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Comment by exelius | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the failure is on Mayer; Yahoo was a walking zombie before she arrived. They were the last remnant of the dot-com boom -- a media company without a significant role in content, advertising, shopping or computing. They had no technological advantage, or really any foundation for a competitive advantage to set them apart from the rest of the market.

Quite simply, Yahoo was culturally never a technology company. They defined themselves as a "media" company in the mid 90s to avoid drawing Microsoft's ire, but they said it for so long they believed it. They underinvested in technology throughout the late 90s and early 2000s, and by that time Google was the behemoth that Yahoo should have been. Yahoo is only around today because they recognized the emergence of China and made a lucky investment in Alibaba. Without that investment, Yahoo would have gone bust years ago.

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I think there's plenty to make a case that Mayer specifically was a large negative vs Yahoo on twin-earth where someone else was CEO.

Many(?) aquisitions were her plan. From the article:

> goodwill impairment charges of $1.2 billion

This means since 2012 Mayer has overseen the aquisition of companies for at least $1.2b more than their book-value worth, and now that value is gone. Paid a premium for brands and then lost the value of those brands.

~~~

> “She believes she can figure it out on her own,” says a former top Yahoo exec. “Her attitude is, ‘I watch TV shows, so I know TV shows.’” Mayer hired Katie Couric — in a deal reportedly worth up to $10 million per year, mostly in stock — because she personally likes the former TV news personality, without a sense of where and how Couric’s brand would appeal to Yahoo’s user base

~~~

> Mayer was gung-ho on expanding Yahoo’s media business, particularly in video entertainment, approving a Netflix-like slate of scripted original series with a seven-year business plan to recoup the investment

> Yahoo formally exited TV-style entertainment in the third quarter of 2015, taking a $42 million write-down on [original series, deals, then axed Yahoo Screen division]

Her plan.

~~~

> Yahoo in February folded seven digital magazines, including titles covering food and travel, which had been a Mayer pet project. She wanted to launch dozens of vertically oriented magazines, dictating that they use Tumblr-based designs, hoping to better monetize Yahoo’s monthly audience.

Her plan.

> Mayer has positioned those closures as a refocusing on Yahoo’s four strongest content segments — news, sports, finance, and lifestyle — as the company aims to cut 15% of its workforce over the course of 2016. But those were the areas on which Yahoo should have stayed laser-focused all along, according to S&P’s Kessler.

~~~

She had ideas that were either unworkable, poorly implemented, or she was unknowledgeable and hired the wrong people.

> I don't think the failure is on Mayer

That's how this works. She had a job and failed. It's okay to say that. They aren't paying her to not take responsibility. They will be paying her more than you and I and many readers of this comment combined may ever make, just to leave.

Or in other words, she tried to run Yahoo like it was Google. My experience at Google led me to see it as a bunch of poorly executed clones of trendy startups that never ship.

However, their insane ad revenue keeps the boat afloat, and allows them to fund moonshots and failures. Yahoo doesn't have that insane revenue stream so that strategy didn't work out so well there. Am I missing something?

I don't think you're missing anything.

That quote about "throwing rocks" in the article is misleading - Google has done exactly that and succeeded. Their trick is that they're standing in a quarry and don't have to give a damn how many rocks miss as long as they get the occasional hit. Mayer carried over that philosophy to a company with half a dozen rocks and nowhere to get more.

It's telling that Mayer never really revealed a 'plan' for Yahoo ('content' and 'advertising' don't count). She bought a bunch of things, tried a bunch of deals, and clearly expected value to shake out somewhere like it does for Google. But Yahoo doesn't have the time, revenue, or infrastructure to slot in a stream of experiments and wait for a win - their only attributes were staff and users, and they needed to consciously turn that into money. It's closer to Facebook's monetization task than Google's, and regardless of her talent Mayer's background was an impediment to what needed to happen.

I had come here to say this. Look at all the products left dead in Google's wake. Wave is probably one of the biggest "before its time" products that got destroyed, amongst others.

I'd imagine it's easy to learn some bad habits as an executive at Google, where your budget limitless, and you're rewarded for creativity and innovation.

That management style does not fly at a company that has no real product or revenue and is struggling to become profitable.

Most "normal" companies just do not have the luxury of withstanding a huge margin of error on cost vs benefit.

Your evidence convinces me to agree with your position.

On my mind always is the Yahoo Fantasy Football product. In the past few years, the NFL has grown and other fantasy products have grown in value. Why was Yahoo not able to do the same? Why didn't they leverage the value of their sports products?

i interviewed as a front end developer for the yahoo fantasy sports team, the tech interview focused on balancing trees... which IMHO is totally unrelated to front end web dev. you wonder why they lost?

Haha! I heard this kind of experience from some others who interviewed with various companies too. Always wonder why would anyone do that?

You know how many linked lists I've had to traverse in interviews? Wanna know how many linked lists I've had to traverse in my daily work in the last 5 years?

People do that because they're lazy and/or inexperienced interviewers.

What language/field do you work in? Usually one of a language's native data types will be implemented as a linked list, and/or something in a popular library will. That said nobody should ever need to roll their own functions for operating on linked lists.

Linked lists are slow as shit, most of the time. Even things that looks like they are linked lists, i.e. C#'s List<T>, are really dynamic arrays, akin to std::vector. Cache coherency matters.

These days, mostly Objective-C on iOS and Java on Android. Python, mostly, for scripts and quick-and-dirty. Bash for anything else. So, yeah, I haven't seen a lot of linked lists lately. Back in my Microsoft days working mostly with C? You betcha. But I haven't worked there in quite a while.

Good points. I agree completely.

Yahoo has also gone from a genuinely useful and relevant aggregator to a full-blown click-bait shop.

Perhaps this is how she thought Google makes its billions and she wanted to emulate it.

Sad but she will be richer for it.

> They will be paying her more than you and I and many readers of this comment combined may ever make, just to leave.

Who knows that they might be still better off? That is probably the premium needed in order to limit one's losses.

I don't think any of the items you've mentioned really mattered. They were moonshots but the issue with Yahoo, in my mind, is that the investors have different ideas about what they want and how valuable the company really is. And I don't think anything she, or anyone else, did would have made a bit of difference.

There are basically two camps: The founder camps that want to try and prop up the value in order to keep their stake high, and the shark investor camp that are betting on some kind of acquisition (leveraged around the value of Y! Japan and Alibaba) for them to cash in their stake.

The first is the one pushing for all the moonshots (and were the ones moving to hire her in the first place) and the second group would love for her to fail so they can move on with selling the company and get their stake back.

All of the "moonshots" you've mentioned are basically just late game hail mary's that were likely not going to work. IMO, the only way for any CEO to get the business turned around would be to pay off all the shark tank shareholders, strip out as much of the non-core business as they can, and then rebuild the brand from the ground up. However, the founder shareholder camp is firmly against that for a number of reasons, including the fact that many of them would be the ones losing their place at the company.

If you look at the stories of successful turnarounds, they all had unified investors. In the case of Apple, everyone rallied around Jobs because they knew their stake was worthless if they didn't give up on their pet projects. But because of the other investments, there's a solid floor on the value of the company, so all of the key investors know there's a fairly solid floor price on the shares, and everything else is just house money. Why not bet on moonshots in that case?

I think it's conventional to give Mayer the benefit of the doubt, I certainly did for a long time, but if there's one responsibility that lies squarely in the hands of the CEO it's to define a clear, unifying vision for the company that catalyzes employees, users and investors. Mayer failed to do this, I'm not sure she even tried. This whole time she's been fixated on minutia while remaining casually oblivious to the big picture.

Let's compare mission statements. Google's mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". Absolutely. Makes sense. Tesla's mission is to "accelerate the world's transition to sustainable transport". Yes, I can get behind that. Every move Tesla makes reflects their mission.

But what's Yahoo's Mission? (and now that I Google it, it has changed again, for the 25th time) "Yahoo is a guide focused on informing, connecting, and entertaining our users".

I'm Really not sure how to connect that with the sick parade of misfit properties circling the drain we call 'Yahoo'. Though we can all make our best guess, I'm not sure anyone clearly understands what Yahoo is, or what it's trying to be. Not even Marissa Mayer. That's job #1 for a CEO.

> informing, connecting, and entertaining our users

I'm struggling to find a way to distinguish this definition from the Internet writ large. Yes, everyone agrees that Yahoo is on the internet, but nobody can really say why.

Sick parade of misfit properties should become a part of the tech folklore to describe situations like this more clearly.

> I don't think the failure is on Mayer; Yahoo was a walking zombie before she arrived.

But they brought her on and paid her amply to specifically fix this problem. As a result she shares part of the blame for Yahoo's failure to right the ship.

Do you fault the oncologist that doesn't cure advanced metastatic cancer? Or the patient who ignored the signs for years before quitting smoking?

Depends on what was promised, doesn't it?

As someone who normally attributes large amounts of fault to CEOs, that's a fascinating rebuttal, (both in that of the many arguments I hear, it's not often among them, despite making me have to think hard about my stance) so let me try to counter it:

Do I fault the oncologist? Depends. Is there any reasonable expectation of success? Was the failure mode that ended up panning out one that could have been avoided with known courses of action? Was there any "user error"? Similar questions could be asked of Yahoo, and while I realize that I + most people not in a yahoo boardroom probably don't have sufficient visibility or background to answer decisively, never felt the external signals (her management decisions) I've seen demonstrated a course of action I would have been confident in.

Now, that could in and of itself be debated, but I think it's only a peripheral argument to the core point: Is compensation commensurate to the work done? (Which frankly I often think is the subtext in these CEO discussions) This is where a large amount of my personal issue lies, since regardless of which direction I think Yahoo could move, the course of action taken was "iffy" and the compensation extreme. Winding down a lost cause? Could have been done without nearly as much expenditure, and likely with greater shareholder value. Reviving a faltering company? Clearly has not happened. Nevertheless, she is pocketing hundreds of millions for what is by all standards a failed job.

So again, do I fault the oncologist (CEO) for failing to treat the terminal cancer (business failure), if all other options are undesirable? Probably not more than as the parent said, they "share a hand" in it, but to me that does not necessarily entail a declaration of aggressive "fault". Do I pay them exponential multiples of a typical salary to do so? Probably not. I realize that from this 10000 foot view it's a very subjective argument, but to go into line items requires a good deal more time than this post before work allows, and I hope this conveys the idea sufficiently even so.

Thanks for a well-reasoned reply. I think there are two issues here, which I don't often see cleanly separated:

* She took the helm of a failing company; is it reasonable to think that she was going to be able to turn it around, from any rational perspective?

* She was paid a lot of money to turn it around; is a CEO essentially paid to "take the blame" when a company fails /for whatever reason?/

The former is a question of business physics, if you will, and my personal belief is that she is not at fault in any real sense. Yahoo was a company on life support for several years before she got there. Nothing was going to turn that around. If anything, the point of bringing her in was to prop up the company long enough to cash in on Alibaba, and in that she certainly succeeded.

The latter question goes to a debate we should definitely be having regarding executive compensation, and one in which I probably agree with both you and other (somewhat self-righteous) respondents to my comment. She was paid far too much. However, in that she cannot be faulted any more than any other well-compensated CEO in the world, regardless of success. To say that she was paid far too much /to fail/ implies that had she succeeded the pay would have been appropriate. The notion that there's some outcome that warrants executive compensation on that level is not one I subscribe to.

The metaphor doesn't hold: Yahoo! didn't have a fatal disease, it had failing businesses. This oncologist literally cannot cure certain terminal ailments.

A better metaphor might be: Yahoo! was like an old rusted out car. You hire someone who tells you how they can fix this car, you pay them a lot of money, and then they leave the car in worse shape than when you hired them. How much blame do they deserve?

Which is to say: A new CEO absolutely can turn a failing business around -- that's what she was being paid tons and tons of money to do. If Meyer did feel like Yahoo! was a completely lost cause or that she would be incapable of fixing its problems, then she should not have taken their money. As an extremely wealthy person to begin with, she had that luxury.

In short: She absolutely has culpability in the failure of Yahoo!.

I don't blame her for making $80M+ just by being herself. I blame the people who hired her for their magical thinking approach to technology.

She wasn't Yahoo!'s mascot -- she was their CEO. If you're CEO, part of your job is accepting blame when things go badly for your company.

Nobody is blaming her for making $80M. She is blamed for not doing things that would have made it better business.

A CEO absolutely can turn a failing business around? Are you sure of that? I don't feel any cognitive dissonance in my belief that, yes, Mayer is responsible for Yahoo's ongoing failure, but also it's quite likely impossible to turn Yahoo around.

Maybe my phrasing was off, but you're misunderstanding my comment. Stepping into a CEO role means you're saying "I can turn this company around." If you fail at that, then you accept the blame. Don't want to catch blame? Don't accept "impossible" jobs.

Also: Yahoo! had a ton of resources in a rapidly-growing industry. I highly doubt turning Yahoo! around would be impossible. Hard, maybe. And maybe many people had already sort of given up the game and moved on to better things. But, again: If you're CEO, it's your responsibility to turn the company around. That's why you get the big bucks.

I think you're misunderstanding my comment, I explicitly stated that yes, Mayer is to blame.

What I was commenting on was the implication that any company can be turned around. I don't think that's true.

The point that is trying to be made by chasing I think is that Yahoo had a better chance then your average "any" company would have to make a turn around possible.

CEOs get the credit when the company does well and they get paid extraordinarily well. Either they don't deserve that credit and shouldn't get paid nearly as well as they do, or they should get just as much credit when the company fails. None of this heads I win, tails you lose bullshit.

How are you disagreeing with what I said?

> Do you fault the oncologist that doesn't cure advanced metastatic cancer?

Yeah, especially if the "oncologist" told the patient to change their t-shirt to purple to cure the cancer. Eg:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-whe...

" For months, the team had settled on blue and gray. If users were going to read emails on their phones all day long, the thinking went, it was best to choose the most subtly contrasting hues. But now, Mayer explained, she wanted to change the colors to various shades of purple, which she believed better suited Yahoo’s brand.

ccording to one senior executive, Sharma’s body language changed the moment Mayer issued her request. He looked deflated. Altering the color of such an intricate product would require that members of his team spend all night adjusting colors in thousands of places. He slumped off and prepared to tell his staff the bad news. "

That feels like the most anecdotal data point possible. It's also possible that Meyer was right.

But why was she right after all the work was done? If the brand colours were so important surely the design team should have been aware of that beforehand.

Steve Jobs was reportedly only "right" about the choice to use glass screens for the first iPhone after the entire production chain had already been set up to build them with plastic.

Steve Jobs had a proven track record and was spending his own money. Marissa for all her great qualities ain't no Steve.

> It's also possible that Meyer was right

How is "it" possible given the fact that the engineers all made the last minute changes Mayer demanded and the outcome was unsuccessful?

Is it me, or does this sound a lot like bikeshedding?

Yes but who is it trivial for? Sharma or Mayer?

Not an apt analogy at all. Biological systems are fundamentally different from companies. The components of biological systems are neither engineered nor intelligent. The components of companies are either engineered (servers, business processes) or intelligent (employees). That makes it a completely different kind of problem.

>Do you fault the oncologist that doesn't cure advanced metastatic cancer?

If said oncologist has the hubris to claim they can...while accepting $100M+ to do it then, yes...yes I do.

Do you pay the oncologist $80-120M for a botched job?

https://www.themuse.com/advice/negotiating-success-what-to-l...

They had to try and they had to pay somebody. It's entirely possible she was the best person for the job. It's just as entirely possible that the task was impossible, and both her and the board knew it, but had to try their best.

If she knew it was impossible, why did she take the job?

because she got paid so much money she'd be an idiot not to ... ?

Seems unlikely given how rich she already was.

your argument is essentially that she'd have taken a pay cut or worked for free. money matters, and most rich people don't get that way not caring about it.

My argument is nothing of the sort. I am arguing that she was rich enough that money way not a compelling reason for her to choose the job if she didn't think she was likely to be successful.

> It's entirely possible she was the best person for the job.

In hindsight this is tough to accept. Her only job experience was with Google, while that is impressive Google was it's own rocketship that was skyward from the get-go, she had no experience taking over a project on a downward slide and turn it around, she was also demoted while at Google. But hindsight is always 20/20, and maybe no one else more qualified wanted the job at Yahoo...?

"I don't think the failure is on Mayer; Yahoo was a walking zombie before she arrived."

So you're saying that no one can save Yahoo, not in the past three years, not now, and not in the future? The company is simply doomed? Sorry, I don't buy it... Mayer had a leadership position and she failed.

I wonder how other superstar CEOs would have managed Yahoo! differently. What would Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, or even Larry Page each have done differently?

I agree Y! was in decline many years before Mayer was brought in. They went through a few CEOs with the mandate to turn things around and failed even worse.

But to blame that on classification I think is misleading. Can we call Google a technology company (or Ad company)? Was Netscape not a technology company? Was inktomy not a technology company? It does not matter, what mattered is that they didn't confront change and adapt. In some cases your niche is too unique to be able to adapt and you'd essentially have to pivot (but that's hard for big cos --though there are good examples IBM and office equipment or any number of companies which went from manufacturing to basically sales orgs selling things produced elsewhere.

It's less about how the world saw Yahoo than how Yahoo saw itself. They felt that Microsoft's position in technology / the browser was too dominant, so they pivoted towards the "discovery" experience. Problem was, Google provided a better experience by approaching discovery as a technology company and was able to build a sustainable market advantage as a result.

Yahoo also never really sold anything. They were a publisher before there was a good marketplace for online ads. IBM was able to pivot because they had an established sales channel they could mine for dollars; but Yahoo's sales channels never got built out to the same extent before Google came in with a new model and obliterated them.

I think their mistake was thinking "media" would be the cash cow. Everyone was in love with the idea of "portals" Netscape, Excite, AOL, Microsoft (MSN), etc. That somehow they could "capture" the audience and keep them in their portals.

I was amazed that she took the job at all. Yahoo is dead, and has been for a very long time.

I'm amazed that you were amazed. Seems like the perfect job to me. Not only because economically it's obviously fantastic, but also because she came to a company with significant resources and were basically given the freedom to do whatever the hell she wanted with it, without having to think much about an existing identify and business.

We can navel gaze at Yahoo as a company all we want, but I think Marissa's accomplishments as an individual should not be overlooked.

She largely got to write her own ticket at Yahoo and had two healthy children while moving from a mid-upper management role at google into a real CEO position.

Most women that have two children back to back like that in the professional world end up in a "mommy track" career path.

For Marissa and her family I'm sure the journey was more important than the destination. However I doubt the shareholders feel the same way.

From a shareholder perspective I think she did a marvelous job: The task at hand was never to turn around Yahoo! into a Google-esque profitable tech power house, the task was to protect the shiny glass box in the lobby full of BABA.

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