Yahoo Talent Exodus Accelerates as Marissa Mayer’s Turnaround Flounders | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo Talent Exodus Accelerates as Marissa Mayer’s Turnaround Flounders

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137 pointsSeanBoocock127 comments

One of the most visible signs of Yahoo's weakness was its strategy to hire big media stars...I'm aware that Yahoo News brings in a godly amount of pageviews to articles on its site...but that hasn't translated to giving a more noticeable platform for its media stars. Since Yahoo hired Katie Couric, who was once a huge star on network news, the most I've seen her name in the wild is in Reddit ads promoting her interviews. I can't think of any other popular news organization that has had to resort to Reddit ads to promote its stars.

And remember David Pogue of the New York Times? His opinion was always spread widely when he was at the NYT...I've literally never seen any thing that he's written tweeted in the wild since he's been at Yahoo (though once in awhile I'll check in to read his stuff, which is actually still quite good and better than the NYT's current tech columnist).

I know cultivating a media brand is different than building and maintaining your core engineering team...but the media push was one of the big initiatives from Mayer and it went pretty badly.

FWIW, Couric had been kicked off network news and moved back to daytime.

These hires were part of Yahoo's content creation strategy which also included producing TV shows. They just wrote off $42 million for the TV shows[1]. These expensive celebrities are probably next as I doubt they can justify their cost on a shrinking platform.

[1] http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/yahoo-misses-q3-earning...

I watched a few episodes of Community from the new season. Yahoo butchered it. That show suffered multiple bad decisions and quality went up and down like a yo-yo, but Yahoo's attempt at reviving it is by far the worst. If this is representative of the majority of their attempts at content creation, I can see why they would want to step away from that.

That's a pretty subjective viewpoint there. Even after losing several cast members, it was still very highly rated and I personally thought the job Harmon and crew did to push through that was amazing.

Community Season 6 was actually pretty good. Especially compared to "The Gas Leak Year." It was designed to close the series gracefully, after actors were already exiting.

35 year old overweight single women from the midwest who spend most of their time with their cats have no interest in Katie Couric. Yahoo needs to understand their demographics and cater to them. They waste too much money and resources trying to be something they are not.

I've always thought the best play for Yahoo would have been to swing right and become a "Fox News" of the internets.

All of these tech/acquihires and throwing good money at Stanford/Google pedigree will not work. Yahoo does not have the culture, infrastructure or the talent to compete with Google/Facebook or become a Netflix. They are far behind on many fronts and instead of investing in areas that will be hard for them to compete, they should invest in areas that they are already successful (Fantasy sports, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance).

The millennials who have already decided Yahoo is not cool are not going to change their mind because of SNL episodes, community or Katie Couric. Mayer needs to understand this.

Another typical sign of its current problems, perhaps an involuntary display of a state of denial, is the ad campaign they are running all over the bay area, with just their logo, no message, nothing.

I'm curious: how bad is it to leave a new job soon after starting (because you realize the product isn't as great as what you thought it would be/too much competition in space)? When you are a high performer, you really don't want to waste everyone's time if you end up in this bad situation. What is the professional thing to do?

Asking because the article mentioned some people staying only for a few weeks. In a small startup, not seeing traction would be reasonable cause for departure since your paycheck directly depends on it. In a large company, things are not always interrelated in the short term. So there is more time to try out things. I guess the question is: how long should one try to make a new job work?

As long as you can justify in your next interview. Your employer will want to know whether you jumped ship to top off your salary, or if you really weren't getting what you put in. Take a case of stagnation as a chance to try something big. Even if it doesn't work, it makes for a compelling narrative.

It only really matters in the eyes of potential future employers, so consider how it looks to them. Having done interviews and resume screening myself, I wouldn't balk too hard at one quick departure, but I would want to hear a good explanation for why you left so soon. The job and/or company being very clearly something different from what you were told would be a good one.

Multiple quick departures in a row are kind of a red flag for somebody looking to hire a full-time employee, as opposed to a consultant of some kind.

It would seem to matter not. Have a look at JMs career trajectory following his (first) exit from Amazon. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmccormack Amazon welcomes him back after a two month tour of duty with Yahoo. Six months later he goes to Google. He's got some obvious next steps: Apple, Tesla, Facebook, Snapchat?! Throw in some sentimental stints back at old Amazon, that's a career baby!

It matters to the people you leave, too. When people spend a lot of energy recruiting you, doing due diligence on you and you on them, it (hopefully) builds a fair amount of trust and mutual respect. When you leave after a short time, that trust is violated, often in both directions. Barring something somewhat unusual (cough Clinkle cough), people are generally going to be very transparent with people they hire to help with a turn-around. When you have every opportunity to determine whether or not you're up for a challenge and then 3 months later are like "nah, actually, too hard" it will probably have some effect, at least with people that were closely involved in your hiring.

I've also seen where people come into a role being promised autonomy and once they start finding that they're stuck into a pre-existing strategy or hierarchy that doesn't want to change.

Trust has already been broken there. If the job is a bait and switch, why would you expect someone to stay if they have other options?

> people are generally going to be very transparent with people they hire to help with a turn-around.

Really? I've never had an interview where I've been told the team has constant high pressure arbitrary deadlines, a culture of micromanagement, a lack of autonomy, no career progression, low skilled colleagues, etc. Yet these kind of companies are the majority.

I suppose it could seem unprofessional to the company you're leaving, depending on your perspective on things. But unless you're in a very tight-knit community, exactly what your previous company thinks of you usually has no relevance to your future employment options - specifically because it's a matter of perspective whether the departure was justified or not, and whether you'd be likely to leave the new company.

If your field really is that tight-knit, then you'll have to use your best judgement. If the employer you're leaving really is that bad, then you have to trust that everyone knows it, and nobody will blame you for leaving them. They might more wonder why you hadn't heard about how they really were ahead of time. Or if you actually are uncooperative, unprofessional, or otherwise unproductive, expect that to get around too.

I have two quick departures (4 months and 5 months respectively) on my resume and it has caused me a lot of problems. In both cases, the companies that I joined pulled unbelievable bait-and-switches on me, and my job was essentially unrelated to the job they described during the hiring process. I tried to stick it out in each case, and I even received excellent performance reviews during both short stints, but the burnout and the effect on my mental health of suffering through such egregious bait-and-switch situations was too much and in both cases I couldn't sustain working any longer and so I quit.

I want to find a place to work for a long time, but the quality of software work these days is laughably poor. There are so many ways a job can be bad -- not just normal bad, where you grind it out for 40 hours (I've done plenty of that too and lasted long stints at previous employers), but really, seriously soul-crushingly bad -- that it has made me considerably more paranoid about the motivations and red flags that employers reveal during interviews and hiring.

In general though, most people are willing to at least ask me to explain my unusual resume, and any time my technical skills are evaluated early on, they can see that I know what I am talking about and it goes OK after that.

I'm not sure what lessons this has taught me. Everyone says not to quit a bad job until you know for sure that you have another job lined up. But even though I've quit two jobs in a row and had to live through very hard circumstances and very long, demoralizing spells of unemployment, I still don't actually think my overall life would have been better if I had continued to allow myself to be so egregiously mistreated in those past jobs. I still think the awful grinding-out-the-unemployment stuff has been at least an order of magnitude better than enduring mistreatment, even though it hasn't been good.

> how long should one try to make a new job work?

Depends on your mandate going in. Stick-to-itivness is a desirable leadership quality. Most industries consider business cycles in annual terms. If you can't move the needle in 24-36 months, do everyone a favor and move-on. A 3 week stint however, is not worth putting on your CV.

  > Stick-to-itivness

Tenacity.

vocabularity

"Stick-to-itivness" is a perfectly cromulent word.

Yes Professor Smith, and Thank You!

Resilience

When I'm interviewing someone who bounced from a job I ask them about it. A lot depends on their answer. Everyone has different levels of introspection and self awareness. Experiencing a job where, after a very short while you left that job[1], means that something reasonably powerful didn't work out. How the candidate deals with that speaks to their ability to understand themselves and the situations they are in.

Bottom line, it could encourage me to hire someone or not hire someone, just like any other bit of experience in their background. Just in this case its more about them and less about what they did in that previous role.

[1] and the company is still in business, and it didn't announce it killed the division you joined just as you joined Etc.

how long should one try to make a new job work?

This question really speaks to me right now! One of the major reasons I was hired into my current job of less than two months is that I have lot of experience working in a very process-heavy environment and I'm tasked with developing appropriate processes for the pretty chaotic company I'm with now.

While I'm sure I can turn them around, there are challenges coming from every direction. The situation is somewhat worse than I expected and I need to have a frank talk with the owner about what timeframe he expects to see a significant move of the needle. I've made a few minor improvements in the 6 weeks I've been here, but people's attitudes are going to be the hardest to change.

I give it a year.

If you're out of there in less than 2 weeks, I would just leave it off the resume entirely.

I'd say it depends on why.

My personal experience is a cto totally lied about a job. I was hired to do ml and ended up being a generic backend dev; nothing I worked on required any ml knowledge. I quit after 8 weeks. Oddly enough, the cto -- an early google engineer too -- was very butthurt. He told me I was childish for expecting the job description to match the job; I told him he was a liar and that was the end of that working relationship.

I definitely wouldn't be bothered by someone saying "it wasn't a fit" for a job that lasted under 3 months. In fact, I'd probably think less of you for hanging around in a bad situation for 8 months rather than just saying this isn't working and bailing fast. When I hire, if it isn't working, and we can't make it work, ending the situation quickly rather than dragging things out makes the best of a crummy situation.

I used to work for a guy who would advertise a ML/data science job and then tried to convince applicants who made it thru the pipe to take a software engineering role instead.

Didn't get a lot of hires that way.

weird, eh? Must be an Engineering Shortage!

He told me I was childish for expecting the job description to match the job

Seems like he should have been head of marketing, not technology.

Nothing beats 24 hours: (ironically, an ex-Yahoo): http://www.businessinsider.com/why-a-clinkle-executive-quit-...

There was a pretty good long-form piece about Yahoo News in The Baffler a while back [1]. It was by Chris Lehmann, a former YN editor. Although one expects that there's going to be a certain amount of one-sidedness in an account by an employee that was let go, it makes a pretty compelling case that one of Yahoo's flagship properties was disastrously mismanaged. He's highly critical of Mayer: "When editorial knowledge is deployed to elevate advertising, it stops being either editorial, or knowledge; it’s hackery, sold out to the highest, or just the bare middling bidder. [...] Under Mayer’s leadership, the company has brought this ugly art form to sophisticated new heights — and in the process blown through all the basic rudiments of journalistic ethics." There's definitely some corroboration for that view point, BTW. [2]

And it wasn't just the way the firewall between editorial and advertising was dismantled by Mayer. He documents the atrocious working conditions, the extent to which the executives Mayer hired to manage YN had no idea what they were doing, YN's reliance on gimmicks to try to juice page views (which didn't even work), and the way the site's editorial mission seemed to shift from week to week. Lehmann tells a particularly hilarious story about a Yahoo exec trying to pitch a Crossfire-type blog where a rightwing blowhard and a leftwing blowhard would argue with each other. The exec really wants to hire Robert Novak, not realizing the guy had died two years ago.

Anyway, after reading this and then reading the OP...not surprising.

[1] http://thebaffler.com/salvos/purple-reign [2] http://deadspin.com/dan-gilbert-didnt-like-a-yahoo-blog-post...

Maybe, just maybe, it has something to do with the whole "work in our offices or quit" memo sent to virtual employees a while back not paying the dividends she had hoped. Adding insult to injury, perhaps her build-out of a full private nursery in the executive suite staffed with her personal nannies while simultaneously requiring staff to stop working remotely, even part time, had a deleterious impact on morale and work-life balance for those who cannot afford a team of private caretakers for their own families while they commute potentially for several extra hours each day.

Perhaps we are just now starting to see the effects of potential internal management hypocrisy with all these departures, especially the ones that only lasted a brief time.

Of course, this may be speculation on my part, but I can't see how decisions like those would encourage people, especially high performers, to stay long term if this is indicative of Yahoo management philosophy.

Ref:

http://gawker.com/5987043/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-installed-...

http://gawker.com/5986462/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-no-more-wo...

The buzz about their work from home program was that people were abusing it and not doing actual work. I agree, they should be able to work from home, but when she did this, she was basically firing a buncha losers. They should allow people to work from home again, though.

What proof is there that these people were "losers" and slackers as you put it?

Either way, you're right about needing to open it back up. The impact to morale overall must have been huge when these people had to scramble to protect their livelihood.

>What proof is there that these people were "losers" and slackers as you put it?

Shitty Yahoo products.

And your evidence that they were shitty due to the remote workers exclusively is what, exactly?

You're asking for evidence to back up an assertion that was not made.

It appears there were at least some insiders who agreed that there was a lot of dead weight [1]. What I wonder is who's budgets these people were on? Shouldn't it be in some organizational unit's interest to cut people who are not productive, regardless of where they work from?

* [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-yahoos-confess-marissa-may...

> Shouldn't it be in some organizational unit's interest to cut people who are not productive, regardless of where they work from?

Well... if you have, say, 80 people working for you, and you discover 15 are dead weight... cutting them would mean you can do your division's job with 65 people. You wouldn't have any room to argue for budget increase. That's a cynical view, but one I've seen played out a couple of times over the years in my travels.

Firing people is emotionally taxing. That's honestly probably 85% of the reason why shitty employees can keep their jobs. Managers hate firing people and most will procrastinate endlessly if that option is available.

This is great news, I'm saved!

> What proof is there that these people were "losers" and slackers as you put it?

VPN usage statistics. We have to take Y!'s word for it, but most news stories about the policy change say that Mayer looked at usage statistics to find that many work-from-home employees were working less than full time. I can't find a cite right now, but I thought I read that several employees would go weeks without logging in once.

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-marissa-mayer-figured-out...

Well not every job is well suited for remote work. As a developer, you know if they're not cranking out code. You miss sprint goals. Sprint demoes are a disaster. You don't see commits. When QA or design work from home, it's not as easy to tell whether or not they're actually working. That's been my experience at least.

That said, I think it was a poor choice to abolish the WFH policy.

When QA or design work from home, it's not as easy to tell whether or not they're actually working

How do you tell whether or not they're actually working when they're in the office?

It's difficult to manage something if you don't have measurable outputs. The emphasis is on the word "measurable". Give a manager some way of objectively measuring what you're doing and most of them will be happy.

It's easy for them to measure office hours or lines of code or commits or bugs fixed, etc. This does not logically imply that the person is actually doing any "real" work but it creates the perception and it's easy to measure and so managers are fond of it.

At the end of the day you need to manage the perception that you're working or not working. When you're not working in an office it's even worse. You just lost the easiest way: creating the perception that you "put in the hours". Don't make this difficult for your manager. That's my experience anyway.

If QA or design doesn't work, you still hit sprint goals and have non-disastrous sprint demoes?

I would say there's a more universal difficulty of understanding the productivity of jobs different from our own.

Surely a design or QA lead would easily detect when someone is not actually working?

When designers don't work, your developer or your marketing department (or whoever they produce designs for), they will tell you they are missing the designs and are blocked for this or that.

When QA does not work, there will be very few bug reports, and your support will see the number of tickets shoot up.

But you must have some process in place to really identify the bottleneck. Something I assume a big company should have.

So fire the people who are abusing it, along with people working on site who aren't hitting the performance Yahoo wants. Don't tar everyone with the same brush

The problem with this is, how would she know who was abusing the work-from-home facility and who was not? Mayer would have to rely on the dinosaur of Yahoo middle-management, which at best is a self-serving beast.

Mayer did not trust them, and hence her fiat action of banning working from home.

Fire the managers you can't trust first then. I get that Yahoo's internal culture at the time was highly dysfunctional, but I very much doubt the root cause of that was Marisa Mayer not being able to roam the floors and check nobody is using Facebook.

It doesn't seem that any of the people who left were remote workers. I mean--maybe they had felt some solidarity with their remote-working coworkers--but I suspect that Yahoo's problems run a little deeper.

The company promised a turnaround that hasn't happened. The people leaving largely seem to have been in positions to have a strong sense for when and how such a turnaround would come to fruition--and their actions suggest to me a lack of confidence.

I do agree that the memo didn't really help the company in any notable way. Whatever it could have helped was surely more than offset by what it could have--and did--hurt.

Banning remote workers may not be the catalyst, but it may indeed be a valid symptom . When that memo happened I actually thought to myself that, hmm, that doesn't seem to be the kind of company I'd like to work for. And now along with this story, the first thing I remembered was that memo as it left a pretty strong impression over me.

And don't get me wrong, I understand why some companies may want people to always be present in office during business hours. But what bothered me the most was the tone, because that memo was a threat against people that, for better or worse, probably helped build Yahoo and made it what it is today.

In other words, the morale of employees could have been affected by such decisions. And unhappy employees in the creative sector are not productive employees. So you could say that they missed the turnaround. But what if they missed that turnaround because of how things are managed internally? It's not that far fetched.

The people leaving according to article are quite high ranking. I don't think they would care for work from home and in case they do yahoo would make exception for them.

And perhaps putting extra emphasis on educational background over talent and achievements is running things aground.

"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."

http://www.businessinsider.com/mayer-refused-to-hire-gwyneth...

To be fair, I would balk at hiring Paltrow, too, but that's because she's a crazy person who gives unsafe advice, not because she didn't go to college.

Both your and the parent's suggested explanations seem to me to be more about pushing an agenda than an actual explanation. I'm sure there's no one reason that people are leaving Yahoo. It's possible that their interest in educational background in hiring and retention, and/or the work-from-work policy that received several orders of magnitude more media coverage than its actual effect on employees, have been factors in some departures. But it's much more likely that the biggest factor overall, and probably the single most important factor to most of the people who have left, is the fact that Yahoo is a zombie. There's little or nothing interesting happening there, the company is shrinking steadily, and its long-term prospects are not going to inspire or excite anyone. At this point, it's basically another AOL; the days of it being an important player are long gone and will not be coming back regardless of who the CEO is, what kind of strategy they pursue, or just how long the company continues to exist on paper (which may well be a very long time; e.g., AOL). It's over, and it's been over for a long time. People who have other career options don't tend to stick around such places, and it's hard to blame anyone for leaving.

Maybe... or it could be a thousand other things. Not that I was a fan of what you're talking about, of course.

Yahoo has been poorly managed for several CEOs, it's not a new turn of events. She hasn't helped things, but it's not like Yahoo was a rocket ship before she was hired. She had an amazing opportunity to change things while Alibaba was keeping Wall Street happy, but that window has closed and she has nothing to show for it other than making herself very very wealthy. She'll be gone soon.

I missed why Yahoo! divested themselves of their large ownership stake of Alibaba, why did they do that?

They haven't fully, but want to spin it off into its own company so that taxes don't have to be paid. That's not going well for them (the IRS didn't say they were A OK) and meanwhile BABA shares have tanked (ended the first trading day at $93.89 and is currently at $69.75).

tl;dr Mayer can no longer hide behind everyone's hopes and dreams of a monster Alibaba IPO.

Expected to happen at end of year because shareholders basicly insisted on it.

Yahoo owns a minority stake in Alibaba - a huge fast growing company. Yahoo is worth $30 billion but the Alibaba stake is worth $23 billion* and they also have a minority stake in Yahoo Japan worth $2 billion* and $5 billion in cash.

It doesn't make sense for an operating company to hold investments worth many times more than their core business. Yahoo today trades more on what happens to Alibaba than anything Yahoo management has control over. This has perverse effects like huge management incentive bonuses based solely on Alibaba's success. Not to mention they would have saved billions in taxes if they had spun it off years ago.

*-pre-tax

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/21/yahoos-business-now-worth-les...

> Maybe, just maybe, it has something to do with the whole "work in our offices or quit" memo sent to virtual employees a while back not paying the dividends she had hoped.

I really doubt it. The "no work from home" edict applied to about 150 employees total; and the vast majority of them were deservedly kicked out. There were a handful who were doing a tremendous job, and the were allowed to WFH.

[citation needed]

It's not the personnel affected, it's the level of morale it affected was my point. People see hypocritical leadership decisions and look for the exit right away usually.

"another worried about the ability of managers to stanch the flow of valued employees."

That is the problem right there: shitty managers at Yahoo. I spent a few years there, and despite being in the industry for many years, I've yet to find a more dysfunctional setup. Managers have absolutely zero accountability at Yahoo. In any other place, if engineers start leaving a manager, it would be cause for concern; if too many do so, the manager is axed. But in Yahoo, shitty managers hang around, hopping from project to project, biding their time till they can find a new project to shit on.

And the tech stack?!? Don't even get me started.

Yahoo needs to cut out its management layers, and reduce the manager headcount by 75%. Only then will it start turning around.

what is the tech stack...

Primarily Yahoo Pipes with a PHP and COBOL backend. All stored in Microsoft SourceSafe, if the project you're working on is even using a VCS.

> Microsoft SourceSafe

is that still a nightmare to work with remotely?

I don't know if you're serious.

He is bad at joking. E.g. Where do you think Hadoop comes from?

> And the tech stack?!? Don't even get me started.

To me, technical mediocrity at yahoo is the number one problem.

What does Yahoo do?

Microsoft has Windows, Office and Xbox.

Amazon has massive web server and product distribution platforms.

Apple has OS X and iPhone.

Google has Android, search, ads, and an online office suite.

What does Yahoo do? I guess they have some long-time email users and a well-liked stock tracking platform?

Don't forget fantasy sports tracking!

Their fantasy football platform, at least, is the best of the ones I've tried. Lots of obvious product placements and ads, but good UI and UX, well-gamified weekly/seasonal trophies, and interesting statistical stuff I haven't seen anywhere else.

I agree, it also does a lot of little things right that other platforms mess up. For example, it's the only platform that doesn't penalize a team's defense for scores that occur when they're not on the field (e.g. an interception returned for a touchdown). It is, unfortunately though, an unholy browser memory hog as well.

And Flickr.

From 2013, revenue sources (quarterly):

    Banner Ads: $423M

    Search Revenue: $403M

    Other: $245M

    2014 total revenue for year was 4.6 Billion

Apparently they're selling a few billion dollars worth of ads.

Never thought the web ads market is big enough for both Google and Yahoo.

There are very few people with a correct conception of the scale of the web.

A lot.

Millions use Yahoo website daily and Yahoo email.

Yahoo is the fourth/fifth most visited website in the world. WORLD.

Yahoo's ONLY problem is that they want to be a leader in their industry. If they did not and were content with milking their content and user base, they would be boring but very profitable.

Yahoo can deploy many products to its audience and be a leader again.

Serious question: Can they, though?

I'm not doubting if Yahoo could build (or buy) some cool tech products and put them in front of their large audience. But the real question is whether their audience is the sort who would bite and eagerly adopt new technology.

While I am sure there are exceptions, I think the bulk of people visiting Yahoo and using Yahoo properties are there because they can't or don't want to change things up. I think how many of those hits to yahoo.com come from library computers that are hardwired to visit it as the homepage, from my parents computers, from people who will load the yahoo.com page to type "Gmail" in the search bar "because that's how the Internet works" etc.

The early adopter set that's more consciously in control of their digital destiny and eager to try new things are already giving their eyeballs to Apple, Google, and the swarms of shiny startups orbiting their ecosystems.

I'm not celebrating this fact. I wish there were more tech centers of gravity to choose from, and I am saddened that Yahoo (along with so many others) is unable to break through.

It is hard to build hit products. Think about FB what is its last internally built and independently famous hit product? YC had to invest in almost 1000 companies and yet they probably have a handful of hit consumer products? How many products should Yahoo shell out before they hit another consumer sensation?

News and sports with comments.

From an engineering perspective, it's probably cooler/better to work on tech stuff (as the other companies have), rather than news or stocks or sports, where the underlying tech isn't as important as how it's marketed.

And Tumblr

A month or two ago they plastered pretty much every advertising space (fixed signs and city buses) in my city with huge purple posters that said YAHOO!. A huge, all purple private charter bus even drive through town.

Google (as opposed to Alphabet) really only has Ads, everything else is just to help get those ads in front of more people more often.

In the sense that both Google and Yahoo are mostly focused about showing adds, they are not that different. Google has just more means of showing ads that are more effective, and viewed as cooler by its users.

> Google (as opposed to Alphabet) really only has Ads, everything else is just to help get those ads in front of more people more often

Actually they have like ~1.37 Yahoos worth of non-ad revenue[1][2]

[1] https://investor.google.com/earnings/2015/Q2_google_earnings...

[2] https://investor.yahoo.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=92308...

Clearly you've never experienced the joy and wonder of Yahoo Answers

Why does my arm shake and turn bright red when I'm eating dirt?

http://www.listsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/good-qu...

I always thought that exactly this question was part of their demise. Although the word "synergy" is far overused, it's exactly what Yahoo never managed to create. Google brought people searching content together with people offering solutions. Facebook brought people seeking entertainment together with people offering entertainment.

Yahoo had it all - email, answers, news, stocks, search, and they even invented Hadoop back then to sift through all their data. They just never had any larger vision to integrate any of their assets properly to solve a grand problem.

They always just threw ever more noodles to the wall and tried to see which ones would stick.

There's zero coherency in anything they do, for me it's just a diverse bunch of poorly maintained and integrated services that's purely kept together with duct tape, page rank and marketing hacks stacked on top of each other.

It's the kind of slow death when there's just enough recurring revenue left that it's hard to screw things completely up, even with a league of completely dilbertized MBAs in charge battling each other until the last of talented people have left.

They also have, as I understand it, a metric fuckton of content sources (not including Flickr, Tumblr and so on) and a very highly-tuned content and advertising presentation system, plus the default footprint on various browsers. Essentially, they have a lot of default eyeballs and use that for advertising. Unfortunately, they've relied on rent-seeking in that space, and Apple and Facebook's recent moves may bite directly into their one profit center.

Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Finance are quality products.

Yahoo Sports was a quality product,until the redesign that I understand Mayer micromanaged. Now I find it unusable and I find myself going to nfl.com, mlb.com, or ESPN instead.

what's wrong about it besides the blurred background photos?

It must be terrible if you are going to ESPN.com instead. I can't stand going there any more since they redesigned the site earlier this year.

I used to read Yahoo! News too, but the quality became too low and the bias too annoying. I still use Yahoo! email as my secondary account.

My Dad used to spend time on Yahoo!'s portal too, mostly for stocks and movie information. I never thought it was worth going directly to Yahoo, but if a Google search sent me there for a stock then I'd read it.

The original "synergy" idea was more about being a portal. But those don't exist anymore because search completely superceded it. It seems too late for Yahoo! to revive its search business. It isn't a good aggregator or content discovery platform because there are stronger competitors like Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook.

Flickr

I think 30 percent of their business involves promoting anything Kardashian-related. On some days there are no less than 4 or 5 stories about them on the front page of their "news".

Going back on my time-machine, I recall when she was first hired.

Silicon Valley was abuzz with excitement, thinking Yahoo would once again become a tech-juggernaut that it once was, competing with Facebook, Google, etc.

Truth be told, the previous CEOs geared up the company to be more like Buzzfeed than like Google, making Yahoo a media company.

Granted, Yahoo would never be in the same circles as the common tech-juggernauts, but this is the natural evolution of companies.

Monsanto once used to make poison, now they force their fake-seeds to feed the world.

Deep down, we all wanted Yahoo to go back to being something, afterall, it was a cool company once upon a long 1990s time ago, but Mayer was probably the worst hire of them all.

In the end, it doesn't matter though. She has a vested interest somewhere north of US200million and her failure at Yahoo will be celebrated when Twitter hires her as "Head of UX" once someone like Carl Icahn buys Yahoo shares to spinoff Alibaba faster and then spinoff: Yahoo Finance (Bloomberg), Flickr(Facebook), etc.

Nah, she'll become a VC.

> Jon McCormack: At the end of last year, Mayer scored a coup in the hiring of the Amazon star to be in charge of all of Yahoo’s mobile engineers. He only stayed a few weeks.

Ouch.

I don't know anything about him, but I would love to hear the story about how bad/hopeless a situation must need to be in order to warrant leaving so soon.

Every body can sail a ship in good waters.

She has been a CEO of a publicly traded company for 3 years. One that was "seemingly" in trouble. 3 years is a long time for a company that was founded 3 years ago. Yahoo is 21 years old and still alive (and somewhat doing well).

I've got a lot of respect for Yahoo's ability to survive despite being such a value destroying machine.

This is what happens when you read a childrens book in front of all your employees http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-childrens-book-...

Maybe Twitter/Yahoo should team up or Snapchat. Get these teens some ads. Yahoo's mobile strategy is a struggle, maybe some partnerships are in order.

I honestly believe Mayer could do it but since none of their apps are FB/Instagram/WhatsApp nor do they have the traction as these juggernauts, I'd suggest a partnership.

Come on Yahoo. Find a niche, make some money.

Losing these talented people. Maybe it's because they didn't perform or didn't realize the large task they they'd be responsible. Or maybe Mayer only hired them to steward a certain project (this wouldn't explain the quick exits but not all of these exits are quick). Mayer is a work horse. The issue might be with the hires and the difficulty of tasks.

I think that was the idea behind the Tumblr acquisition.

It's just really, really hard to buy something "hot" without killing it (by external reputation/customer satisfaction or internal employee exodus)

Off the top of my head I can only think of two that worked (Instagram, WhatsApp) and Facebook deserves huge credit for that.

I don't think my own employer (Nokia), even in its heyday, ever successfully acquired and integrated a company.

I agree that is what was behind Tumblr. But it's my belief that integration will take time. Yahoo could get ahold of some of the mobile ads, they've been investing heavily in mobile development. Twitter is about to make a big push with Dorsey (he's smart enough to know that's where he competes) and so is Snapchat, which is why I mentioned them.

Yahoo tried to be a snap chat channel but got voted off the island.

OK, armchair CEOs: how would you turn Yahoo! around?

Sell the company if anyone is willing to pay a premium to the current share price. Otherwise liquidate most of it, perhaps keeping a small rump if that rump can churn out enough cash to keep the lights on and a small dividend flowing. An ad company can be run profitably with very little ongoing investment and minimal staffing, and that's all Yahoo is at this point.

There's not going to be any turnaround. All that trying to turn it around is doing is enriching the senior executives at the shareholders' expense. The above plan will maximize returns to the shareholders, not hiring another whiz-bang CEO to make a nine-course gourmet meal out of this pile of fetid dung.

If this still holds true: http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/study-gmail-users-you...

Then I would swing right and turn Yahoo into the Fox News of internets.

Get bunch of Radio talk show hosts and conservative commentators, give them multiple platforms and let them loose.

Get some cheap TLC reality shows that are exclusive and really try an appeal to Yahoo's current demographics.

Instead of trying to appeal to the educated and affluent already entrenched in Google and Facebook, you invest in what you have and expand that market.

This will create growth and momentum in the company. Once you have that, you compete with Google and Facebook.

What exactly did she turn around? Yahoo still feels like a hot mess.

I feel bad about such news. Ever since Marissa Mayer came they were starting to fix things with their services. Like for example Flickr was resurrected. If Marissa Mayer will leave, or if they narrow their focus, Flickr is probably not that profitable so it can stagnate again or be sold or killed. Which would be a shame.

Once Yahoo was willing to stop development of their own search engine and ad platform, I knew they were doomed.

Yahoo's ad service was a lot nicer than MSFT Ad Center and nearly as nice as AdWords. They gave up on one of the most strategic positions they had.

There is a pile of other stupidity there before and after that others could speak about, but with Yahoo making a deal with Google, it will only continue to be dumb.

I believe the entire culture, history, and everything at Yahoo is predisposed to failure and is beyond fixing. It's like a losing sports team who has a history and culture of losing. It takes an entire overturning of everything usually to fix it.

> Yahoo's ad service was a lot nicer than MSFT Ad Center and nearly as nice as AdWords. They gave up on one of the most strategic positions they had.

You can thank Carol Bartz for that. She should be enshrined in the same pantheon as Carly Fiorina.

Is this one of those glass cliffs?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff

Men have no exclusivity on being bad CEOs. Look at Carly Fiorina.

For something to flounder doesn't it have to first exist? There was no turnaround.

Don't know why you're getting "greyed out", but without writing an essay about it, this

This is really too bad for diversity.

>>Just last week, Yahoo lost two senior women execs — development head Jackie Reses to Square and marketing partnerships head Lisa Licht.

Before that, another exec once close to Mayer — CMO Kathy Savitt — left for a job at a Hollywood entertainment company, although sources said that was due in part to increased estrangement between her and Mayer.

How is that bad for diversity? Reses landing at Square is not a bad thing for diversity. The others don't seem like they'll land at bad spots either. They were poached or left of their own accord, not fired. If Yahoo's the only game in town, then yeah, it's bad for diversity. But Yahoo's not the only game in town.

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