
What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried to Be Steve Jobs - r0h1n
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-when-marissa-mayer-tried-to-be-steve-jobs.html?_r=0
======
waterlesscloud
" 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.

~~~
throwawaymsft
It seems there's a pattern in how she sees other people.

* Trying to design the Yahoo logo herself in a weekend (how hard can it be?)

* Reading a children's book to a room full of employees, to stunned silence

* Disallowing remote employees but building a nursery for her child + nanny. (Do other people get Yahoo! daycare too?)

* Requiring extensive credentials for other people [Gwyneth Paltrow better have a degree!] but not bothering with background reference checks for people she wanted (Henrique de Castro, who cost Yahoo over $100M for a year's worth of shoddy work).

Believe it or not, Jobs had empathy for what the user truly needed, which gave
him a killer sense of taste. I feel that's lacking here.

~~~
phaus
>Believe it or not, Jobs had empathy for what the user truly needed, which
gave him a killer sense of taste. I feel that's lacking here.

It seems that Marissa's feeling was that if her users don't already like the
exact same things that she likes(as a millionaire living in a fantasy world),
then they should learn to start liking them.

~~~
Domenic_S
Yes, which stems from vanity/narcissism: "I have exquisite taste, and people
want to be me (a millionaire I-can-have-it-all mom/career woman), so
everything must reflect my personal aesthetic."

Contrast with her hero Jobs.

~~~
LLWM
It works for plenty of people. That's why professional celebrities like Kim
Kardashian can become successful "fashion designers" based on their fame
alone. The only caveat is that you do actually have to have good taste to be
successful.

~~~
nerfhammer
Celebrities with fashion labels or fragrance lines don't design anything, some
company that already does those things just licenses their name

~~~
youngtaff
Victoria Beckham is one exception to this

------
danso
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
> 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_
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).

~~~
tomp
Given that a lot of web sales/pageviews has mainly to do with branding (i.e.
the more famous you are, the more pageviews you get, making you even more
famous), Paltrow's name (and the brand that it carries) is her _doing_ her
job.

~~~
corin_
It's her doing _some of_ the job. Maybe it's big enough that if the rest of
her time was spent sleeping it would still be worth hiring her. Maybe she'd be
amazing at the rest of the job, regardless of qualifications. But if you're
looking to hire someone to actually run something then being famous isn't
enough on its own.

~~~
commandar
>But if you're looking to hire someone to actually run something then being
famous isn't enough on its own.

This is what I was touching on downthread and I guess wasn't entirely clear: a
contributing editor doesn't _run_ anything.

They don't copy-edit other writers' work. They don't manage anyone. They don't
touch anything related to the business backend.

It's a prestige title given to writers that generate an audience. That's it.

~~~
corin_
So is your (and others) assumption that Mayer was literally making a decision
based on no logic at all?

The reason I made my point was that judging someone based on not having a
degree can be considered foolish, judging someone on not having a degree where
a degree couldn't even be related isn't foolish it's just nonsense - so I gave
Mayer the benefit of the doubt. But maybe I was wrong to?

~~~
commandar
That's exactly why that anecdote has gotten an incredulous reaction.

If it's accurate that the position was for a contributing editor for a food
blog, caring about a degree _is_ completely nonsensical.

It's certainly possible that the story is inaccurate, but it seems to have
been included in the article as an intentional example of bizarre decision
making.

------
q2
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
My first thought:

"Is this a PR leak to prepare us for new CEO"

~~~
canvia
or a hostile takeover

------
HillRat
_[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
_> 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.

~~~
HillRat
Really good point -- I had forgotten Apple's proliferation of
incomprehensibly-named Power Macs and how Jobs reduced the line to the bare
minimum. And, indeed, part of his strategy was to kill off Apple's actually
innovative product, the Newton MessagePad, which had finally hit a solid
implementation with the 2000. As much as I loved the Newton, killing it was a
sound tactic in pursuit of a sound strategy.

By contrast, think of Jobs at NeXT: he pursued a failing strategy because he
was trying to innovate for innovation's sake (trying to build a 3M workstation
without a proven market; building a totally-automated, world-class factory
without enough orders to keep it operating; obsessing over minutiae like the
handrail design at NeXT headquarters). The result was fantastic technology but
a company whose promises had to wait for Jobs' return to Apple.

I like to think that Jobs' failure at NeXT was an educational experience for
him; however, with Mayer, I'm not sure she can pull off a second act after
what I expect to be an unceremonious ouster from Yahoo.

~~~
tim333
Was NeXT a failure? From Wikipedia it was founded in '86 and got bought in '96
by Apple for $429m plus 1.5m Apple shares for Jobs. I wouldn't mind failing
like that.

~~~
HillRat
I'm a bit late in catching up on this, but NeXT really was a commercial
failure. It sold a number of its workstations to government agencies (notably
CIA) and scientific teams , but in the early '90s exited the h/w business to
concentrate on selling NeXTSTEP and, later OpenStep.

The strategy switch was the result of the company's failure to compete with
workstation manufacturers like Sun, and the company's rapid drawdown of its
cash. By the time NeXT exited the hardware business, they had revenues of
about $125m/year, but operating at a loss; Canon, which was already into NeXT
to the tune of $100m, floated another $30m plus a $55m line of credit. Jobs
was also funding NeXT and his other project, Pixar, out of his own bank
account, which left him severely depleted. (Previously, Ross Perot and, later,
a consortium of universities had also invested in the company for about $150m
combined.)

By cutting the hardware business, developing a mildly popular web server
(WebObjects), and selling off assets like the Deer Park HQ, Jobs was able to
eke a minor profit out of NeXT, but nothing that would justify the massive
valuation investors accepted during its early days. Apple's purchase was
indeed partially for its technology -- Apple had played around with a
competing OS, Be, for its new OS layer, but ultimately passed -- but also to
lure Jobs back.

------
xyahoo
(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
_" De Castro would leave the company in January 2014. For about 15 months of
work, he would be paid $109 million."_

Costly mistakes.

~~~
xyahoo
But it happens at that level. You can't seriously expect anyone to go through
life mistake-free. Look at Google's mistakes, for instance. How much money
have they thrown after Google Glass?

~~~
phaus
If you hire someone that's a borderline con-man and lose $100 million dollars
without making the most basic attempts of vetting him for the position, that's
not an honest mistake.

------
kanamekun
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
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
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
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.

------
FlyingLawnmower
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?

~~~
drzaiusapelord
>Surely Microsoft is still considered a "Big tech" company?

MS market cap: 371.84B

Yeah, I'd say they're big and I'm not sure if they're trying to "turn
themselves around." They're making money hand over fist, mostly from the
enterprise end of things and Windows/Office licensing. Of course, they are
doing poorly in the mobile arena, but that doesn't mean they're in financial
straits.

~~~
throwawaymsft
Hardly in financial straits, but becoming strategically irrelevant to the
future of computing (like IBM -- huge, and ignorable).

~~~
aroman
I really really do not think that IBM is "becoming strategically irrelevant to
the future of computing". Maybe the IBM of the early 1990s, but not the IBM of
the mid 2010's. Watson and its related technologies are practically synonymous
with the future of computing, in my mind.

~~~
throwawaymsft
Good call, I'd forgotten Watson -- but I think you caught the idea of what a
big and ignorable company could be.

------
aikah
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?

~~~
Marazan
Stack ranking is one of those organisational things that so clearly has no
value that it bogles my mind that companies adopt it.

~~~
q2
and managers like it.

~~~
bsg75
because they can reduce their decision making to a spreadsheet.

------
snlacks
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
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.

~~~
isaacremuant
> Mozilla should allow users to choose their default search provider on
> installation.

That's EXACTLY what they do. The same way the did before. Google was the
default and people could easily change it to bing, duck duck go or whatever
they wanted.

They still can but the default is Yahoo instead of Google.

Options > Search > Default search engine.

It's really easy.

I'd advice you to CHECK things before spreading this kind of disinformation.

~~~
debacle
I am 100% certain that when I updated to Firefox latest, my default search
engine was changed. Give me just a moment to reconfirm.

Edit: Just confirmed. Installed FF 30. Turned off the option to receive search
updates. Updated to latest, provider was still changed to Yahoo.

~~~
TD-Linux
The default search changes if you have never touched the search option.

~~~
geoelectric
It probably changed even if you switched away from Google and back to it at
some point.

Firefox checks the pref value, and if it equals the default it considers it a
reset and removes it from the prefs override file. There's no way to hard set
the equivalent of the default value.

But as mentioned elsewhere, now that the default is Yahoo, changing it to
Google should stick forever.

------
easytiger
> 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
Toolbars and arbitrage.

~~~
scott_karana
What arbitrage, exactly?...

~~~
GeneralMayhem
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
Didn't Google cut that out a long time ago? I didn't find any evidence that
Ask was still doing this.

------
bsaul
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.

------
yourad_io
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!

>:-[

~~~
GrinningFool
I don't have these troubles in FF or Chrome (on linux). Any plugins that could
be interfering?

~~~
yourad_io
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.

------
hyperpape
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?

~~~
HillRat
It's a bit of a slight of hand that involves independently valuing each part
of the company. Nonetheless, that 55% YoY loss in GAAP income doesn't look too
good. There's also the fact that the company has $20bn in current and deferred
liabilities and debt, with long-term liabilities up 300% since 2009.

A company _can_ be profitable and still have a negative valuation,
specifically if its liabilities outgrow its revenue. Generally, such companies
become takeover targets if there's anything worth preserving. (Theoretically,
the concept is that equity holders will take a discount on their shares
because the company's poor prospects reduce liquidity in trade, and holding
onto a share is seen as riskier than taking a lesser haircut now.)

The previous discussion is at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606891](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606891).

~~~
hyperpape
Thanks--it wasn't clear to me how Yahoo's liabilities stood. Even without the
rest, that would've prevented me from asking my question.

------
jlukanta
"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.

~~~
xyahoo
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).

------
leoc
"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.

------
danielweber
_“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
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.

------
thejerz
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
I thought they dropped search years ago. Nowadays their search is powered by
Bing?

~~~
xyahoo
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)

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

------
harmonicon
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.

~~~
yesiamyourdad
Mail is absolutely awful.

They've redesigned the Yahoo Finance homepage but they've really trashed it.
Recent quotes rarely works, the page is cluttered, they constantly link to
articles that start auto playing some obnoxious video. Their financial data is
good though and the stock quote pages haven't changed much so the internals
are OK. There's a stuff they could do to improve it, but given their track
record, I hope they don't try.

The irony is that Yahoo! Finance's users presumably have money since they're
looking for investment news, so you'd think that those ads would be especially
lucrative.

One thing I do like is that they have several financial writers on tumblr now
and they link to that content from the Finance home page. Those tumblrs are
actually some of the best content on Finance.

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

------
bsg75
> 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.

------
gamesurgeon
"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?

~~~
lmm
> 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.

~~~
hyperpape
I take it you don't agree with the story you mention from your tone, so I'm
not arguing with you.

However, as the concept of work to rule ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-
to-rule](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule)) shows, employees don't
treat themselves as being only obligated to do what their contracts specify,
and it would be disastrous if they did. Similarly, managers view themselves as
owing something to their employees that's not specified in the contract.

Hostile takeovers often work by going into a company and breaking all the
relationships of trust that previously existed. By doing that, you can often
cut costs in ways that the previous management couldn't do. (Here's the paper,
though I confess I've only read the summaries of it:
[http://www.nber.org/chapters/c2052.pdf](http://www.nber.org/chapters/c2052.pdf))

------
jeswin
"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-Keynot...](http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/PDC/PDC-1996/PDC-1996-Keynote-
with-Bob-Muglia-and-Steve-Jobs)

~~~
WalterSear
According to the article, she's the one who keeps making the comparison.

------
bane
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
>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
You're quite right. Steve Jobs was both an asshole and a psychopath. Still, he
was one hell of a visionary.

------
tacree
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.

------
r0h1n
Notwithstanding Meyer's faults or idiosyncracies, I wonder if there was
anything anyone could have done to reinvigorate Yahoo?

~~~
q2
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.

------
gcb0
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.

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

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

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

------
jordigh
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?

~~~
timjahn
I find it sad how people are so lazy when it comes to long form content. I
understand we all might not have time at the moment for the long form content,
but there is time somewhere in the day. Somewhere.

~~~
ddod
I personally think there's a difference between substantial long-form content
and the standardized "elongated-form" content that all starts out with
something like "It was a cold December morning and the sparse streaks of light
crept softly through...". That's purely for entertainment value over
informational value, and I can see why the parent commenter could grow tired
of it. As soon as I saw the first line of this article, I knew it was going to
be a haystack I didn't feel like perusing for needles of information.

~~~
jordigh
Yes, these storytale leads make me think, "get to the blasted point already!"

