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
That is the complete opposite of what I've heard from those still at Yahoo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve#Companies_utiliz...
... 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).
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.
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.