No one, no one could have saved it and made it relevant. I think she did a pretty commendable job trying.
Agreed. I simply can't understand why we keep flogging this dead horse, Mayer or Verizon, none of it makes any sense. Am I missing something regarding the true value of Yahoo!?
Yahoo never had a chance.
As a stand alone entity, Yahoo simply had no real chance. Their only path to relevance was a complete remodel of their priorities ~10 years ago.
Verizon, honestly, doesn't make alot of sense but my guess is they think they can integrate it into their operations to make money. Idk how they would.
One of the previous CEOs was the founder Jerry Yang. He made one of the most epic corporate investments when he fought for Yahoo to invest in Alibaba.
No one, no one could have saved it and made it relevant.
If we are going to set the bar so low, I can think of a lot of qualified people in the Valley that could have done as good or better job than Marissa. She made a whole bunch of bets and basically none of them panned out. Her top skillset was supposed to be Product Management and the best that has yielded are one-time decent Yahoo products becoming shittier.
A 10-year old who knows how to play Monopoly could come up with it.
For much less money.
If you sell yourself as a savior at > $50M/year compensation, it is not unreasonable to demand close-to-miraculous results, not "trying".
Yahoo is apparently still worth ~$4 billion. For quite a while there, its nominal stock value was negative after dispatching Ali Baba, despite cash-on-hand in excess of zero.
I'm not a fan of Meyer's, but she managed to keep the beast alive, where her predecessors were killing it swiftly.