
Marissa Mayer has been on a shopping spree, but is there any sign of a strategy? - alexlitov
http://gigaom.com/2013/07/04/marissa-mayer-has-been-on-a-shopping-spree-at-yahoo-but-is-there-any-sign-of-a-strategy/
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pavs
I think the strategy is to get as many new decent developers outside the yahoo
echo chambers, in an effort to change the working culture inside the company.

For many years Yahoo suffered from mismanagement of CEO with short term goal
to appease shareholders as opposed to building a company based on strong
workforce and values. Despite all the PR speech by the previous CEO, I never
felt that the previous leadership really knew what the hell they were doing.

One of the first thing Mayer had to do was stop the culture rot within the
company, and you will see that a lot of her decisions, whether its buying up
other companies and making new rules around favorable working conditions, is
targeted on building a strong group of core developers. This obviously takes a
lot of time, there is no magic bullet to fix culture rot.

Mayer is from Google school of thought, so she knows a thing or two on how
good working environment works. You will see that while Google has a strong
leadership to guide the company, a lot of its products and services started
from and driven by not the leadership, but their developers on their 20%
project.

So to put it in short, Yahoo is not in a position like Google where they can
dictate long term strategy without getting its bases in order and fix decades
of rotting.

I think in the next 12 months or so will be interesting time to see what comes
out of Yahoo.

~~~
Swannie
Culture is set by the execs, and their senior managers, not the developers.
Buying up new companies won't change the culture unless they are integrated
into a new management structure. Sure, a good junior or mid-level manager can
maintain a strong culture in their team/organization. BUT only with senior
exec support - otherwise they will fall under corporate oversight for
everything - from facilities policies (free snacks, beer, soft drinks,
breakfasts? huge desks? breakout rooms?), HR processes (hiring, performance,
salary increases, role changes), IT processes (hardware/software freedom),
etc. There are talented managers who can present a view of full cooperation,
but still do their own things - though again, to pull that off, they usually
have some senior exec support. The more contact with the rest of the org. the
more its culture seeps in.

Just think about it in terms of code - you write some code as a standalone
demo - to bring it into your main application, you end up having to integrate
into most of the existing framework, and that influences the original demo
code - often for the better, but that depends on the quality of the existing
code base - and how well it was architected (by the code equivalent of the
execs).

Very few companies do acquisitions where they carefully protect the acquired
company. The assumption is that the buying companies culture is better! One
company that _does_ do this quite well is Conde Naste. (Wired, Reddit, etc.
all have quite separate identities, and from the outside appear to have
autonomy.)

When you start to see an exodus of long term Yahoo! execs, then she's probably
doing something right. Whether Wall Street would reward her for that, is a
totally different question!!!

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
This.

Culture is pushed from the top. If you're changing the culture at the top then
bringing new people in lower down might speed up the change and solidify it
but in of itself it won't change anything if nothing is changing at the top.

~~~
Swannie
Right, but if you bring them in without changing the top, they either get
changed to the existing culture are and somewhat unhappy. Dislike the new
culture and leave. Or kick up a fuss, and get asked to leave.

But if they see execs who _really_ get it, they may endure a line or middle
manager who doesn't get it, knowing that it's just a matter of time.

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sheri
Does acquiring companies for injecting 'young blood' actually work? I feel an
acquisition means the founders and early employees would want to kick back and
relax in the comfort of a big company job for a while. The examples I've seen
are where they wait out their vesting period, and then quit and start their
own company.

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tater
The strategy is to appease wall street and shareholders. Doesn't matter what
their plan is or what they do, as long as they have a plan and do something.

While somewhat rare for publicly traded companies, Amazon has shown that
companies can float while prioritizing long term strategies above everything
else.

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netrus
Mayer realized that Yahoo's position is that of a big old corporation: High
assets, weak on true innovation. Using the assets to absorb external
innovative power is the logical consequence. As time is running out, they have
to go for 10M+ opportunities, instead of trying too many too small projects.

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hzay
Somehow I find it hard to believe that if it had been Zuckerberg or Larry Page
or any other _guy_ , this title would have been chosen.

~~~
dkrich
People who write these types of comments do more to set back gender equality
than anything written about the subjects themselves. If the subject of the
story were a _guy_ would the thought of sexism even cross your mind or would
you just, ya know, evaluate the story on its merits?

~~~
hzay
I was mistaken and there's no way to indicate that in the comment now, but
your reply is way out of line and ironically a good example of harmful
stereotyping ("people who write these type of comments"). Also, my comment had
nothing to do with the story and everything to do with the title.

~~~
dkrich
Sorry that you feel that way, but since you made a comment which called into
question the validity of the article and the character of the author without
any evidence or apparent research to prove its validity, I think calling into
question your assumptions and the potential harm they cause to be perfectly
fair.

It's not right for me to generalize, so I should have said "These types of
comments..." but my point still stands.

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PhilipA
As one who hasn't followed Yahoo for a long long time, how does Yahoo actually
make money? Is it purely from advertisement?

~~~
billybob255
I've seen estimates of ~90% of their revenue coming from advertising.

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thorum
If this were any male CEO doing all these acquisitions, would the author of
this article have written about him going on a "shopping spree"? I kind of
doubt it.

Edit: Criticism retracted - searching around in Google, it looks like this is
a common phrase when referring to companies that make a lot of purchases in a
short period. Apologies to the author for implying something negative.

~~~
pauletienney
+1 for your auto-critic ;)

