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Comment by reacweb | Hacker News Reader

IMHO, yahoo has bad investors. One of the proof is the firing of Marissa Meyer. As soon as she was hired, the reputation of yahoo has started to improve. All the fights of investors against her until they make her leave had the opposite effect. It takes years to build a reputation and it takes more years for this reputation to bring dividends. I have a similar feeling for Microsoft. The reputation has (slowly) improved since the arrival of Satya Nadella. I which he succeeds to make it back a big player.

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Meyer basically destroyed a healthy, but not growing, company in the span of 4 years through short-term number-massaging actions at the cost of their competent engineers and core product development.

Nadella isn't making a particularly strong case for MS either with his seeming distaste for any product of theirs that isn't either mobile or cloud-based (like the ones where they actually have a monopoly to build off and no competition worth speaking of), which seems to arise from that 'chasing growth numbers' mindset.

Yeah she was terrible. Their homepage still sucks, freezes up my browser all the time.

Microsoft products? "Windows is a service" is the word now, as firmly stated by a recent message demanding a PC reboot.

(The first sentence was "Windows is a service and updates are a normal part of keeping it running smoothly.")

to their "credit", this doesn't actually mean anything given the msft ability to misuse language consistently to make it sound more magical like

I am not in America, but when she arrived, I was very curious to see how she could revived such a dying zombie. Clients and engineers were leaving as hell. IMHO, she has done a lot to reduce the hemorrhage and make it attractive again.

> IMHO, she has done a lot to reduce the hemorrhage and make it attractive again.

What are you talking about? She's no longer employed and Yahoo has been sold off to Verizon...

I replied to the rewrite of history of yahoo, in particular that yahoo was healthy before Marissa Meyer arrived. IMHO, she had a positive effect on yahoo during her presence.

>Meyer basically destroyed a healthy, but not growing, company in the span of 4 years

So she did exactly what Google paid her to do. Eliminate a competitor.

How dumb do you have to be to hire a CEO from high in the ranks of your biggest rival?

Boardroom drama and IR conference calls turning into a 4chan style discussions are characteristic of Big Co. culture as such in US. The few successful big companies that evaded that predicament, were the ones with either poison pill provisions, or other tricks that made them "taste bad" for activist investors and other nasty guys from financial industry

Loss of direction is what stalls big tech companies 9 times out of 10. If you have 10 decision making actors on the board of directors, you have to effectively do 10 different things that each of that guys want, and all of them with compromises made to accommodate the 9 remaining other things that had to be done simultaneously.

My father frequently says that "a public company is a like a woman with 10 husbands, all trying to make love to her at the same time"

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