I cant recall a luckier, more overrated CEO in my career than Marissa Mayer. She shows up right before Alibaba (and wild valuations) takes off. Dan Loeb gets involved to turbocharge the stock, which has done well solely because of Alibaba. She makes a bunch of expensive, terrible acquisitions and insists she didn't overpay for these odd non-revenue generating assets in the midst of a minor tech bubble, while providing no evidence. Yahoo itself, meanwhile, continues to decline and is regarded by most as a structural mess. Management is overpaid beyond the point of reason, the former COO being exhibit A for all that's wrong with management comp and corporate governance. I hope this company goes down in flames.
Actually, I don't know if she's overrated or not, but she inherited a huge mess in many ways. The biggest mess is the deal Yahoo! did with Microsoft effectively kneecapped Yahoo's potential growth for something like a decade.
Yahoo no longer controls their own destiny in search or search advertising. Yahoo had a better search advertising system (I was a customer) and probably a better search engine at the time.
I'm sure she would be the first person to want to invest in search and search advertising, but Yahoo basically can't do any of that in a meaningful way unless they can get out of their underperforming Microsoft contract.
Just remember that the benchmark for a CEO is not if they are doing a good job. It's if they are doing a better job than someone else would do in the same role. It's like NFL QB's. There's a small pool, so being good doesn't mean you get to keep the job if someone else thinks you should be doing GREAT.
By that measure Marissa has done a pretty great job in areas that the previous revolving door CEO's didn't. Hell, the fact that Yahoo! is even part of the tech scene discussion is an improvement.
In December 1999, Intuit Inc. (makers of QuickBooks, TurboTax, and Quicken) purchased Rock Financial for $532M. The company was renamed Quicken Loans. In June 2002, Gilbert led a small group of private investors in purchasing the Quicken Loans subsidiary back from Intuit for just $64M.[8]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicken_Loans#History
She gets more press than most CEOs but Yahoo was in trouble before she took over. She might not be great but there are probably more overrated CEOs
There is no shortage of train wreck deals out there, that's for sure. What struck a nerve with me recently was Meyer's defense of them. It wasn't even "defense", just insistence that she and the rest of management are awesome simply because she says so, despite a mountain of actual evidence that says the opposite. I see this crap all the time, some exec armed with nothing other than their word or excitement or insistence telling me everything's just super without any articulation. Here was her chance to somewhat redeem herself and instead she fell right in line with what every other idiot CEO does. Of course, based on the de Castro debacle we knew this was her character anyway...it's just shareholders' money.
> I cant recall a luckier, more overrated CEO in my career than Marissa Mayer.
Short memory, short career or just sexist? In less than 2 years at Yahoo, Mayer brought in unprecedented leadership in a byzantine group left unmanaged for years.
Doesn't Ballmer beat her wildly in being lucky/overrated 2001 to 2011? Remember the disastrous yahoo buy out in 2008? Talk of being lucky that it failed. Or Blackberry?
Mayer turned around Yahoo's perception and fixed key products. She pointed out a talent and reputation issue and tried to solve that (http://qz.com/184046/yahoo-says-marissa-mayer-has-fixed-its-...) - should Yahoo just have done and bought nothing because of increasing valuations?
There's no actual point to ad hom like this. Yahoo's strategy is not solely Mayer's. It may not be working, you can disagree with it, it's plain populist to single out Mayer.
>It may not be working, you can disagree with it, it's plain populist to single out Mayer.
You bringing sex into the debate, your accusations of sexism and this point toward you being the sexist, if anyone is. She is CEO. She is almost entirely responsible and accountable for company strategy and performance.
Mayer has proven herself through the ranks of many prestigious technology companies throughout her career, but her performance as CEO has been an embarrassing disaster.
> Mayer has proven herself through the ranks of many prestigious technology companies
You have a funny definition of "many". She's worked at exactly two tech companies in her career: Google and Yahoo. For such a shrill critic of her performance, you're remarkably uninformed about what she's accomplished.
It doesn't make it true either, and nothing that the original poster said suggested that it might be the case. Heck, we don't even know the gender of the original poster.
> Mayer turned around Yahoo's perception and fixed key products.
Hmmm, to me and everyone I know, Yahoo! Mail is where you send all the trash and unwanted spam. It's surprisingly common practice, and my perception of Yahoo! hasn't changed a bit.
Alibaba took off long before Mayer arrived. Regardless of financial improvements, the products have seen more innovation than the previous 10 years. I now have 3 Yahoo apps on my phone! Some improvements have been for the better, some for the worse, but she seems to have at least broken the "do nothing" attitude at Yahoo previously.
Yahoo Weather is popular one (and an Apple Design Award winner). There's a pretty big set, most of which I've never tried. From a quick search: Yahoo, Mail, News Digest, Finance, Messenger, Weather, Sports, Fantasy Sports, Cricket, and Screen.
Then there's the Yahoo owned services like Flickr, if you want to count them.
Edit: I just installed Yahoo Weather, and it's great. It uses photos to represent weather conditions at each of your saved locations, which are all pulled from Flickr. I doubt it has photos specific to every weather condition in every location, but I got them for all the locations I tried. And the animation in the interface (parallax scrolling between locations, spinning windmills for windspeed, and maybe more I didn't notice) is smooth and well done.
Pulling up a weather app and seeing a local landmark with a cloudy sky in the background is a really neat user experience, so props to Yahoo on successfully integrating Flickr with this. I like it a lot.
In art, we worry about the viewer not understanding our work. It comes down to shared culture. A reader or viewer doesn't understand the work because the work does not communicate to them in a language they understand. Is it because the work is too forward thinking? Or is it just gibberish?
It tends to work out that the artists who spent the most for their degrees will lean towards it being "too forward thinking" more often than the rest of us.
I agree with you. There is also the arbitrage game that Yahoo! continues to play with publishers. Once in a while they will fine publishers when the bot traffic gets too obvious but then it's back to the same old game.
I really hate Yahoo. When they bought Geocities they changed my user name that had 64 in it to 63 automatically. What a stupid number. Then, because I didn't log into it within a certain time frame, they up and deleted all my content. It was the first (and only, really, besides school requirement...) personal website I ever built, in 6th grade. It had all the cool images, gifs, midis I had gathered on the internet and I even created custom gifs for it. I even copy pasted some javascript code to make my gifs animate when moused over.
Even though I only used the email account they automatically set up for me for junk registrations (my main mail was already @home/attbi/comcast before they bought geocities, then gmail when that was created), I ended up making a second yahoo account with a name that wasn't lame (which I still used for junk registrations, and other random things, but moreso than the one automatically created). One day the password on that second email account suddenly changed. I used the same password on both the accounts for years with zero sign of infiltration. I still continue to use accounts tied to the one with the mysteriously changed password. I did everything I could to get that one back with no luck. Maybe I was compromised by some hacker? I do recall during my efforts being asked by yahoo support something along the lines of "is this your main account?". There was never anybody that I could talk to, only text support, and most of my attempts/ticket submissions went ignored. Maybe they think I'm a hacker.
In the end, nothing but bitter feelings toward Yahoo for me.
The only thing tying me to Yahoo at all anymore is Flickr, and I somewhat hope it goes under just so I get some sort of archival download of my content and a reason to finally find something better.
They don't have built-in "archival" downloading, but they allow other apps to do it for you. The free version of Bulkr will grab your photos, and the paid version will include tags etc. https://www.flickr.com/services/apps/72157622874451890/
This is true in some cases, but I gotta say I'm glad myspace seems to have nuked everything I left on there from middle school except a profile pic. It would be horrid if that stuff was left up for the world to see and I'd forgotten my log in credentials to delete it.
Don't feel bad, I had already graduated college. I was pretty happy about it given there was no way I was going to use gopher being a Univ of NoDak alumni. :)
I was actually expecting this question. I have spent several hours looking for it already, but it seems that mine was missed. I do have a Sysquest cartridge (tape drives like Zip disks) from that period that might have a lot of it, I just need to figure out how to interface with the SCSI reader.
If anybody happens to know something I don't about finding websites, the title of it was "Slasher's Realm" and I believe it was in TimesSquare somewhere, maybe under chasm or tower.
Edit: ahh yeah, it seems like mine wasn't crawled before it got deleted http://www.reocities.com/timessquare/chasm/1788/
The Geocities take down was announced well in advance, and I recall dozens of groups attempting to archive all or most of it. Search for "geocities archive" and you will see a number of archives.
I hope you find what you lost. Let us all remember to keep local backups. :)
It's just sad to see Yahoo! in such a bad shape. I was just talking to a friend about the great Yahoo! in the times of Hack Day! and Brickhouse.
They bought some of the hottest startups back in the days (Flickr, Delicious, Upcoming...) only to neglect them, shut them or let them die. These were amongst the first companies that had put the user front and centre, leveraging the fabled user generated content. This was of huge value for any company and they let it slip through their fingers.
Also, at Brickhouse they developed Fire Eagle, one of the first services to work with location, and a great take on it too. A central and independent place where you could post your location to and then you'd grant access to other services choosing the level of detail (e.g. you phone was constantly posting your most accurate location and then Twitter could have access to your current City, Facebook to the Country you're in and Dark Sky could access Lat/Lon).
And, of course, they once owned Geocities.
Then they shut some stuff down, closed Brickhouse and I think they stopped hosting Hack Days. I know correlation does not imply causation but I find it very difficult to dissociate these two situations. How can a technology company thrive if they kill their innovation internal cycle?
Yahoo! seems to once have had one of the best innovation cultures in industry only to see it disappear like this. Everything that has been happening since then (like death by acquisitions) looks like part of the plan or the lack of thereof.
Yup. I rejoiced at that and backed Andy right away. It may not end up being what Upcoming was before but it felt right to back his initiative anyway even if just to condemn Yahoo!s take on it.
Upcoming is just another example: way ahead of its time. Take the number of companies in the events space nowadays. Take the millions of dollars invested or spent in such companies. Lots of meetups happening everyday around the world...
Yahoo! has just let it die instead. It's even hard to argue that Upcoming was off because it was ahead. I can't see why the events on Upcoming wouldn't turn into what meetups are today. All it needed was someone to take care of the product and the community. Gatherings and events have been happening since before Upcoming was created and are now being managed on Meetup, Eventbright, Lanyrd, etc... It isn't the case of these companies creating a new space for them, they just took it from where Upcoming (and others, probably) left.
Isn't it fairly obvious that there are two categories of companies that they buy: the ones they count on for strategic business (Flickr), and the ones they acquire just for the people? I have to imagine that the latter is mostly just to infuse Yahoo with young, energetic people who are willing & able to work long hours if given a proper vision. Sure you can put out a lot of job reqs, but this seems like the way Mayer has chosen to try to infuse Yahoo with talent & energy.
They just forget one very important problem: You can try to buy people by buying the company they work for, but chances are they will not want to stick around after the company culture has been trampled over.
Been there a few times over my career: Those acquisitions are, in almost all cases, a disaster.
Is that really a good strategy? I've seen this reason before (buy the company for the people), but is it really reasonable to spend over $1B on a company for such a small number of employees? I don't see Yahoo! needing to keep the non engineer/CS people.
"In theory you could beat the death spiral by buying good programmers instead of hiring them. You can get programmers who would never have come to you as employees by buying their startups. But so far the only companies smart enough to do this are companies smart enough not to need to."
A company can be bought for anything really, if it makes sense.
As shubb points out, if it's cheaper to buy a company than to deal with licensing or legal problems, then it might be bought. Same if the overhead of dealing with a company as an external entity is too high compared to buying it outright and forcing it to come in-house (if the product or service isn't of any need after some time, the employees can still be shuffled in the org afterward)
While I too am inclined to hate Yahoo, perhaps out of envy that a shitty, failed idea I might have come up with wasn't acquihired for tens of millions of dollars, their stock tells a different story. Not that a successful business is defined by its stock price, but she is performing in a way that the board and its investors are likely quite happy. The price has nearly doubled since she took over.
When you calculate the stock price minus alibaba valuation increase, Yahoo is still declining (in fact Alibaba has MORE value than Yahoo itself, resulting in Yahoo having "negative" value)
Mayer seems to view Yahoo primarily as a place where you can find all sorts of stuff on one giant app. “Once the user’s in that app experience, the easiest thing to do is stay in that app experience,”.
I think this is a very insightful analysis. I think there are people that like the "yahoo" way of presenting applications. It may look old fashion to others, but there is a market. If it was not the case, yahoo would already be dead. If yahoo changes its mind to do the same as others, they would lose their soul and die. We have similar experience with RIM that left professional phones with keyboard to become an Apple follower. RIM is (almost) dead.
I don't think that's a good analogy, RIM was failing because they stayed the course for too long. As soon as the iPhone came along Blackberry should've jumped on the touchscreen bandwagon. Instead they clung to their keyboard phones for too long and lost many of their regular customers to iOS and Android.
They still had a sizable lead in enterprise but even there they didn't fix some of their fundamental usability issues in a timely fashion, so a lot of enterprise customers started shifting towards Android and iOS.
Blackberry's problem is that it too them far too long to respond to a sea change in their market. Had their first true flagship touchscreen phone come in 2009 instead of 2013 they might still be a big player.
I think you are missing the point very hard on why RIM failed.
I am one that would own a RIM phone, IF, IF, and only IF they had made it easy to code applications for it like Apple and Google did for their phones.
RIM noticed now and BB10 is seemly really interesting, but now they are too late, there are no apps on their phone.
And I say that, because I ABSOLUTELY HATE touchscreen, it NEVER do what I want, I own a Xperia Play, and many times I prefer to use the Playstation controls to control the phone, the touchscreen is unstable, finnicky, don't work when it is raining, or when my hand is wet, or sweaty, and so on...
RIM should have sticked to keyboard based phones and use their energy on developping the application market. I do not disagree with you, but I think they could not develop their application market because all their energy was devoted to their paradigm change.
Most BB users I know absolutely loved the keyboard, and thought it worked much better than a touchscreen. It was also considered by many business users to be the only phone useable for business use because you could actually type quickly on it.
Those users also abandoned the phone, but I don't know if it was because of the touchscreen.
You can have a keyboard and a touchscreen at the same time. I actually loved my keyboard/touchscreen android phone. I still want a real keyboard. I miss it.
I think the reason they failed was "app store." Also they had a really crappy interface compared to iPhone and Android.
>> You can have a keyboard and a touchscreen at the same time. I actually loved my keyboard/touchscreen android phone. I still want a real keyboard. I miss it.
I can't imagine that a BBRY Q10 running BB 10.2.1 would not have more appeal than the android keyboard/touchscreen that you had.
RIM(Research in Motion) was renamed/rebranded as BBRY(Blackberry) in 2013
BRRY(the company) is NOT dead.
They are still very much alive and still making and selling smartphones and other products/services.
IMO, they are doing a much better job of making them(smartphones), then they are of selling them, and if they continue on that trajectory they could well end up ... dead ... but
FWIW - Let's not put the body in the cooler until were sure that its actually not breathing.
Google/Android left phones with keyboards to become an Apple follower (along with their own innovations) and thrived. RIM didn't die because they tried, they died because the new stuff they put out was crap.
I guess I really don't understand her mobile strategy. Yahoo is a constellation of tons of different services and they all belong in different apps. Are they going to have one big "Yahoo Mega-App?"
That makes even less sense than Facebook's central app, because at least you can look at Facebook as offering a cohesive, singular service. But even Facebook is unbundling because it realizes that it can offer a better experience if each app just focuses on a single component of their platform.
Do they really? They even kept that stupid Summly app, rebranding it as Yahoo News Digest. Then there's Aviate, Tumblr... I don't know, what else did they buy?
Was Summly that awful? I should hate my words to be crushed into some newspeak by some algorithm but I am not a journalist. I also like to read words written by a real human being. Hence Summly is not for me. However, I can see it appealing to those that get their news from 'free newspapers' etc. Was Summly that bad? Or was it the problem of 'child prodigy get rich' that gave it a bad reputation?
