>There’s just one example everyone can think of — Apple — but that effort took nearly a decade to show results
It didn't take a decade. Apple was months away from bankruptcy when Jobs went back.
It didn't take a decade. Apple was months away from bankruptcy when Jobs went back.
I despair that the tech world is being run by no-nothing teenagers credentialed solely by their family's bank accounts.
Thanks for calling out this cringe-worthy assertion.
Similarly slashing the complex lines of offerings, selling the original colored iMacs at bigger profit margins than Apple had seen in years, etc were all things he pushed in less time than Mayer has been at Yahoo! Of course it's not fair to expect a new CEO of a troubled company to live up to that standard, but it's completely false to say it took him 10 years to "show results".
Just look at Apple's 10k filing from 1999. Net sales were hugely negative in 1997, in the black in 1998 and doubled in 1999.
http://investor.apple.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=912057-99-1...
Granted, this was a longer time frame, between 1997 and 2003/4, but there were consistent signs along the way that improvements were happening and Jobs' decisions on where to make cuts and where to focus were correct. I think it's hard to say the same thing for Yahoo.
One of the things Jobs brought back to Apple was strategy - not just a strategy for specific products, but a focus on creating certain kinds of customer experiences and expectations.
Mayer hasn't done anything similar at Yahoo. She's been a tactical manager, not a strategic CEO. She keeps trying to do strategy with things like Project Index, but most of her acquisitions and ideas seem to have been impulse buys - arguably on the premise that the typical Yahoo user is someone a lot like herself.