Google’s Marissa Mayer Tapped as Yahoo’s Chief

What about their cultures make this situation hilarious, and how come you're convinced that Mayer won't make a difference?

And possibly who to poach from google.

Prior to joining google in 1999 as employee number 20 "Mayer worked at the UBS research lab (Ubilab) in Zurich, Switzerland, and at SRI International in Menlo Park, California" (wikipedia) for what appears to be only a few years. (She graduated high school in 1993, received a B.S. and and M.S. which must have taken at least 4 or 5 years afaik).

My guess is that she has a great deal of confidence, confidence built on the fact that she was an early google employee and she was able to ride the success of that opportunity. But her entire working career is basically google and I'm not sure she brings the depth of experience necessary to take on turning around the fortunes of Yahoo.

I remember long ago hearing her push the notion that all design and interface decisions must be tested. I remember thinking that is just a recipe for non-execution with the goal of never being "wrong".

Andreessen also said he's "super-happy" for Mayer, because she's ready to step into a CEO role at a major tech company.

But can she actually turn Yahoo around? Andressen declined to offer any suggestions for areas that the company should pursue, and he also cautioned that it's hard to think of many Web companies that succeeded in turning themselves around.

"On the other hand, it's hard to overestimate how screwed Apple was in 1997," Andreessen said. "Tech comapnies can in fact be turned around. The problem is, there aren't a lot of Steve Jobs characters running around."

Basically, if she makes it, she's "a Steve Jobs character" and if not, well, it's hard to turn tech companies around.

[1]: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/16/marc-andreessen-marissa-may...

(1) In most situations, you will have a smart, rational person you might be aware of in the layer that he/she reports into (though preferable, not necessarily her direct boss). Talk to them about what you see as problems.

Be prepared to back up your claims with documented, solid evidence of the behavior. Keep emotional, hyperbolic, prejudicial expressions or assertions to yourself - they will only work against you in such situations.

Be as paranoid as you can be about who you can trust to back you up in your peer group in case there has to be a discussion. Knowing people who're discontent like you helps only if you know they won't stab you in the back.

Avoid ultimatums. Express faith in the system and the ability for the person to change. Express willingness to change yourself. In other words, come off as the bigger person right from the beginning and at all times.

(2) Have an exit strategy if the situation turns on you. This could include escalation to several layers (CEO/Board) above the layers you're dealing with and looking out for a new job.

I don't think Yahoo particularly needs a nice person as CEO right now. Their culture is dysfunctional enough that they probably need a Steve Jobs type, someone with clear opinions who's willing to ruffle a lot of feathers (and make a bunch of people quit). Steve Jobs wasn't really a nice person either.

"Working with Zuck" http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=339013388919

"Every time Zuck looks at a product, it is as if he does so with fresh eyes... He doesn't care what he said yesterday"

Further, I would say the people who want to judge a character by a few anecdotes are being lazy, small minded, and short sighted. Jobs, Gates, and Mayer are all different people with their own styles. I'm not sure if Mayer's style will be what Yahoo needs, but I wish her the best of luck.

That description of her didn't include a single word saying anything positive about how she did her job. No description of Jobs of similar length, regardless of how much the writer hated him, would have failed to mention that Jobs also had many positive qualities.

Mayer is a big coup for Yahoo, and the investors may back her if she wants to clean house with the board, but I wouldn't necessarily expect it to happen; it's unclear if Mayer really sees the board as part of the problem, and as Mayer is coming from outside of the organization, she may lack the close ties to other Yahoo execs that would be necessary to pull such a move off.

Think about it, who would you have as CEO of Yahoo? John Chambers? Larry Ellison? The CEO of Hulu? Mark Hurd? Jerry Yang? Tim Cook?

I think Mayer is better qualified than anyone else that is available because she is an expert on the space. When she joined Google, the mainstream Internet was less than 5 years old. Her entire career has been built on the Internet. If she went to any large company like IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Cisco, EMC, you name it, I would think it wouldn't be a good fit, because she wouldn't be an expert on the space.

Mayer has been with Google since practically the beginning, and as an executive, she has participated in the decisions and actions required to create and maintain a world-class engineering organization. As well, being an early employee and not just surviving but thriving, I'd be willing to bet that Mayer has done more as an engineer than most engineers at Yahoo, except maybe Filo, so that gives her incredible technical legitimacy. So, yes, I believe she is extremely qualified to run a company like Yahoo.

You can't just stick a "turnaround expert" in the shoes of Yahoo CEO and expect a great result. You need someone that understands the space, and can make the tough and right decisions that can put Yahoo back on track. Everyone that they've chosen as CEO since Yang just felt like they were trying to salvage as much of Yahoo as possible, and sell it to some other company or PE fund, and give up. By choosing Mayer, it means they are serious about trying to put Yahoo back on the right path again, and not just selling it off. I'm pretty sure this will motivate the current troops at Yahoo.

The only other interesting choice for CEO might be Reed Hastings, but he's taken already. The Yahoo board could have elected to try to acquire Netflix and put Hastings as CEO of the combined company, which would have been interesting. I still prefer the choice of Mayer though, because it shows a lot of guts, both on the part of Yahoo and Mayer.

(my opinion)

In most cases 2 weeks is a professional curtesy.

Also, once they've resigned, they're no longer an employee, so for a lot of companies (Google included) they may not be allowed in the sensitive office areas, anyway.

Despite the obvious value to them, the product was and remains very poor.

For years their primary product was their human-curated directory of Web sites. It was popular because the quality of results returned by the algorithmic search engines of the time (HotBot, Lycos, AltaVista, etc. -- you young 'uns in the crowd may need to look them up) were so poor that you had better odds of finding what you were looking for in Yahoo's directory. The directory left out vast numbers of sites, of course -- that was the cost of trying to manually maintain an index of the Web as it exploded in size. Human curators couldn't keep up with that growth; only software could. But Yahoo bet that software would never be as good as humans at finding the site you were looking for.

Then Google came along and built software that could index the whole web and return relevant results from it, and that knocked the bottom right out of Yahoo's manual-curation approach.

It was an ongoing tension while Yahoo was still desperately clinging to the fantasy of regaining the search leadership, or at least stopping Google in its tracks - search was to a large extent Yahoo engineering's claim to legitimacy for the idea of a tech focused Yahoo.

Without it, what was left were mainly support functions for a massive content operation, but with a team still to a large extent seeing itself as the core of the company.

Yahoo wasted tremendous amounts trying to do technology for the sake of being a tech company rather than to support revenues; a lot of little fiefdoms in engineering were allowed to exist seemingly because it looked internally like Yahoo was building an impressive technology base, while it often instead was creating tensions in the business and costing ridiculous amounts.

Flickr+Picasa=I might actually use Google products in a social way.

A baby and a career are not mutually exclusive, I just wish people would stop assuming that they are.

IMO Yahoo's best bet is to reinvent themselves as a world-class product company, and rent the relevant tech stack from someone who can actually do a good job of it.

Best of luck to Mayer and Yahoo, though.

And besides, I didn't suggest nothing can be changed at Yahoo. I didn't say that at all.

I said it should be blown apart, and the stagnant 1990s products should go. Mayer should put her talents to work on a smaller core where growth can be achieved with new products.

Yahoo Finance? Yahoo Sports? Search? Yahoo Mail? 1998 era portals? There's no growth there. She might be able to revitalize energy into Flickr and adjust it to a smart phone world, that'd be one existing major product worth giving some attention to (for example).

Unless Mayer has something equivalent to the game changing PageRank approach to search, there's absolutely nothing she can do to improve Yahoo's search product. So what can she do with the existing product core exactly? Not much, stagnation is inherent to most of the product segments in question.

The real simple angle is: ok, what's the gorilla / whirlwind product that's going to revitalize Yahoo? Search? Not a chance. The content niche products like sports or finance? Nope. Web mail? Comeon. Classifieds & jobs? Nope, small potatoes. So what is it? To really grow a $20 billion company, you need to find billions in new profit. Mayer will only find that with new products. Unless you think she can take 1/4 of the search market back from Google or take a huge chunk of the rest of the web email market.

Yahoo needs a blue ocean change.

All the stagnant parts should be sold off for a huge amount of cash. And she should more or less start over and attack something new where Yahoo can own its segment and build a gorilla product with huge growth potential (instead of being 2nd or 3rd (etc) place in everything).

And that wasn't enough; 3 years later they got their new OS out, but they were still a small player in their markets.

It was something like 4 years from takeover until they released the iPod, and circa 7 years before the stock really started to take off.

Even Yahoo can survive long enough for Mayer to find some new multi-billion idea, I'm not sure whether key shareholders or the board will give her enough rope to make significant changes.