Can Marissa Mayer save Yahoo? | Hacker News Reader

Can Marissa Mayer save Yahoo?

businessweek.com

39 pointsjmduke38 comments

I thought Yahoo was a goner for sure.

On the day Mayer took over, if you sat me down and said "Michael, discuss the most optimistic yet still possible scenario for Yahoo's future", I would have dismissed the current course as implausible.

That doesn't mean they're saved, but Mayer as a CEO has exceeded my (very low) expectations.

Agree that part of their success is that they're setting low expectations. When Meyer said "We promise not to screw it up"[1] after dropping >$1 billion on Tumblr, I thought to myself "Way to set the bar low, Marissa."

[1] http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/50902111638/tumblr-yahoo

She was just being direct and honest. She knows Yahoo's reputation precedes her.

A: I don't know and neither does Business Week

I suppose we all love the game of conjecture though. It is certainly a favorite past time of many.

Before reading the article I'm pretty sure that you're right.

I recently declined a job at yahoo UK becouse their hiring process was a mega mess. It took nearly 4 months from first interview till I got a proposal, and the engineers there seemed to be demoralised a lot.

That's a ridiculous amount of time, nobody would wait that long unless they are changing jobs and are not in a hurry.

No.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines

    if title.endswith("?"): block(submission)

Does this mean we'll finally block these kinds of submissions?!

"Are the days of question headlines on HN over?"

What about polls?

^ They're crap

^ I like them

Awesome. I was just about to post this. I almost wish to kill a few hours scraping tens of thousands of headlines with question marks to find out whether these could be answered with a negative. I suspect > 85% could be answered so.

Note to self: start submitting HN posts titled, "Is [znowi] a useful HN contributor?"

I know you're making a joke, but https://news.ycombinator.com/classic

;)

what does that do?

Shows the homepage with votes only counting from accounts with an age of over a year.

neat!

“Name another Internet giant that went through three years of decline and then started to grow again,”

This captures the difficulty of their situation. If she turns it around, she'll be one of the Valley's great CEOs.

"most recently, it languished under Carol Bartz and Scott Thompson as a dot-com relic known mostly for losing its top talent to competitors."

When top talent choose to join Yahoo instead of Google, Facebook and Twitter, that will be a sign that things have changed. This doesn't count acquihires.

Talent follows money. If yahoo pays more than Google, talent will come.

Some of the comp is in equity, so the talent has to believe in equity.

People also join firms for brand image, and future career opportunities. The talent has to believe in that too.

It seems clear that most of what needs to be done (to "save Yahoo") involves ceasing to do certain things so that core competencies can rise. That she's gearing it toward the mobile age is astute, but not necessarily out of step with what competitors have been doing for some time.

Who knows, but I can say this. I've started using Yahoo mail regularly again, and I've started giving it out as my preferred email contact again. And, at least until ios 7 comes out, I've been using Yahoos weather app pretty regularly. I wouldn't have been doing either of these one year ago.

No - the opposite; but in the meantime lets place bets on how many companies she will buy. My bet is 40.

There is a method in this madness, if you are implying that she is buying companies for shits and giggles, I think you are wrong.

Can we stop posting articles from businessweek? Please?

I don't know, if you read between the lines it's got useful info, e.g. Yahoo has been historically very hostile to mobile, and they can't recruit mobile talent without "[buying] talent, spending close to $200 million to acquire at least 18 startups, in addition to blogging network Tumblr for $1.1 billion. In each instance, Yahoo has locked up engineers with two- to four-year contracts...."

Yeah, that sounds like a recipe for success....

That depends if they're set to task or given enough to room to build something cool.

Why?

I thought this particular article was pretty darn good.

yes, let's get more medium.com articles.

The exact path to survival is hers, but to save any company you MUST change things. Did Jobs change Apple when he came back? Of course!

The smart (inside) money says no.

Loeb's hedge fund who appointed Mayer has sold their stake and has removed its directors from the board.

where could one get this kind of info for the traded companies?

This particular piece of info was widely reported in business news.

SC 13D is the SEC disclosure form. There are probably sites that aggregate that type of information.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1011006/0000899140130...

What an article. It goes on for page and pages that with lite information. I want my 10 mins back!

> Mayer prefers to focus on the company’s increase in Web traffic. She won’t give numbers but says it’s enough to erase the entire decline from the previous year.

Probably the most costly acquisition of Web traffic ever.

No.

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