in browsers, and the future of web development. Then let
developers knit the pieces together and give them contractual terms which
stipulate you won't go up the stack at them like Facebook, Apple, and Twitter
did if their apps are successful.

Basically, if Apple represents ultimate centralization and Google is somewhat
open, turn Yahoo into the ultra open, monetizable platform for the web. They
have the traffic, they could make this a very attractive proposition for
developers.

~~~
filip01
For the record, Mozilla is a 501(c)(3).

~~~
sxp
That is the Mozilla Foundation. There is also the for-profit
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation>

~~~
capnrefsmmat
...which is owned by the Foundation. I doubt the Foundation will hand it over.

------
voidfiles
Free food is a big idea. As a one time Yahoo, I was shocked. This shows to me
that Mayer is going to be different. I am not sure if every CEO previous to
her had this choice, but none of them did it. It either proves that the board
has given her a lot of leeway, or all the others have been weak kneed.

Seriously, food is a big deal, someone at my orientation asked a VP why we
didn't get free food. She answered by explaining that the only people who
liked the free food were the employees, and that share holders didn't like the
free food, and that we work for the shareholders. With that everyone
_clapped_. I remembered at the time that free food sounded good, especially
because I was about the become a Yahoo employee.

So, I hope this is like the Canary in the coal mine, but in reverse.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Wow, what an awful, awful answer that was from the VP.

The shareholders probably didn't like her salary either, did it get cut?

------
rmason
Looks like Marissa has learned the lesson told by Steve Blank in his famous
essay, the elves leave middle earth

[http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-
eart...](http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-
earth-%e2%80%93-soda%e2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/)

It has bought her time with the engineers while she decides what to do.

~~~
mindcrime
I love this comment on the @sgblank post:

 _When I started at mindspring as a startup (a dial up company) there were
some very interesting rules._

 _1\. Drug testing policy. If you have drugs we will test them._

Classic stuff. That's the kind of culture I want to build at Fogbeam Labs when
we get to the point of having employees. I like to say "let's be the Mötley
Crüe of software companies." Hard partying, hard fighting, and ass kicking,
that's the stuff we're going for - well, along with great software, world-
class UX, and better integration of enterprise software than you can get
anywhere else.

~~~
mgkimsal
I wish you success in that endeavour. The danger is that you might try to be
"the Mötley Crüe of software companies" but end up being seen as "the Winger
of web apps". I just had some Beavis and Butthead flashbacks when I read your
post ;)

~~~
mindcrime
Hey, I _like_ Winger!!! :-)

------
dinkumthinkum
I think it's obvious that Yahoo! needs some serious internal "disruption." I
think the biggest thing they need is _relevance_. Incremental improvements to
their search, email, etc I don't think will matter. If Yahoo's search started
being 5% better than Google, by whatever metric you prefer, would anyone
really care? I would still use Google. I think in many consumer's view, and
even probably many of us, we have all just been wondering when this all Yahoo!
thing was going to end, whether was from a buyout by MS or whatever. They need
some kind of breakout product, surely they know this but we've been waiting
for awhile now. Honestly, I think it's got to be something more than just
acquisition. Honestly, just now I visited yahoo.com, (not yahoo answers or any
of that, the homepage), I haven't done that in years. I'll say this, it's a
strange place.

~~~
bborud
I'll sum it up for you in one sentence: Marissa Mayer needs to figure out what
Yahoo! is supposed to be good at.

Right now Yahoo! isn't remarkably good at anything.

~~~
stevewilhelm
Just to name a few: on the consumer side, Yahoo! is remarkably good at Sports
including Fantasy Football and Baseball, and on the technical side it's
remarkably good at Hadoop.

~~~
bborud
It does an okay job with Hadoop. Parts of Hadoop are good (Zookeeper) and
parts of it are well short of the mark (HDFS) and ought to have had more
effort behind it years ago.

------
samstave
This is great. You need to start with foundational changes that positively
impact the culture and morale of the staff. Providing free food is a good
basic that should happen.

There needs to be a revitalization of the Yahoo staff if there is to be any
success.

Then you take those thousands of reinspirired/invigorated people and point
them at a problem.

Finding the right problem though is, well, the problem.

Personally, I have said several times here on HN that Yahoo should take
YCombinator as their new directional model.

They should be seeking to foster startups in the valley VERY aggressively.
Invest, incubate, incorporate.

Take the growth of the startup communities and incorporate their innovations
into the Yahoo brand...

------
bborud
Ah, yes, the new Caesar is throwing bread to the plebeians to silence the
restless. What I am wondering is when she is going to start feeding the top
two tiers of management to the lions. After all, the shareholders need calming
as well.

Tick tock, tick-tock.

------
csmeder
At this point, in the year 2012, isn't this just called modern? Sure a decade
ago google was the only one doing this. However, aren't most
startups/competitive tech companies in the bay area offering free food?

If Yahoo wants to compete for talent against the SF startups, facebook,
google, etc. It seems like this isn't googley, its just part of the modern
benefit package.

~~~
Me1000
A lot of companies don't provide free food, Apple, and Nest to name a couple.

Talent won't be attracted by free food, but what it will do is cause the
morale to change. People already working there will start getting excited
about these new changes. Things become a little more fun. When your employees
have a higher morale, they feel better about working harder, and they become
more proud about what they're working on.

The new all-hands meetings will be key in that strategy. A good CEO and a
great CEO can tell you the vision of the company and why it will succeed. But
only a great CEO can make his or her employees feel inspired to do better work
after those talks.

The first signs that Yahoo is turning around will be seen on the streets of
San Francisco and Sunnyvale. When yahoo hoodies and tshirts are being
displayed as frequently as you see Google of Facebook swag, if the employees
start showing they are _really_ proud of the company they work for, that will
signal the earliest changes in Yahoo.

Edit: spelling

~~~
Evbn
All hands meetings are morale boosting when they feature Oprah style handouts
of fancy schwag. Business status reports, meh.

~~~
Me1000
Sorry, but the people who only get excited with fancy hand outs won't be at
Yahoo much longer if Marissa does her job right.

She needs people who want to work long hours, and/or weekends. That kind of
work ethic doesn't come from handouts, it comes from inspiring people around
you to build something really awesome.

~~~
franze
i dispise company cultures that encourage you to "want to work long hours,
and/or weekends". if thats the (unspoken) goal of these culture changes, then
you will end up with a bunch of burned out "friday night major release"
staffers.

it's about cutting the crap, getting rid of balast and setting the right
priorities, not about "long hours".

~~~
Me1000
That's fine, not everyone can live that kind of life. There are a few
engineers, however, who do want to put in the extra hours to build something
awesome.

The thing is, for that to be successful you will never be asked directly to
work long hours. If you've never experienced that, it's impossible for me to
explain it to you. It's just a desire you get when you work around really
talented people who are equally dedicated.

~~~
franze
i worked 60 hour weeks and sometimes 80 hour weeks, sometimes for companies in
start up mode, some established market leader companies, sometimes i slept
below the desk, sometimes i didn't sleep at all, for some i had
(phantom)shares, for some i didn't (i get around a lot).

sometimes long hours are necessary, 95% of the time they aren't.

working 60 hour or more is a problem, never a solution. constantly working
long hours leads to lousy decisions and to a lack of priorities (and a lack of
priorities are the reason for another round of long hours).

one of the best CTOs i ever worked for was confronted with a lot of friday
evening major releases, which more often than not lead to him loosing his
weekends. he created a new policy that the last release would be thursday
morning. code quality, bug occurrences an work/life balance improved
significantly.

------
DanBC
> Better search!

Yahoo was known for collating links, while Google had a killer algorithm.

But Google's drive to make the algorithm work all the time for everybody is
causing some discontent. Power users are disappointed at (for example) the
loss of +, and don't like the weird word substitutions and stemming that
Google has introduced. And naive users are confused by overwhelming choice.
They don't know the difference between the various sponsored links; they have
no idea what a domain is so they aren't going to know if they're going to a
trustworthy site or to scumbags.

Imagine how nice it would be if you entered your programming specific terms
into a search engine and got carefully selected links back.

I don't know if free food is going to get that, but it's worth a try.

EDIT: I've just visited the Yahoo page for the first time in many years. It is
laughably hideous. Sorry for any Yahooers, but this version is even uglier
than the 199x page (black on silver?).

------
afhof
A lot of the changes listed in this article are as the title suggests
"Googley". I am not that surprised by these actions though. It's easy to get
used to the free food and the Friday meetings and then miss them elsewhere.

That said, if I was working at one of Yahoo's remote offices, I'd feel pretty
left out of the free food / etc. Do HQ Engineers work any harder than the
others?)

~~~
codeonfire
Well, who's to say they even have the facilities or personnel for free food at
other locations? If it's an office with a break room it probably isn't set up
to serve hundreds of meals a day.

------
guelo
Yahoo gave up on being a technology leader when they killed their own search.
If I was Mayer I would buy DuckDuckGo and say fuck it, we're taking on Google.

~~~
Aloisius
Isn't DDG just Bing w/ some logic to bump up anything that shows up in various
authoritative sites like Wikipedia?

Yahoo already uses Bing.

~~~
hnriot
yes, there's a lot of misconceptions here on hn about what DDG actually is.
Indexing the web, now, is beyond the capabilities and budget of individuals,
you need the resources and backing of a company like google, ibm or microsoft
to do so. DDG is federated search, not a search engine. While they might crawl
a few sites, it's Bing that you're seeing in the result, the work of Microsoft
engineers (along with any remaining PowerSet guys.)

~~~
Evbn
Gabriel seems to enjoy encouraging the misconception that DDG is a search
engine.

------
wisty
It sounds good. This may give her the moral authority to make less popular
changes down the track - she's signalling that she wants to make the place
like Google, which will make the troops more sympathetic to anything she does.

------
breckinloggins
So given all the hubbub lately I decided to visit Yahoo.com for the first time
in years. I'm not really Yahoo's target audience, but my second-first
impressions are:

\- That little "Make Yahoo! your homepage" thing that slides down and moves
the rest of the content with it has got to go (especially considering there's
a "Make Y! your homepage" link RIGHT below it).

\- Clicking on the dot in the exclamation point still does the "Yahoo!"
jingle, which is nice, but I don't like the new jingle. It's too polished. Old
one was better.

\- The actual search bar is a bit heavy and "2005 Web 2.0" looking, but I
suppose it needs to be a little chunky to stand out from everything else on
the page (and there's a lot).

\- Overall, I like the color scheme and design, but it still feels a bit
"heavy". The fact that there's SO MUCH STUFF on the front page suggests that
this real estate is a design-by-committee thing and that politics is heavily
involved. There's so much stuff and it's packed so tightly together that I
really can't decide what I want to look at.

\- The Olympics banner is neat.

\- The top news rotator is OK, but it's a little clumsy.

\- The subsections, like Yahoo! News and Yahoo! TV, feel too different from
each other and too different from the main site.

\- Speaking of target audience, the "Trending Now" section is neat, but I'm
not sure I like what it's saying. Between that, the "Must-See Videos on
Yahoo!", and the "Most Popular" section below it, I get the feeling that I
just stepped into a middle-class hair salon. I'm not trying to be elitist,
it's just that this site really seems to scream "late 30-something suburbian
white woman with a minivan" in a way that most other sites don't, so I don't
feel very welcome here. Shouldn't the front page to one of the world's most
recognized online brands start out a little more neutral and slowly BECOME
about whatever it is you're usually interested in? ArsTechnica does a good job
of this, building up a "Your Stories" section based on stuff you've clicked on
an (presumably) how long you stuck around after you clicked.

\- A little more nitpicky, but I think it's another indication of Yahoo!'s
most prime real-estate being driven by corporate politics and ladder-climbing
(because I'm going to give the page designer a benefit of the doubt): take a
look at all the section headings. You have "YAHOO! SITES", "TRENDING NOW",
"MUST-SEE VIDEOS ON YAHOO!", "MOST POPULAR", "POLL", "FAVORITES". There
doesn't seem to be much consistency in the color or font size with these.

\- So, yeah, "Favorites". How come I just NOW (within the last 30 seconds)
found that? It's way below the fold of the sites list. Aren't my favorites
kind of important? Shouldn't they be above "Yahoo! Sites"? And why are they
already populated? Yahoo! on FB, Yahoo! on Twitter? How are those my
favorites? I never told you I liked those... These are the kind of things that
make it a little TOO obvious that I, humble visitor, am the product being
sold.

\- The bottom footer (no, not the real footer, the footer above that) seems
redundant. "More Yahoo! Sites" contains only slightly different content than
the "Yahoo! Site" area, and there's already a way from right there to see
more. If you want to promote new or underperforming sub-sites, why not try a
sites recommendation engine based on the stuff you've visited? Follow Yahoo
could be placed elsewhere, and the "About Yahoo" stuff can certainly be
combined and replace the "About our Ads" thing on the real footer.

\- When performing an actual search, the results aren't too bad (they're
powered by Bing, which isn't wonderful but it isn't terrible either). In fact,
the search listings are a lot less cluttered than what Google's results have
become.... it's almost refreshing.

~~~
antidoh
"there's SO MUCH STUFF on the front page"

I haven't been there for a long time, so I went there to follow your critique,
and my first thought was WTF is all this? This is like a 90s site map, with
pictures.

~~~
Cushman
I also checked the site out for the first time in a while. My first thought:
"This looks like AOL.com."

But of course I haven't been to AOL in forever either, maybe they've changed.
So I checked them out too. Yep, can't tell the difference.

~~~
jaredsohn
In 2007, TechCrunch had an article showing that AOL and Yahoo even had the
same page layout: [http://techcrunch.com/2007/04/26/aol-one-step-behind-
again-n...](http://techcrunch.com/2007/04/26/aol-one-step-behind-again-new-
home-page-identical-to-yahoo/)

------
WestCoastJustin
Seems like these are all moral boosting tweaks. Friday meetings that keep
employees up-to-speed, free food, and updated swag. Gets people talking and
they can see physical things happening! This is re-org 101. Make no mistake,
the real changes that will turn Yahoo around, take months, if not years to get
rolling.

~~~
FaddiCat
>>> Free food is a bonus.

It's also good for Yahoo. It encourages employees to stay on campus for
longer, so Yahoo gets more value out of them.

------
orijing
Just curious, how much Google stock does she have, and does that affect what
strategies she can pursue with Yahoo? i.e. it may encourage a more cooperative
stance with Google than a competitive one, even if the latter is better for
Yahoo individually.

~~~
Evbn
I assume and hope she would divest from Google so that more of her net worth
is contingent upon Yahoo's success more than Google's.

------
leeskye
Definitely a smart decision by Marissa. The savings from feeding employees is
definitely outweighed by the productivity and morale gained from satisfied
employees. Make your employees feel proud and good to work there.

------
FaddiCat
I'd be more interested in what she's decided he WON'T change. What redeeming
qualities does Yahoo have? (That's not a rhetorical question; I'm genuinely
interested.)

~~~
seunosewa
Lots of content that attracts lots of traffic from all over the world. The
people that create that content.

------
loceng
I'd like to work for / with her.

~~~
drgath
<http://careers.yahoo.com/>

~~~
WestCoastJustin
I'd be surprised if there wasn't a hiring freeze right now while they asses
what they have. If you look around this site there is all of 4 listings!!

~~~
drgath
Actually, Yahoo is hiring like crazy.

~~~
sown
Any areas in particular?

~~~
drgath
Pretty much everywhere, but I know for a fact front-end (HTML/CSS/JS) is in
high-demand. Just search for relevant terms on the careers site.

Also, Flickr is hiring -> <http://flickr.com/jobs/>

------
ntkachov
Yahoo still has some buying power with serious engineers. I'm not sure what
their plan is but cool projects + good perks are usually a sure fire way to
get good engineers. I really hope that she turns the place around and makes
another Google.

------
adrianwaj
I bet she'll do nothing more than turn Yahoo into a well-organized and well-
fed train wreck. She really needs to bet on something big, not just get people
into nice lifeboats. Maybe Scott McNealy would've been a better hire.

------
bavidar
Ahh I get it. Shes prepping Yahoo for a Google Takeover. Makes sense...

------
joshfraser
Smart move. This helps her make friends w/ existing engineers within the
company while also making it easier to recuit new talent -- two things she's
going to need desperately.

------
pmoehring
Wow, the smugness and adversity to Marissa Mayer is really evident here. Did
these two have a run-in in the past or is that just KS's style of reporting?

------
madrona
Yahoo's front page is 600kb and finishes rendering after about a second.
Google is 17kb, and renders in a tenth of that. More Googlification awaits.

~~~
ajays
Apples and oranges.

Try comparing <http://search.yahoo.com/> with <http://www.google.com/> ,
difference isn't as large.

Here's what I get:

    
    
         curl -s http://www.google.com/ | wc
         20     397   14433
    
         curl -s http://search.yahoo.com/ | wc
          1     363   12616

~~~
madrona
You will need much more than the HTML for the pages to be usable.

------
trekkin
A smart move.

------
iba
I wonder if Marissa will try to maneuver Yahoo for a possible acquisition by
Google.

~~~
noamsml
I doubt it. If Mayer wanted to play second fiddle to Page, she'd have stayed
at Google.

------
debacle
I can't help but feel that this is a bit cargo cult. I'll wait to see the
results.

------
ilaksh
I know people always make fun of Yahoo Answers, with good reason, but I think
that when it comes down to it, Yahoo Answers is one of the web's most
important resources, just because there are so many questions and answers that
it covers quite a lot of popular topics. True that a lot of it is stupid or
nonsense, but there is actually also a lot of useful and timely information in
there.

I also remember using the Yahoo fantasy sports thing and it seemed pretty good
to me.

And to be honest the Yahoo mail program is really attractive looking to me and
very functional.

Yahoo Groups is extremely useful also.

I guess however its hard to compete with things like gmail, reddit and
meetup.com.

So anyway since half of the comments in this thread are basically going on a
'pretend you are the new CEO of Yahoo, what would you do' thing, I want to
play also. Actually Yahoo has so much going on, its kind of hard to NOT want
to play that game.

One thing to focus on making Yahoo Answers better. Maybe more ajaxy and
realtime. Maybe make the app better (ask questions? voice input?). Maybe even
do a deal with stackoverflow or something (although stackoverflow users might
not appreciate that).

It seems like they have a ton of useful applications and other stuff. I forgot
one: Yahoo Games. I guess the hard part is making money from all of those
things. I think to figure out what to do I would need to know how much each of
those different parts of Yahoo cost to operate and how much money comes in
(mostly from ads I assume).

I guess one big issue is the brand. Ever since my old boss told me a few years
back that Yahoo search was better, I associate Yahoo with idiots. And even
though I do think Yahoo Answers is very useful like I mentioned before, the
large number of retarded Yahoo Answers questions doesn't help with that idiot
brand image problem.

One random idea: its really expensive to build Android, iOS (especially),
HTML5, Windows, OSX and Linux apps. Especially if you want to target all of
the above. Maybe they could throw some money at Apple and Microsoft and make
an application platform with WYSIWYG components, a little bit along the lines
of Wordpress, but everything is a widget, and somehow make it work across all
of those platforms, and built on Node.js (or something). I say throw money at
Microsoft and Apple because they are always (as far as I can tell) spending
money on throwing up roadblocks to prevent good cross-platform solutions from
becoming popular and practical.

One more random idea: I think the easiest way to compete as internet giant
these days might be to create products that cross into the 'real' world. For
example, the Google Project Glass project to me seems very exciting. So are
things like 3d print-on-demand. Maybe Yahoo could build or promote a
product/service along those lines?

Of course, those product/service ideas are extremely expensive, challenging
and risky, so I dunno.

Other random idea: try to merge with one of the giant evil cable or media
companies, such as Time Warner, if the government will let them. Then maybe if
the CEO and people are persuasive enough to the Time Warner execs with all of
the Yahoo customer numbers (like 700 million visitors per month), we could
finally get HBO GO without having to buy cable. I mean I am not trying to make
more gianter evil companies, but.. HBO GO without a cable subscription.

Other random idea: start converting to mainly telecommute by telling most
people they can work from home and then eventually shutting down campuses. Use
that as a selling point for acquiring talent and also a way to save money.

OK last last random idea: find a way to defeat ad block. Which would probably
involve advertisements that actually weren't really advertisements somehow.
Maybe something like reddit, or reddit+twitter+facebook, a way for people to
recommend/vote up/review/rate products/services or apps, possibly filtered
based on the relevance of the current page.. then maybe you just charge all of
the advertisers a small fee to be eligible and don't let any of them pay more,
so its entirely driven by consumers rather than the amounts companies are
willing to pay.

Anyway that was fun.

------
vampirechicken
When did yahoo become people magazine?

------
moron
_I tried to reach a Yahoo PR person for comment, but my phone remains unrung,
even here in Israel._

I don't understand this sentence. Is her phone more likely to ring because
she's in Israel, or something?

~~~
powera
The work week in Israel is Sunday through Thursday, so there probably were
people in Yahoo! offices there.

~~~
ars
Sunday in Israel was the 9th of Av, which is a very solemn fast day. I doubt
if anything at all was open.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tisha_B%27Av>

~~~
edanm
No, everything is mostly open on Sunday.

Saturday night, which is when the 9th of Av actually started _, most (but not
all) things were closed, but Sunday everything is open again, especially
businesses.

_ Jewish Holidays go by the Hebrew Calendar, which counts days from Night to
Night, not from Sunrise to Sunrise. So when the regular calendar says that the
9th of Av is on Sunday, the actual holiday is the evening of Saturday, then
Sunday 'til evening.

