Maybe instead of beating up on MM, we could look at Yahoo the way we look at Twitter: Yahoo could be great if the world would let Yahoo be Yahoo.
But Yahoo being Yahoo would be a smaller company, with smaller, focused business, and happy customers. But it would have a smaller market cap, and today’s investors would take a massive haircut. So they keep plowing ahead trying to be a tech giant.
Because they bought tech giant shares, and it’s tech giant, or collapse until it’s sold for scrap. And MM has to parrot the “this is the road back to being a tech giant” line to keep the illusion alive.
I’m not sure that anyone can do any better given the “tech giant or nothing” circumstances.
Yahoo being Yahoo means Yahoo driving revenue via bundling spyware, plus a dying fantasy sports site.
The Sun/Oracle Java JRE, Firefox, etc, Yahoo hasn't made money from anything other than tricking low-sophistication users into making Yahoo their home page by installing toolbars and changing browser settings, and they do this by paying to have installers of unrelated but necessary applications do the dirty work. This is all they have had as a business model for 10 years.
Yahoo should die, it's a scammy company surviving by doing things that would lead us to condemn anyone without the pedigreed name. They had dreams that the scammy stuff was just a way to keep the lights on while they restart their search efforts, or their technology driven products, but that's all just a dream, this company has been dead on the inside for 10 years.
I actually thought MM had the right idea at first re: Yahoo! being a low-brow web entertainment portal. At one time Gweneth Paltrow was going to have her own lifestyle blog/website on Yahoo!. Even though anybody reading this comment or anyone we're close with probably wouldn't be interested in that there's a large number of US consumers who would be.
Either because of a personal bias or something else (we'll probably never know) she pulled a 180 and did things like buying the rights to every season of SNL (which was a favorite of her's growing up) and poached Katie Couric to run their news desk.
Having said all that, I don't know if I would anything different myself: If I'm bringing a tech giant back from the grave, I want to make it "sexy" again. I want the glory that comes with that. I don't want my company to be a mouthpiece for celebrities' personal brands
Nice insight. Seems like there's a pattern here, in which high public visibility creates expectations which push a company out of its optimal mode of operation.
Agree that beating up on MM serves no purpose. But what are you saying? They should slim down in every business sense of the word and focus on X. What is X?
> Because they bought tech giant shares, and it’s tech giant, or collapse until it’s sold for scrap.
I was under the impression that investors essentially treated Yahoo as a proxy for Alibaba due to their holdings. I'm curious how much investors value Yahoo itself these days.
My first question would be, as it has been for 12 years: "what is Yahoo supposed to be good at?".
The failure to answer that has been Yahoo's biggest problem for the entire last decade, and probably for most of the one before that.
In fact, this was the first question I asked when the company I worked for was acquired by Yahoo and their management team came over to talk to us. The answer I got was a completely delusional "we take what others have invented and we do it better". I didn't score any brownie-points for pointing out that while the copying bit was true enough, the "improving" part was pure wishful thinking unconnected with any observable reality.
I kept insisting on an answer, I never got one and eventually I quit and joined a competitor.
I think the key question is not whether or not Marissa believes she can save the company. She might be delusional as well. The question is whether or not Marissa can articulate what Yahoo is supposed to be good at.
A number of us here agreed it was a nice one-stop shop for a little bit of everything with Directories' curated info being a particular gem. Thing is, the former has been 100% surpassed (esp by Facebook/Google) with the later sold off long time ago.
So, the question must be asked. I supported Marissa's first attempt to save it. Looking at current situation, I'd reject the second one. She could apply this attitude to less hopeless companies with a lot better results.
> Marissa Mayer ... has a “three-year strategic plan” ... that entails building and improving the services people use on their mobile phones every day, such as search.
It's a good thing they killed their own search engine and tossed the majority of their mobile apps, then. And that it all happened under Mayer's leadership. Considering they've lost a lot of experience and market share in search and mobile, I'm sure they'll be well prepared for this.
To be fair, streamlining the app portfolio isn't a bad thing, as they had a bit of cruft. But she's had years to make these changes into a reality without success. It's hard to tell if she's asking for three more years in order to continue the same ineffective moves or to undo them.
Who knows? Maybe if she runs the ship far enough aground it'll grow legs.
Her answers were very trump like "some things have gone well, some things haven't gone well, some things have grown faster than expected, some have gone slower"
"Have we made big bets? Yes we've made some big bets"
No real insight into changes that are coming up, just really empty answers.
Is she willing to take $1 pay and get rest of her compensation in stock options that expire 5 years from now?
How much is she willing to invest in Yahoo stock or stock futures by herself?
If I were in the Yahoo board, those would be my first questions. Best way to test her commitment and trust for her own strategy is to see how much she is willing to bet her own money on it.
I had a lot of faith in Mayer's turn around. Do I think she needs more time? Yes. Do I think she can do it in more time? I'm skeptical now. Will the board, that she created, try to keep her accountable like you're saying? I hope so.
I'm skeptical. It seems AOL/Armstrong really wanted to merge to become a new Yahoo. I'm curious on how Yahoo will pivot, with the time. FB, SnapChat, Instagram, Twitter, and Google are fighting for mobile ad revenue. It's my understanding that's how Yahoo is trying to reinvent itself. Might be too little, too late.
It's funny how people pretend that it's a sure thing that Yahoo can be saved. Saving Yahoo has always been more like a moonshot than a long shot and this was true way before they even hired Mayer. Sure, she has failed to do so (expected) but let's not pretend that there was much that she or anyone else could've done to save the company at this juncture. Her pivot to content failed but in many situations you don't know what will work until you try it. She had her shot, she failed and will probably be fired now but let's not pretend that there was much that she could do in the first place. Yahoo looks a lot like a lost cause.
More like the board should ask for cash money and stock options back just to give her a chance, but the opportunity cost of leaving her on far exceeds anything she even has the capacity to pay back.
One of their most valuable assets is Android Yahoo Mail app, that they are methodically killing: my mom (a loyal Yahoo user of 18+ years) says it has become too complicated (grouping conversations), with an unpredictable spam filter. Until recently it suffered from a serious memory leak (which was not fixed for years).
They already successfully killed the Android Yahoo Messenger app (remember when Yahoo Messenger was huge on desktop?). Ironically, WhatsApp founders are from Yahoo...
Yahoo mail has got much worse under her leadership.
Flickr has become unreliable and buggy under her leadership.
Personally I wouldn't pay her another dime.
Yahoo has already transitioned into being a niche advertising and media company. That's not necessarily a problem, but Yahoo still fancies itself as big tech player and that hasn't been the case for over a decade. It may make sense for Yahoo to try and become a better media and advertising company, but Marissa Mayer is surely not the best choice of CEO for that kind of company. I'm not even saying she's a bad CEO, just that she is not an appropriate choice for the kind of company that Yahoo has become. I don't see how 3 more years with her at the helm can result anything other than an extension of Yahoo's long skid into mediocrity.
I don't think Yahoo could ever make that transition without losing billions in market cap. I know that's what is happening right now but it is a tough call - make a last ditch try to be "genuine" tech company or kill everything to make business of whatever is possible. Considering that Yahoo still has tech talent and a tech executive as it's CEO, I can guess it will try to gamble on the former.
I'm just amazed that the Yahoo board hasn't fired her yet with her overall performance in the past four years. She's been paid handsomely and delivered very little.
The management, the talent may have infinite problems and might have contributed to Yahoo's demise but I don't think solving any of them would give it a magical upswing. There is no way it can get turnaround without nailing down a product that everyone wants. Frankly, I don't see that happening in near future, considering that all the previous efforts including acquisition of Tumblr haven't really contributed much.
I am sorry to say that Yahoo management doesn't have a clue about what its doing. Case in point : I used to be a avid fan of the show Community and was elated when Yahoo picked it up. However for Canadian viewers I learnt it was only available only certain days of the week. WTF? And don't event get me started on the streaming issue. They couldn't even get the basics of online video right.
> only available only certain days of the week. WTF?
Hilarious. Conways law in action. "organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations"
Yahoo!'s identity crisis has been going on for at least 6 years, here[1] is then Yahoo! CEO trying to describe "what is Yahoo!" in 2010 . It may have started earlier, but this was the first time I noticed it.
Yahoo could have been the dominant messenger. But then they killed the browser based messenger... forced you to use their terrible email based messenger. And then forced you to use their atrocious mobile app which forces you to verify phone number. They expelled at anon/safe communication before that but then everyone went to kik/snapchat/what's app/etc
Yahoo! was great fifteen years ago, now it’s just irrelevant. The world moved on to niche content sites and they were left behind. I can’t think of a single sector where I’d choose them over competition. I’ve heard that their web mail service is stellar but so is Gmail and I’m staying with it. It’s not like they came up with a service that was x10 times better than anything out there, far from it. They have been around since the dawn of the web and haven’t manage to build anything innovative in the last ten years. Where is Yahoo! in the whole social media thing? I mean Google tried their luck with Google+. What did Yahoo! did? They bought Tumblr and didn’t even bother to integrate it with their services.
Yahoo! has to focus on doing one thing and doing it very well. They can’t be both a services and a content shop. It doesn’t work like that. When it comes to content they have to compete with traditional news organizations that have decades of experience on the field. When was the last time you read something interesting and original on Yahoo!? For me, it’s like never. The problem though is that if they had to choose one sector that would mean massive layoffs and that in turn would send the stock way down. So that’s never going to happen, at least not unless reality hits them hard.
I feel kind of sad for them though because for me there was a time that I visited Yahoo! on a daily basis, before Google came-up with a better search algorithm and stormed the web. As with every company that was there from the beginning they hold a special place in my heart. But the reality of the web is that unless you innovate you become obsolete sooner or later.
Flickr is still the go to site for photographers, there are other sites, but Flickr is the most popular.
However, Adverts on login page suck though and for those that don't pay they have adverts inserted that look exactly like photos. I don't see the later normally, but it's a pretty awful way to make money (though Google search and Facebook advertising are equally bad).
[+] [-] braythwayt|10 years ago|reply
But Yahoo being Yahoo would be a smaller company, with smaller, focused business, and happy customers. But it would have a smaller market cap, and today’s investors would take a massive haircut. So they keep plowing ahead trying to be a tech giant.
Because they bought tech giant shares, and it’s tech giant, or collapse until it’s sold for scrap. And MM has to parrot the “this is the road back to being a tech giant” line to keep the illusion alive.
I’m not sure that anyone can do any better given the “tech giant or nothing” circumstances.
[+] [-] justin_vanw|10 years ago|reply
The Sun/Oracle Java JRE, Firefox, etc, Yahoo hasn't made money from anything other than tricking low-sophistication users into making Yahoo their home page by installing toolbars and changing browser settings, and they do this by paying to have installers of unrelated but necessary applications do the dirty work. This is all they have had as a business model for 10 years.
Yahoo should die, it's a scammy company surviving by doing things that would lead us to condemn anyone without the pedigreed name. They had dreams that the scammy stuff was just a way to keep the lights on while they restart their search efforts, or their technology driven products, but that's all just a dream, this company has been dead on the inside for 10 years.
[+] [-] wodenokoto|10 years ago|reply
The problem is much worse. The owners of Yahoo don't even want a tech giant. They don't even want a company, they want to sell it as scrap.
That's a tough environment to work in when you are hired to run a company.
[+] [-] valhalla|10 years ago|reply
Either because of a personal bias or something else (we'll probably never know) she pulled a 180 and did things like buying the rights to every season of SNL (which was a favorite of her's growing up) and poached Katie Couric to run their news desk.
Having said all that, I don't know if I would anything different myself: If I'm bringing a tech giant back from the grave, I want to make it "sexy" again. I want the glory that comes with that. I don't want my company to be a mouthpiece for celebrities' personal brands
[+] [-] _greim_|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thieving_magpie|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Veratyr|10 years ago|reply
I was under the impression that investors essentially treated Yahoo as a proxy for Alibaba due to their holdings. I'm curious how much investors value Yahoo itself these days.
[+] [-] bborud|10 years ago|reply
The failure to answer that has been Yahoo's biggest problem for the entire last decade, and probably for most of the one before that.
In fact, this was the first question I asked when the company I worked for was acquired by Yahoo and their management team came over to talk to us. The answer I got was a completely delusional "we take what others have invented and we do it better". I didn't score any brownie-points for pointing out that while the copying bit was true enough, the "improving" part was pure wishful thinking unconnected with any observable reality.
I kept insisting on an answer, I never got one and eventually I quit and joined a competitor.
I think the key question is not whether or not Marissa believes she can save the company. She might be delusional as well. The question is whether or not Marissa can articulate what Yahoo is supposed to be good at.
[+] [-] nickpsecurity|10 years ago|reply
So, the question must be asked. I supported Marissa's first attempt to save it. Looking at current situation, I'd reject the second one. She could apply this attitude to less hopeless companies with a lot better results.
[+] [-] justabystander|10 years ago|reply
It's a good thing they killed their own search engine and tossed the majority of their mobile apps, then. And that it all happened under Mayer's leadership. Considering they've lost a lot of experience and market share in search and mobile, I'm sure they'll be well prepared for this.
To be fair, streamlining the app portfolio isn't a bad thing, as they had a bit of cruft. But she's had years to make these changes into a reality without success. It's hard to tell if she's asking for three more years in order to continue the same ineffective moves or to undo them.
Who knows? Maybe if she runs the ship far enough aground it'll grow legs.
[+] [-] linuxkerneldev|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ant6n|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FLUX-YOU|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedino|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jackmodern|10 years ago|reply
No real insight into changes that are coming up, just really empty answers.
[+] [-] nabla9|10 years ago|reply
How much is she willing to invest in Yahoo stock or stock futures by herself?
If I were in the Yahoo board, those would be my first questions. Best way to test her commitment and trust for her own strategy is to see how much she is willing to bet her own money on it.
[+] [-] heimatau|10 years ago|reply
I'm skeptical. It seems AOL/Armstrong really wanted to merge to become a new Yahoo. I'm curious on how Yahoo will pivot, with the time. FB, SnapChat, Instagram, Twitter, and Google are fighting for mobile ad revenue. It's my understanding that's how Yahoo is trying to reinvent itself. Might be too little, too late.
[+] [-] charlesdm|10 years ago|reply
This sounds familiar.
[+] [-] rpgmaker|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wahsd|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cft|10 years ago|reply
They already successfully killed the Android Yahoo Messenger app (remember when Yahoo Messenger was huge on desktop?). Ironically, WhatsApp founders are from Yahoo...
[+] [-] dingbat|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ddorian43|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] planetjones|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dexterdog|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] revel|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shubhamjain|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aNoob7000|10 years ago|reply
I'm just amazed that the Yahoo board hasn't fired her yet with her overall performance in the past four years. She's been paid handsomely and delivered very little.
[+] [-] programminggeek|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shubhamjain|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manishsharan|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irq-1|10 years ago|reply
Hilarious. Conways law in action. "organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law
[+] [-] dsr_|10 years ago|reply
For some reason I don't run the world.
[+] [-] mentos|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] draw_down|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] detaro|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unclebucknasty|10 years ago|reply
What they need is a new product.
[+] [-] ceocoder|10 years ago|reply
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/28/ok-seriously-what-is-yahoo/
[+] [-] 0xmohit|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redwood|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elorant|10 years ago|reply
Yahoo! has to focus on doing one thing and doing it very well. They can’t be both a services and a content shop. It doesn’t work like that. When it comes to content they have to compete with traditional news organizations that have decades of experience on the field. When was the last time you read something interesting and original on Yahoo!? For me, it’s like never. The problem though is that if they had to choose one sector that would mean massive layoffs and that in turn would send the stock way down. So that’s never going to happen, at least not unless reality hits them hard.
I feel kind of sad for them though because for me there was a time that I visited Yahoo! on a daily basis, before Google came-up with a better search algorithm and stormed the web. As with every company that was there from the beginning they hold a special place in my heart. But the reality of the web is that unless you innovate you become obsolete sooner or later.
[+] [-] rythie|10 years ago|reply
However, Adverts on login page suck though and for those that don't pay they have adverts inserted that look exactly like photos. I don't see the later normally, but it's a pretty awful way to make money (though Google search and Facebook advertising are equally bad).
[+] [-] js2|10 years ago|reply
(I'm on mobile and don't see a way to link to a permanent URL, but the video is currently on the front page.)