I think there is absolutely no indication that anybody, other than Jesus Christ himself descending from the skies mounted on a Harley Davidson in flames, could have saved Yahoo.
So, bashing Marissa here would be really, really pointless and sad.
So, bashing Marissa here would be really, really pointless and sad.
When Thompson stepped down the board were given two proposals. The first, revive Yahoo as a premium tech firm lead by someone like Mayer, or 2. admit that Yahoo is now a media co and double down on the verticals where Yahoo is winning - especially those where you can sell premium ads (Finance, Sport)
The board had delusions of grandeur and saw Yahoo's as still being on the same level as Google rather than taking the safer bet and building out the media company.
Being a media company isn't as interesting - but there are a lot of public, medium sized tech media co's out there who get along just fine (and some even have an innovative breakthrough every now and then - like IAC) - and Yahoo, with the later plan, would have been the best of this bunch.
Still however, comparing it to a company like IAC is quite insulting. Yahoo was something more, it was a chance for a media company to rule the internet once again. It was how tech did media.
Yahoo tried to be a media company for years. They called themselves "the premier media company". They had two different CEOs pulled from the media world, Terry Semel and Ross Levinsohn. Levinsohn didn't really have much time, but Semel did. If Yahoo was a media company, they were unsuccessful at it.
I always wanted Yahoo to rebound. I worked there for a few years and my team seemed quite good. But there was always the problem that the company didn't quite seem to know what it was trying to do. It didn't have a real plan for winning back search nor for winning in media, and it didn't have deep enough pockets to dig indefinitely. What it had were initiatives like Livestand that failed to compete with apps like Flipboard and an ad network that never competed with AdSense despite Yahoo actually buying Overture.
News was launched in 1996, roughly a year after Yahoo became Yahoo and only four months after the IPO. News is most definitely an early success.
Yahoo's problem (or one of them) is that they've failed to have any significant new successes in well over a decade (that I can recall at least). The best they've done is maintain their early wins, but those have been eroded, as they completely lost search and mail to Google, much of the news/finance/autos/sports traffic to dozens of competitors, etc.
If I were Yahoo CEO, and the company had chosen the media empire route, I would have explored a Yahoo Finance 2.0 as a social network. Step one, acquire or clone OpenFolio and Robinhood and maybe buy something like SumZero for its social graph slash userbase. Create a Free and Pro tier. Other companies I have mentioned before as a good fit in this idea are Forcerank and Sparkfin. Motif is another company trying to make stock picking more social. Having a unified messaging layer across the bottom of ALL its properties (like Facebook) would have benefited here too.
Yahoo should have made a push to be THE fantasy company, instead of covering its product in daily fantasy ads, trying to squeeze out the last of the value. Sports is a huge vertical other tech giants like Google and Microsoft and Apple dont play much in. Being cash rich, they could have bought one of the major Daily Fantasy empires, which basically print money. I cant think of many better easy ways to return shareholder value. Again, a messenger bar at the bottom of the screen would have really tied the place together.
Now if I want to talk with my group of friends about my fantasy picks or my stock picks (or my fantasy stock picks in the case of Forcerank) my group conversations carry over between properties. The thing about Finance and Fantasy is they both involve an element of competitive "I know more than you and can make better predictive decisions." Stock Picking and Fantasy Drafting slash Lineup Setting are more closely related mental tasks than they are given credit for. Both are pleasurable when you are right.
I think its odd to say Yahoo went the tech route, because outside her acquisitions, it does seem they doubled down on the editorial media vertical side (tv shows, news anchors, major tech journalists) without creating any sort of modern cms, without actually introducing ANY tech innovation in house.
They also scrapped Yahoo Voices, right as Medium and Kinja and Chorus and Wordpress forged a new era of blogging. Ive said before, Atavist would have been a great fit in their tech/media empire niche. After buying the tech, they should have acquired some really popular high quality independent blogs/bloggers.
So yeah, Yahoo could have given up and become a gambling site only.
click bait and content mills/farms?
Summary:
- Loeb decides he can make a bunch of money if he can invest in Yahoo!, clean out the board, and get a more compelling CEO in charge.
- Loeb buys 5% of Yahoo! (presumably at a price in the mid-teens) and starts a campaign.
- Loeb ousts then-CEO Thompson and recruits Marissa Meyer from Google to take the CEO job. She is announced in July 2012 to massive fanfare and media attention.
- Yahoo!'s stock rises to $28 or so over the next year. Seeing as how they shipped no new products of note during that time, it's fair to assume this was largely due to Meyer joining the company. In July 2013, Loeb sells off most of his holdings and is removed from the board.
Given this, it seems unfair to bash Meyer for not saving Yahoo!. She was never hired to do that. She was hired to make money for Dan Loeb and did a great job. All the handwringing about "saving Yahoo!" is a fake narrative foisted on the public by the tech press and Yahoo!'s PR people.
Once a company becomes a zombie, there's generally no saving it. If you can get enough people to believe it might happen though, you can make some money.
Also: This reading helps make sense of some of the other weirdness around Meyer's tenure. Why did Henrique De Castro get such a rich contract? Why did Meyer? Perhaps in part because some of the people negotiating those deals (Loeb and Wolf, ex president of MTV hired by Loeb to help with the Yahoo! affair) knew they'd be gone in a year and didn't care about the fallout.
The stock price was largely driven by Alibaba - hence why attributing stock growth to Mayer's appointment was misplaced.
The idea was that you sell off the BABA holding, distribute that to investors and then you end up with Yahoo on it's own which is then pivoted to being a tech company (higher PE's) rather than a boring media company.
Mayer ended up becoming far from the ideal hedge fund CEO. She kept more of the BABA sales for acquisitions than the activists wanted, she spent hundreds of millions on silly recruiting like Henrique De Castro and then spent $2.5B+ on 50+ acquisitions - all of which didn't move the needle and ended up being written down to near-zero.
That's a lot to spend for a company that had a negative value - and Mayer hastened / worsened the situation (hence why Loeb got the hell out of there when offered $29 by Mayer)
She took on the job, promised results, and demanded (and got) enormous compensation. Part and parcel of that is accepting responsibility for failure.
Keep in mind that if she had turned Yahoo around, she would have gotten the credit.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/07/25/technology/marissa-mayer-pay...
She tried, well but her Participation Trophy was worth $300 million including Golden Parachute. That is a grave sign!
Yahoo was dying. They were dying no matter who was at the head. And whoever was holding the reins when Yahoo went down would get to be known as the person who killed Yahoo with the appropriate reputation hit. They might never work again, almost certainly never be the CEO of any significant company.
Meanwhile the board needs a big name at the helm. Someone to goose the stock price at the end, someone to guide the company on a smooth glide back down. Someone to take the blame. If the board doesn't get someone big and credible, they lose money, they take the blame.
Marissa Mayer didn't get paid $300 million despite presiding over a sinking ship. She got $300 million to preside over a sinking ship. That was the price of her reputation as a CEO.
Yahoo was dying when I was there in 2005-6 - the internal political structure, in-fighting, and general disdain from the US for anything not made there was terrifying.
But with billions of dollars propping it up, it takes a long time for a corpse to actually fall over.
Also, being the CEO of an "old and out of touch" company with services that only grannies use nowadays leaves you open to lots of undeserved bashing. So bashing her is easy. But she should be bashed if she was a bad CEO (which she wasn't, I think) or if somebody else would've done better than her (a person that most probably doesn't exist). So there's that.
(Yes, most of my comment was facetious. Don't take it literally)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Yahoo!#Marissa_Maye...
Basically, Yahoo has had exactly two successes: its investment in Google signed in 2001 when Yahoo used Google's search results and Jerry Yang's heroic investment in Alibaba. Everything Meyers did was simply spending that money.
It's easy to spend money, especially when you have a lot and you are getting paid bank.
Yahoo owns both Flickr and Tumblr which are both popular with younger crowd.
So are CEOs responsible for the company or not?
Because HackerNews seems to want bank executives to go to prison for actions taken by the company and its employees. However, we don't want to even hold a tech CEO accountable for the financial results of the company because the culture is "stodgy"? One of the CEO's jobs is to change the culture.
Whatever. Yahoo was already going down, and she just looted it for an order of magnitude more than "f-you money" on its way down, without much steepening its decline. Things end as they always would have, and Mayer retires to the island she just bought.
London may be in a class of its own, but elsewhere in the UK £35k is considered decent money.
That said, a "Web designer" role and a "Developer" role are two completely different things. £35k is about right for a decent web designer salary; but for a developer, that's more of junior to mid-level role, even outside of London.
Compare http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/default.aspx?q=developer&l=&id=... and http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/default.aspx?q=web+designer&l=&...
Remember when she was confirmed as a hire, the feeling around the Valley was less of "wow, a new CEO" and more of "how did someone like Yahoo get someone like Marissa". The previous CEOs include alumni from PayPal and AutoDesk, so getting someone as successful was a win for Yahoo at the time.
Not me. My comment at the time was "Fiorina 2.0", a mediocre mid level got lucky.
I don't know whether that sentence is supposed to imply innovation (PayPal) or stagnation (AutoDesk).
I mean, Yahoo has essentially failed so there is no way to validate your or my claims, but I disagree very much with this. If Yahoo had focused on its core strengths versus its flipping and flopping between becoming a media company or not, I think it could have become great. They also lost quite a bit of their best talent due to policy changes, work changes, etc.
Honestly I still think there are ways to turn the ship around. It may never become as big as it was before but I see no reason it can't become profitable and stick around for a long time.
What are Yahoo's core strengths? Near as I can tell, its core strength is possession of heaps of Alibaba stock. What core pieces of Yahoo, aside from its Alibaba and Yahoo Japan stock, could be focused on in a way that would make it meaningful as a multi-billion dollar company?
- Trumblr is still huge (arguably mismanaged but still huge)
- Their fantasy football is the largest in the world as far as I can tell. Huge user base.
- Yahoo mail is also huge.
Their core strength is their hugely popular front page and their web applications. Sorta similar to Google in a way. Or even Microsoft and some of its properties. Arguably they could focus on these web products and continue making cash though they'd likely need to downsize a bit.
If this was actually evident, what's the point of hiring her for the position with huge compensation? What's the point of taking the job, and why should that decision deserve praise? It sounds to me like she accepted an impossible task for tons of money. That isn't impressive.
It has nothing to do with her being a women. There just aren't many people who can put up with that endless rubbish.
With Yahoo, you have to give her credit. She has been there for a while and has attempted quite a bit. Saving Yahoo was going to be a totally chance attempt, as its competitors are crushing it in ... everything. From the surface it looked like she was in a better environment overall as well (compared to my Aussie politics stretching example anyway).
I think a company like Yahoo could have, and may still turn itself around. AOL did, mostly by investing itself in news and editorial sites. Maybe Verizon will be able to do something with their data, customers and brand -- and maybe like AOL we won't even realize they're the company owning the articles we're reading or the services we're using.
What are you talking about? She managed to make enough backroom deals to oust a standing Prime Minister. That's pretty strong evidence that she is Machiavellian enough to play the game of politics.
She became PM by playing that game. Her public persona was ruined because she played it too publicly and she should be held responsible for starting a decade long period of political instability.
The Turnbull government has no chance of doing anything other than warm the seats for the next bunch.
So I sort of wish this was only Yahoo we were speaking about, but it's not: it's Australia's Federal Government and every Australian is currently looking into the abyss as the likes of Brandis, Dutton, Morrison, Barnaby Joyce, George Christianson and Eric Abetz destroy our society and economy for their own personal agendas.
You need to watch this three-part documentary to better understand how she came to power: http://www.abc.net.au/news/programs/killing-season/