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Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

I've been wondering: How's Marissa Meyer doing as CEO? I haven't heard much about Yahoo recently except that they acquired some companies in order to get talent in the mobile space. It's been about 1.75 years since she became CEO. Is that enough time for a non-Steve Jobs CEO to change the trajectory of a company?

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> for a non-Steve Jobs CEO

What does that even mean?

Just that Jobs turned a company from the brink of failure to the most successful tech company pretty quickly. But since Apple is an outlier, I was interested in hearing about any other examples of CEOs who have caused big improvements in short amounts of time.

Have a look at Good to Great[0]. It's basically breaking down the qualities that make for the best CEO's, and the results are as research based as they could get, and also deliver some interesting conclusions.

[0] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-To-Great-Jim-Collins/dp/0712676...

If you're going to read that book, I'd suggest you read "The Halo Effect" as well. It talks about how questionable the "retrospective" research from these books is.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Halo-Effect-Business-Delusions/dp/...

Then you gotta read this

Some of the companies listed went from good to great to below average to completely gone.

http://freakonomics.com/2008/07/28/from-good-to-great-to-bel...

As the author points out in the above link

"The future is always hard to predict, and understanding the past is valuable; on the other hand, the implicit message of these business books is that the principles that these companies use not only have made them good in the past, but position them for continued success."

Another example that comes to mind is Ron Johnson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Johnson_(businessman)

He did great at Target and then at Apple but almost brought down JC Pennny

Jobs rejoined Apple in 1997. OSX and the iPod came out in 2001.

So, Jobs was an outlier. But the eulogizing is starting to get out of hand.

It took Jobs a while to turn Apple around. He was brought back on in 1997 and profits were relatively minimal for almost a decade. It wasn't until the release of the iPhone that they really started to soar.

I can think of a few faster turnarounds: Lee Iacocca at Chrysler or Gerstner at IBM. Howard Schulz is another example of a founder returning to the company to turn it around.

Some of these have done a better job than others of lasting through the turnaround CEO (and others it's too soon to tell).

I'd say he "turned it around" quite quickly by killing off a bunch of products and shipping the iMac.

Apple didn't takeoff until the iPod was available for Windows, and then they went into the stratosphere with the iPhone.

I recently talked to a friend, an actual user of Yahoo products, who expressed happiness with the improvements they've made recently. They were referring to both the portal and web mail and they are very happy with the company as is.

Then there's my wife who calls me in for tech support on Yahoo mail on a daily basis. Hates it more with every update.

I use Yahoo Finance frequently, and they've put some lipstick on that pig, but it essentially hasn't changed since about 2002.

If Yahoo is doing anything useful in terms of development, they're doing a lousy job showing it off.

I don't use the web mail but I have stuck with the web mail through the bad years. It has improved quite a bit but sometimes their Android app is an exercise in frustration. They do seem to update it frequently so most of the really annoying things have been dealt with.

For example, they just recently implemented the idea of an email not automatically downloading images and having a button to load them on demand. Seems odd to ignore such an important feature for so long.

Flickr has 1 TB of free storage. Old Flickr Pro accounts have "unlimited" storage space.

She bought Tumblr.

Will she release some hardware?

Maybe they should do a phone. Yeah that would be good. A phone with their own OS. It's gonna be big I tell ya.

Apple should hire some people secretly to work at Yahoo and goad the executive team into this project.

The article mentions that she was involved in his hiring.

You are forgetting: Marissa redesigned the logo! All by herself!!!

Seriously though, what do Yahoo actually do? The mail has gone the way of 'compuserve' in that you don't very often get to see a yahoo address in an email these days. Search was something they just gave up on, then there portal style homepage, does anyone actually go there?

They should have stuck with search, it was something that they were reasonably good at, but, having dropped that it is now not an easy game to get back in to.

Perhaps they should just give up on being a branded entity and become a faceless holding company.

I have to disagree. I'm currently in Asia and /everyone/ appears to be using a yahoo email. I even created some gmail addresses for them, but it just doesn't appeal to them.

Yahoo mail is very very popular outside the US.

Well... not everywhere outside the US. I saw it popular in Asia as someone other said, but here in EU I see only gmail, hotmail and outlook, nothing else.

"The EU" is not homogenous at all. Looking at a 500k mailing from one of our customers in the UK, I see ~190k Hotmail addresses, 44k Yahoo addresses, 24k BT addresses, which I believe are still handled by Yahoo as part of their BT-Yahoo! thing. 42k Gmail addresses. 11k AOL. This is fairly typical amongst our customers.

Of course this list is biased - demographics matters a lot in this case. But that's also what tends to blind tech people about Gmail - Gmail for many years was massively overrepresented in the tech world. Yahoo still tends to be in the top 3 most places, and there are plenty of countries where they place well ahead of Gmail.

From what I've heard, this is because many Asian countries have a culture of information flashbang. The Yahoo homepage is extremely cluttered and busy, which fits in with what they expect.

The Google homepage, in contrast, is just an empty abyss they can't get anything from. Here in the States we seem to value minimalism, which might be one of the reasons people go to Google (aside from it being a great search engine).

Here in the States we seem to value minimalism

What part of America do you live in?

Aesthetic and lifestyle minimalism are not the same thing.

Why are you comparing homepages when the discussion is about email?

This is completely wrong. Most of it is just history. Gmail doesnt value-add anything to people who are content with folders for their email. In fact the labels, conversations etc confuses them. Yahoo mail in other words has less clutter, not more. (And I'm not talking of the look of the page here, but the actual email functionality).

I think the assumption was that the users go to the homepage where they can access their email plus tons of news/traffic/weather/sports/etc.

That being said, the factors that lead to which service a person chooses for email are probably much more complex than just this.

in my opinion, gmail became big when it was a kind of status symbol to have a gmail address. I doubt that ever reached asia. but at one point, there were people with gmail addresses, and people with yahoo and hotmail addresses. and if you had a gmail address and you met another person with a gmail address, you knew that person was "in the know." At that point in time, switching email addresses was seamless -- you'd just switch email addresses. nowadays, you're using email for important things. even just a little bit of inertia would probably keep many people from switching.

Meyer's pitch to Yahoo! was that she was product focused. The guy they passed over for CEO wanted to turn Yahoo! into a "media" company, with a focus on advertising. I can't say which approach is better, but the clock is ticking for Meyer, albeit slowly because of Alibaba.

Yahoo is the number 4 website in the world with profits of over $300 million per quarter. Do you think Twitter or Amazon should also become a faceless holding company ?

http://www.alexa.com/topsites

Yea, it's an old company. It still has more potential. The only people I know who still use it are over 60. I think that's a plus, because although they don't buy toys and food from websites. They still get suckered into sappy website scams--like card companies, and reched malware fixes. (If any non tech-person reads this don't ever download a fix for your slow PC. You would be better off downloading Hiren's boot cd and blindly hitting keys. As to the paid birthday card sites; most of your loved ones find the cards irritating, and just want a simple email from you. I know yu think they are sweet, but honestly--they just want an email. Your kids still love you--know matter what you do though.

This is just bombastic and ill-informed.

To start with, Yahoo has >10% of the US search market[1] – down YoY, but nothing to sneeze at. Their sites also see more unique visitors from the desktop than anybody else – >195m in December[2], and that's the sixth month is a row. There are still loads of email users; finance, sport, shopping, everything that legacy portal sites typically had.

Furthermore, Yahoo was never really a good search engine. It was basically a curated directory until it started using Google's search in 2000 or whenever. I think it used it's own crawler for a while, but it's been powered by Bing since 2010 or so.

I'm aware that I live in a bit of a tech bubble — I don't use Yahoo properties, but there are loads of people out there who use the web in a totally different way. Yahoo's got a lot of obvious issues to deal with, but they've also got lots of money and talent; I don't see any reason that they won't succeed with a bit of restructuring and some strong management.

[1] http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2014/4/comSc...

[2] http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/yahoo-tops-the-most-trafficked-w...

I'm a teacher in a further education college and in adult education in the UK. Students personal email is 50:50 yahoo/hotmail with rounding error ISP accounts and gmail. Most of my colleagues have a non-official personal email address and that tends to be Yahoo more than Hotmail/Outlook.

Wouldn't say any of us have a huge monthly spend or anything but I think Yahoo have eyeballs certainly.

Yahoo is probably one of the safest places after HN to get news junk food. Huff post has too much nsfw and highly controversial content.

Yahoo mail works just fine, and I'd argue that it's a solid product. Further, by using Yahoo mail, and not gmail, that's one less area of my life Google is invading.

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