Marissa Mayer Has Completed Step One
medium.com
medium.com
"Some of the various flaps involving her leadership were crazily overblown, like her personal child care accommodations, or an edict against working at home that affected a tiny percentage of Yahoo’s workforce."
Every original fact in this article is information Yahoo would obviously want to share, like the success of its revamped ad platform. Based on the way he has failed to question anything else that Mayer has done during her tenure, it is hard to believe that these facts were questioned and examined in any detail.
Don't get me wrong: I think that Mayer may be doing a good job. I'm not too sure either way. I just think, as a piece of tech reporting, this is embarrassing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Levy
And in his own words (https://medium.com/@stevenlevy/im-moving-to-medium-6869c0e32...), he was hired by Medium to "establish a tech hub that strives to bring well-reported, lively, and meaningful reporting and writing to what is already shaping up as a terrific platform for the written word."
Disclaimer: Steven is a friend, occasionally a competitor (before I left to found Recent.io), and someone who once approached me to work with him.
But that just makes this PR piece even more embarrassing.
Why are the critical articles more appealing in this case? Is there some inherent desire to see the criticism turn out to be true which is greater than the desire to see the criticism turn out to be unfounded?
The problem for Yahoo is that, at the moment, the critical articles are very dense in facts. Take a look at things like this for an example:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2015/03/01/yahoos-in...
As much as you can disagree with the content of this article, it's hard to argue that it's as light and fluffy as the PR piece served up by Levy.
Regarding Carlson's stuff on Yahoo, you might disagree with some of his opinions. You might even think his book is a hit piece. But, at the very least, it's a well-researched hit piece.
Levy only seemed to speak with Yahoo PR and republish their opinions directly. I don't think any reasonable reader could assume that Carlson only spoke to a hedge fund manager short on Yahoo.
It's not technology, it's the the nature of the company itself. I know all websites want to keep you around, but the difference between using gmail and yahoo mail is remarkable.
I just went to mail.google.com, and I see my email. Now I'm going to yahoo mail… there's a big ad for life insurance next to my messages. Above them is a slightly larger link, intended to look like an email messages, for "rich dad, poor dad." Actually, something interesting has happened lately… the link expands in size about 3 seconds after the page has loaded. I'm starting to wonder if yahoo has noticed that if they do this, they will expand the ad just at the moment that the users wanting to check their email click on the first, top message, leading them instead to click on an ad, increasing "click through".
I'll admit, I'm leaning toward the tinfoil hat side of suspicious with that last one, but there's a reason I've started to think this way. Go to yahoo's front page, and it's click bait city. It seems like yahoo will do everything in its power to make sure I don't do what it is I came to the site to do, run a web search, or check my email.
In short, it appears to me that yahoo is still a media company, following the portal model, trying to get people to stay on the site for reasons that had nothing to do with why they came to the site. And by click bait, I mean titles like "the one medical test you shouldn't skip!", or "the 5 signs that he's manipulating you". In short, I'm starting to wonder if having a yahoo email account is actually a risk to my ability to concentrate.
Maybe yahoo is becoming more of an engineering/technology company, maybe not. If Mayer can make this happen, that'd be quite an accomplishment. There's definitely a huge legacy of specifically intending go not be an engineering company.
I listed them in that order for a reason -- Gmail was the cleanest and the most usable, while the Aol. web client was half ads and irrelevant columns, requiring you to click on the inbox to even read email, and displaying some of the most ridiculous bottom-of-the-barrel flashy ads that you can get before you end up seeing Adult Friend Finder or penis extension animations.
If ad quality is directly related to how much the host website needs the revenue and/or how valuable the clicks are, it's clear which company is doing the best online.
This happens all the time when I read Ars Technica on my phone. That effective clickjacking, combined with the GE puff pieces of late, have notably reduced the frequency with which I visit Ars.
I've spent this month reassigning most of the email i care about to gmail. After that, I'll figure out a way to migrate off of Fantasy Sports, which is the last app I'll have from them. After that, maybe I'll boomerang back as a customer. But, we'll have to see how much more changes.
I know Jobs, Gates, Ballmer, and Zuckerberg, have a crazy amount of criticism, and usually the (if it ever comes) defense comes later after the company/project gets huge or financially successful.
The reality of it all is that transformations take time, especially when things at Yahoo had been so Scott Thompson'd. Marissa has been rebuilding a sinking ship from the inside out - where most people would've just tried to patch it up as it slowly sank, or sold it off for parts; I think that's what's admirable. I think that's why people defend her. She dared to defy the status quo. She dared to employ the same dedication as founders do day in and day out, and she demonstrated over and over again, the audacity to take risks.
I find it stranger that more people don't defend her. All of us should know that technology companies thrive or die from the inside; it's why startup founders spend such a disproportionate amount of time hiring great people. To anyone who actually bothered to pause and compare Yahoo's culture today to yesterday's, it would be obvious that Marissa's conviction and aptitude is heralding a new era of prosperity; the transformation is apparent - and even if not yet absolute, it is still miraculous.
Remember: people -> product -> profit
I think the above excerpt, is a good reflection of what I believe the OP means by defending MM.
It may be unfair to try to sum up MM's time as CEO in terms of acquisitions, but its simply what the media has highlighted and I am sure Yahoo wants the media banging that drum for all its worth. Therefore, if the biggest argument for the $1.1B Tumblr acquisition is pointing to the latest viral post, I consider that running to her defense. From the tone of this article, the stockholders are demanding cost savings (sounds like less employees), new revenue streams and a general direction for the company. For better or worse the CEO is responsible for making the stockholders happy, I personally think Yahoo's niche could be in privacy - give users alternatives to Google, Facebook, Gmail, cloud storage with a focus on what people want...privacy. IMHO Yahoo has always had a respectable focus on the cross section of technology, privacy and human rights (maybe one of the first in tech to create a human rights program).
If fear mongering works for wars, it should work for tech company privacy concerns meets mass consumerism!
/s .. or is it?
Professionally I practice law so yes, myself and my colleagues are concerned about government entities violating not just privacy but the attorney client-privilege...though I digress and this is not what I am talking about, but it does happen.
>but if you look at the "average" person, they have next to zero concern for their privacy.
The "average" person isn't using Yahoo, that's why it would be a niche. I'll leave you with a interesting quote: "A search engine whose users consisted of the top 10,000 hackers and no one else would be in a very powerful position despite its small size, just as Google was when it was that search engine."[1]
I would be really interesting to see yahoos audience demographics to confirm or deny that though.. Perhaps they have a larger international audience I'm not aware of.
That is the complete opposite of what I've heard from those still at Yahoo.
... except other managers, of course! ;-)
I'm an ex-Yahoo, and I feel that Yahoo has too many layers of management. Marissa would be well served by reducing the ratio of managers to engineers to something like 1:10 (currently I've heard it's close to 1:3, but that's just rumor and speculation).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve#Companies_utiliz...
One possible reason is that she is a woman. This, seemingly irrelevant fact, has a couple of potential implications.
First, criticism towards one of the few female tech CEOs could be viewed as misogynistic. Most people would shy away from such controversy.
Second, as a woman in tech she is the underdog, and people love to root for the underdog.
Just a theory, I could be way off of course.
(In particular, I remember a lot of this sort of anti-Yahoo sentiment in the months prior to Marissa Mayer, particularly around the time that the Yammer CEO made some announcement that he would not be hiring ex-Yahoo employees because of Yahoo's patent stance. People decried that CEO as being ridiculous, but there were also a lot of people expressing anti-Yahoo sentiments.)
Probably some combination of both, as well as a few other factors.
Her CV begs to differ: she was VP of Search Products and User Experience, and then held key roles in Google Search, Google Images, Google News, Google Maps, Google Books, Google Product Search, Google Toolbar, iGoogle, and Gmail.
That said, you're very wrong. She had a defining impact on Google Search from the start, a project that did in fact produce notable success and revenue for the company.
I've found just that opposite, that people generally seem critical of her time spent at Yahoo so far. Common targets are her seemingly haphazard app acquisition strategy, or how she frequently is late to meetings or misses them entirely, or how she has hired the wrong people high-profile positions. And often the conversation steers more towards her personality quirks.
Here was a particularly damning article published in the New York Times in December:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-whe...
It's very critical and I didn't see many people rushing to her defense after it was published.
Here's another one:
http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/yahoos-dynamic-ce...
Where do you see all this defense of her?
Gates, Ballmer and Zuckerberg have never been in such dire straits.
Jobs did, and he succeeded, but he was truly exceptional.
You speak as if it's a foregone conclusion that working from home is a good idea, but not everybody agrees with that. So you're suggesting that she should have made a decision she felt was bad for her company to advance your personal agenda, and that's a little bit crazy.
That's not to say a highly or fully remote team can't work. Clearly it can. It's probably not ideal for a sinking ship like Yahoo, though. You really do need all hands on deck, top to bottom.
Don't like it? Don't work for Yahoo. It really is as simple as that. I like the move, though, given their specific situation.
Not so simple. First, jumping jobs for a lot of people is difficult. Second, it also set a trend in the industry. HP soon after started a program to make people come into the office.
It really is that simple. If you want to work for Yahoo, you'll need to relocate. Otherwise, there exists a full world of other possibilities out there for you to pursue (many of which embrace remote working).
also, any criticism of a woman in tech is automatically labelled "misogynist" by the internet hate machine known as Tumblr (which Yahoo owns), so where she might get more criticism, people are giving her a free pass.
Anyone who has any background in the subject knows of the many women who do successfully run companies - they know that there is no need to prove anything of this sort.
Turnarounds take a while, and this is indeed Step 1. I can't think of another "It" company that returned to greatness. Perhaps AOL is the closes. (For those who argue for Apple, I don't think it was the "It" company the first time around)
In order for Yahoo to ever right the ship, that is what they need. They need to become indispensible for either offering something unqiue or something of unqiue value.
Their investment in alibaba was close to that...both unique to investors and great value...where else could you a private equity stake in a huge chineese start-up?
The issue there was the "killer product" was a specialized financial asset with a finite life. This is distinct from something with an evergreen consumer service or product that will be monetizable over the long run.
The task for the CEO is can take the capirtal on hand and start building good (evergreen) products?
If nothing else she should be given (retain) some capital and another 3 years before making a final judgement. At that stage, take a look at the pipleline and if there is nothing in it...that will be a signal.
Yahoo right now is like a pharma company which had a blockbuster come off of patent...its all about the ability to re-plenish the pipeline...the profits that happened previously are nearly irrelevant except for providing the position/capital to recruit people for the next round of product development.
Yahoo! is not a software company (yet).
Comparing Yahoo! against Google, Microsoft, or Apple seems like comparing NBC/ABC/Fox againt those 3 no/
Several media companies have had long term products: The Big 3 networks pre-cable, HBO, Dreamworks...
Yahoo's Directory and Search offerings were category-defining once upon a time, weren't they?
On December 12, 1980, Apple went public at $22 per share,[30] generating more capital than any IPO since Ford Motor Company in 1956 and instantly creating more millionaires (about 300) than any company in history.[31]
In defense of your positions, in the early 90s, many of the most talented engineers that I knew flocked to Apple. They left later in the decade, and then returned post-bubble.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9133430
The author claims that Yahoo's core business is growing less profitable and its numbers are propped up by non-recurring revenue.
I do often forget about small things like the Weather app, which is absolutely delightful. I hope they apply that level of polish to their other apps. Personally I think they should skip small apps such as Weather and just dive right meatier categories such as Mail
At the same time, Apple was building the iPod. When product cycles are long and vision spans even longer, current performance may not be indicative of what's coming.
http://apple-history.com/imac_cdrw
These got, um, mixed reviews, and didn't sell well. (Even the famous taste of Jobs+Ive failed sometimes...)
A while ago after I installed uTorrent all my browsers (Chrome, Firefox and Safari) switched to Yahoo as my default search. Then I changed them back to Google.
After a while (I guess after I rebooted the computer) again all browsers showed Yahoo again. I googled for some help I found a hint that I have to disable and remove the 'Searchme' extension. I did so.
After a while (I guess after I rebooted the computer) again all browsers showed Yahoo again and the Searchme extension showed up again. And still Searchme is there—I took a screenshot http://imgur.com/OsH9o0m
EDIT: Why the downvotes?
Just a guess, but people might find your comment totally irrelevant to the posted article.
Ninite offers it instead of uTorrent .Not sure why they still offer eMule though.