Hacker News Reader

Comment by bedhead | Hacker News Reader

I cant recall a luckier, more overrated CEO in my career than Marissa Mayer. She shows up right before Alibaba (and wild valuations) takes off. Dan Loeb gets involved to turbocharge the stock, which has done well solely because of Alibaba. She makes a bunch of expensive, terrible acquisitions and insists she didn't overpay for these odd non-revenue generating assets in the midst of a minor tech bubble, while providing no evidence. Yahoo itself, meanwhile, continues to decline and is regarded by most as a structural mess. Management is overpaid beyond the point of reason, the former COO being exhibit A for all that's wrong with management comp and corporate governance. I hope this company goes down in flames.

View on HN

Actually, I don't know if she's overrated or not, but she inherited a huge mess in many ways. The biggest mess is the deal Yahoo! did with Microsoft effectively kneecapped Yahoo's potential growth for something like a decade.

Yahoo no longer controls their own destiny in search or search advertising. Yahoo had a better search advertising system (I was a customer) and probably a better search engine at the time.

I'm sure she would be the first person to want to invest in search and search advertising, but Yahoo basically can't do any of that in a meaningful way unless they can get out of their underperforming Microsoft contract.

Just remember that the benchmark for a CEO is not if they are doing a good job. It's if they are doing a better job than someone else would do in the same role. It's like NFL QB's. There's a small pool, so being good doesn't mean you get to keep the job if someone else thinks you should be doing GREAT.

By that measure Marissa has done a pretty great job in areas that the previous revolving door CEO's didn't. Hell, the fact that Yahoo! is even part of the tech scene discussion is an improvement.

> "The fact that Yahoo! is even part of the tech scene discussion is an improvement."

Right on the spot sir.

Yea, it was on my wishlist for Satya.

While not exactly defending her she has been at the job less than 2 years. There have been CEOs who have wasted more. Bad acquisitions? How about buying AOL buying Bebo for nearly a billion back when a billion meant something. http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/13/technology/Hempel_aol_buys_b... Purchased back for $1mil http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/227267

Not quite as bad but still pretty bad:

In December 1999, Intuit Inc. (makers of QuickBooks, TurboTax, and Quicken) purchased Rock Financial for $532M. The company was renamed Quicken Loans. In June 2002, Gilbert led a small group of private investors in purchasing the Quicken Loans subsidiary back from Intuit for just $64M.[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicken_Loans#History

She gets more press than most CEOs but Yahoo was in trouble before she took over. She might not be great but there are probably more overrated CEOs

There is no shortage of train wreck deals out there, that's for sure. What struck a nerve with me recently was Meyer's defense of them. It wasn't even "defense", just insistence that she and the rest of management are awesome simply because she says so, despite a mountain of actual evidence that says the opposite. I see this crap all the time, some exec armed with nothing other than their word or excitement or insistence telling me everything's just super without any articulation. Here was her chance to somewhat redeem herself and instead she fell right in line with what every other idiot CEO does. Of course, based on the de Castro debacle we knew this was her character anyway...it's just shareholders' money.

> I cant recall a luckier, more overrated CEO in my career than Marissa Mayer.

Short memory, short career or just sexist? In less than 2 years at Yahoo, Mayer brought in unprecedented leadership in a byzantine group left unmanaged for years.

Doesn't Ballmer beat her wildly in being lucky/overrated 2001 to 2011? Remember the disastrous yahoo buy out in 2008? Talk of being lucky that it failed. Or Blackberry?

Mayer turned around Yahoo's perception and fixed key products. She pointed out a talent and reputation issue and tried to solve that (http://qz.com/184046/yahoo-says-marissa-mayer-has-fixed-its-...) - should Yahoo just have done and bought nothing because of increasing valuations?

There's no actual point to ad hom like this. Yahoo's strategy is not solely Mayer's. It may not be working, you can disagree with it, it's plain populist to single out Mayer.

>It may not be working, you can disagree with it, it's plain populist to single out Mayer.

You bringing sex into the debate, your accusations of sexism and this point toward you being the sexist, if anyone is. She is CEO. She is almost entirely responsible and accountable for company strategy and performance.

Mayer has proven herself through the ranks of many prestigious technology companies throughout her career, but her performance as CEO has been an embarrassing disaster.

> Mayer has proven herself through the ranks of many prestigious technology companies

You have a funny definition of "many". She's worked at exactly two tech companies in her career: Google and Yahoo. For such a shrill critic of her performance, you're remarkably uninformed about what she's accomplished.

Disaster on what grounds?

>sexist

Oh boy, here we go.

Doesn't make it not true.

It doesn't make it true either, and nothing that the original poster said suggested that it might be the case. Heck, we don't even know the gender of the original poster.

Male. Not sexist. Equal opportunity hater for dipshit managers.

> Mayer turned around Yahoo's perception and fixed key products.

Hmmm, to me and everyone I know, Yahoo! Mail is where you send all the trash and unwanted spam. It's surprisingly common practice, and my perception of Yahoo! hasn't changed a bit.

Wait, so the CEO's role is to drive up valuations? I think Yahoo's a little past that point.

Alibaba took off long before Mayer arrived. Regardless of financial improvements, the products have seen more innovation than the previous 10 years. I now have 3 Yahoo apps on my phone! Some improvements have been for the better, some for the worse, but she seems to have at least broken the "do nothing" attitude at Yahoo previously.

What apps? I didnt know Yahoo even made stand alone apps for mobile.

Yahoo Weather is popular one (and an Apple Design Award winner). There's a pretty big set, most of which I've never tried. From a quick search: Yahoo, Mail, News Digest, Finance, Messenger, Weather, Sports, Fantasy Sports, Cricket, and Screen.

Then there's the Yahoo owned services like Flickr, if you want to count them.

Edit: I just installed Yahoo Weather, and it's great. It uses photos to represent weather conditions at each of your saved locations, which are all pulled from Flickr. I doubt it has photos specific to every weather condition in every location, but I got them for all the locations I tried. And the animation in the interface (parallax scrolling between locations, spinning windmills for windspeed, and maybe more I didn't notice) is smooth and well done.

Pulling up a weather app and seeing a local landmark with a cloudy sky in the background is a really neat user experience, so props to Yahoo on successfully integrating Flickr with this. I like it a lot.

Yahoo Weather, Yahoo Sports (way better than ESPN app), Flickr

> Yahoo itself, meanwhile, continues to decline

Yahoo stock has gained 113% since July 2012, when Mayer was appointed. For comparison, in the same period:

Nasdaq: 38%

Google: 80%

Facebook: 83%

He was talking about the core company Yahoo! not the stock. The stock is doing well because of Alibaba

I tend to agree with you but every once in a while I wonder whether she's so much smarter than me that I just can't comprehend her strategy.

In art, we worry about the viewer not understanding our work. It comes down to shared culture. A reader or viewer doesn't understand the work because the work does not communicate to them in a language they understand. Is it because the work is too forward thinking? Or is it just gibberish?

It tends to work out that the artists who spent the most for their degrees will lean towards it being "too forward thinking" more often than the rest of us.

I agree with you. There is also the arbitrage game that Yahoo! continues to play with publishers. Once in a while they will fine publishers when the bot traffic gets too obvious but then it's back to the same old game.

This will one day come out as a massive scandal.

What arbitrage game are you speaking of?

http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/06/tsavo-media-to-pay-yahoo-4-...

They send bot traffic and mix in PPC traffic to make it look "legit". when too many advertisers complain, this is the result.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com