Ask HN: So Marissa failed to revive Yahoo what would YOU have done different?
If you were the CEO what would you have done to revive the grand old dame of the Internet?
Doing that sounds cold, but it would buy you more time to right the ship generally. Small layoffs over 2-3 years causes way more moral issues. Like making significant changes to long standing working environments/policies. If you have to, do it early and once, don't keep ripping off band-aids or morale will be shit.
Acquire only a company that is either #1 or #2 in their market and can help extend the 2-3 things you defined up front. If the company/product isn't related then don't make the acquisition.
She should also have not gotten so involved with micro managing every group and detail. Hire the right team on the executive staff that sees the vision and can get their staff on board and lead them not manage them. Help support your staff in any way they ask but do not interfere by getting involved with developer interviews or other processes like that, it will only serve to slow down the process and cause failure not prevent it. Not to mention it screams out that you do not trust even the people you brought in, so then why should their direct reports trust them.
As much as you may want to take a 5 year approach you just can't do that in a public company. You have to nail the quarter or they'll lynch you.
"What do you mean more?" her husband says. "I can't afford more."
"I mean more better," the producer replies.
The problem isn't so much WHAT Mayer did, but how badly she did it. She wanted to boost Yahoo's video division, for example, so she (a) paid Katie Couric (someone my Mom really liked) more money than God, (b) licensed the streaming rights to SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE (which needs to be put out of its misery) and (c) decided to fund a season of COMMUNITY (which nobody ever watched). Now THERE'S a compelling product offering. WhoTF would watch that?
She redesigned the site to make it mobile-friendly-- which made it almost unreadable for desktop users. Apparently no one told her that browsers send information about what type of device is reading the site. I liked the tech news, but it became so painful that I just gave up.
(She also killed a lot of the personalization features, which is what had attracted people.)
She bought a lot of tiny companies, most of which made products that were never integrated-- and whose employees left as soon as their employment agreements expired.
She bought Tumblr... then had absolutely no idea what to do with it, and ended up not doing anything. Shut down their sales force to integrate it with the Yahoo sales force (which didn't want to sell Tumblr)-- and then realized they'd have to restart the Tumblr sales force to monetize at all.
She inherited an email system that was a hot mess and made it a different type of hot mess-- with enough glitches that people couldn't rely on it for their email.
A lot of the ideas were reasonable, but the execution was so horrific that there was never any value-add.
Why is Yahoo so politicized and who cares? I think Yahoo is no different from any other large corporation. It's just that the players are engaging and using the media a lot more for their stupid rich asshole power struggles that 99% of earth doesn't care about.
Even the good Yahoo products, like Finance, as ridiculously bloated and buggy.