Just because she resorted to something other than organically growing the business to increase the value to her shareholders doesn't mean she's a failure. We're all assuming that her job was to "save" Yahoo. I don't think that was ever really on the table.
> she resorted to something other than organically growing the business to increase the value to her shareholders
Parent comment:
> and such stock was acquired before she became CEO
She didn't do "resort to" anything. Yahoo made that money from an action a previous CEO was ultimately responsible for. If you want to be really generous, you could praise her for not selling the stock—but if we're praising CEOs for every way they choose not to change the companies they come into, then my pet rock would make an awesome CEO indeed.
You have to give her credit where it's due: she saved the Alibaba partnership from that total fuckup, Carol Bartz. CB was such a fuckup, that she's the sun to Marissa's candle. She insulted Jack Ma in front of his underlings when he came calling to Sunnyvale. She refused/forgot to put someone on BABA's board and totally ignored Ma. As a result, Ma said 'fuck you' and took Alipay out of the group without even telling Bartz.
I wish more people looked at the period preceding Marissa (Bartz, Thompson) and they'd realize that Mayer was a Godsend compared to the cabal of clowns running Yahoo before her.
Her job, presumably, as the CEO was to convince all of the enterprise's employees and customers that Yahoo would be sticking around for the long run. At the same time, she had to prepare to wind down the business while returning capital to the shareholders. I would call that a difficult job.
My lesson from this is most companies with excess capital should make investments, not acquisitions. Most certainly a company with a long string of failed acquisitions should. Yahoo has been repeatedly given as an example, but others like Google don't have a particularly great record either. Berkshire Hathaway is a great example of a massive business centrally owned by a very barebones team (in Omaha.)