I think the strategy is to get as many new decent developers outside the yahoo echo chambers, in an effort to change the working culture inside the company.
For many years Yahoo suffered from mismanagement of CEO with short term goal to appease shareholders as opposed to building a company based on strong workforce and values. Despite all the PR speech by the previous CEO, I never felt that the previous leadership really knew what the hell they were doing.
One of the first thing Mayer had to do was stop the culture rot within the company, and you will see that a lot of her decisions, whether its buying up other companies and making new rules around favorable working conditions, is targeted on building a strong group of core developers. This obviously takes a lot of time, there is no magic bullet to fix culture rot.
Mayer is from Google school of thought, so she knows a thing or two on how good working environment works. You will see that while Google has a strong leadership to guide the company, a lot of its products and services started from and driven by not the leadership, but their developers on their 20% project.
So to put it in short, Yahoo is not in a position like Google where they can dictate long term strategy without getting its bases in order and fix decades of rotting.
I think in the next 12 months or so will be interesting time to see what comes out of Yahoo.
Culture is set by the execs, and their senior managers, not the developers. Buying up new companies won't change the culture unless they are integrated into a new management structure. Sure, a good junior or mid-level manager can maintain a strong culture in their team/organization. BUT only with senior exec support - otherwise they will fall under corporate oversight for everything - from facilities policies (free snacks, beer, soft drinks, breakfasts? huge desks? breakout rooms?), HR processes (hiring, performance, salary increases, role changes), IT processes (hardware/software freedom), etc. There are talented managers who can present a view of full cooperation, but still do their own things - though again, to pull that off, they usually have some senior exec support. The more contact with the rest of the org. the more its culture seeps in.
Just think about it in terms of code - you write some code as a standalone demo - to bring it into your main application, you end up having to integrate into most of the existing framework, and that influences the original demo code - often for the better, but that depends on the quality of the existing code base - and how well it was architected (by the code equivalent of the execs).
Very few companies do acquisitions where they carefully protect the acquired company. The assumption is that the buying companies culture is better! One company that does do this quite well is Conde Naste. (Wired, Reddit, etc. all have quite separate identities, and from the outside appear to have autonomy.)
When you start to see an exodus of long term Yahoo! execs, then she's probably doing something right. Whether Wall Street would reward her for that, is a totally different question!!!
I think the strategy is to get as many new decent developers outside the yahoo echo chambers, in an effort to change the working culture inside the company.
Unless I'm wrong, qwiki had 9 employees. To pay ~$5M/developer seems incredibly expensive. Yahoo could simply offer $500,000/yr and I'd reckon they'd attract talent at same caliber or better than qwiki. In that sense, this seems like a disastrous acquisition if purely for talent.
Does acquiring companies for injecting 'young blood' actually work? I feel an acquisition means the founders and early employees would want to kick back and relax in the comfort of a big company job for a while. The examples I've seen are where they wait out their vesting period, and then quit and start their own company.
The strategy is to appease wall street and shareholders. Doesn't matter what their plan is or what they do, as long as they have a plan and do something.
While somewhat rare for publicly traded companies, Amazon has shown that companies can float while prioritizing long term strategies above everything else.
Mayer realized that Yahoo's position is that of a big old corporation: High assets, weak on true innovation. Using the assets to absorb external innovative power is the logical consequence. As time is running out, they have to go for 10M+ opportunities, instead of trying too many too small projects.
Two minutes of Googling will find you plenty of writeups of companies with male CEOs on "shopping sprees". Have fun with the "intitle" operator, it's used there too.
People who write these types of comments do more to set back gender equality than anything written about the subjects themselves. If the subject of the story were a guy would the thought of sexism even cross your mind or would you just, ya know, evaluate the story on its merits?
If this were any male CEO doing all these acquisitions, would the author of this article have written about him going on a "shopping spree"? I kind of doubt it.
Edit: Criticism retracted - searching around in Google, it looks like this is a common phrase when referring to companies that make a lot of purchases in a short period. Apologies to the author for implying something negative.
[+] [-] pavs|12 years ago|reply
For many years Yahoo suffered from mismanagement of CEO with short term goal to appease shareholders as opposed to building a company based on strong workforce and values. Despite all the PR speech by the previous CEO, I never felt that the previous leadership really knew what the hell they were doing.
One of the first thing Mayer had to do was stop the culture rot within the company, and you will see that a lot of her decisions, whether its buying up other companies and making new rules around favorable working conditions, is targeted on building a strong group of core developers. This obviously takes a lot of time, there is no magic bullet to fix culture rot.
Mayer is from Google school of thought, so she knows a thing or two on how good working environment works. You will see that while Google has a strong leadership to guide the company, a lot of its products and services started from and driven by not the leadership, but their developers on their 20% project.
So to put it in short, Yahoo is not in a position like Google where they can dictate long term strategy without getting its bases in order and fix decades of rotting.
I think in the next 12 months or so will be interesting time to see what comes out of Yahoo.
[+] [-] Swannie|12 years ago|reply
Just think about it in terms of code - you write some code as a standalone demo - to bring it into your main application, you end up having to integrate into most of the existing framework, and that influences the original demo code - often for the better, but that depends on the quality of the existing code base - and how well it was architected (by the code equivalent of the execs).
Very few companies do acquisitions where they carefully protect the acquired company. The assumption is that the buying companies culture is better! One company that does do this quite well is Conde Naste. (Wired, Reddit, etc. all have quite separate identities, and from the outside appear to have autonomy.)
When you start to see an exodus of long term Yahoo! execs, then she's probably doing something right. Whether Wall Street would reward her for that, is a totally different question!!!
[+] [-] badclient|12 years ago|reply
Unless I'm wrong, qwiki had 9 employees. To pay ~$5M/developer seems incredibly expensive. Yahoo could simply offer $500,000/yr and I'd reckon they'd attract talent at same caliber or better than qwiki. In that sense, this seems like a disastrous acquisition if purely for talent.
[+] [-] zimpenfish|12 years ago|reply
(That and the byzantinely fractal multi-layered management structure.)
[+] [-] sheri|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tater|12 years ago|reply
While somewhat rare for publicly traded companies, Amazon has shown that companies can float while prioritizing long term strategies above everything else.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] netrus|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hzay|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|12 years ago|reply
http://www.fastcompany.com/1563818/feisty-steve-jobs-ponders...
http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/978263-tribbda/197291-the-...
Bill Gates:
http://www.businessweek.com/stories/1997-01-12/bill-gatess-q...
Jeff Bezos:
http://gawker.com/287019/jeff-bezos-restarts-amazons-shoppin...
Larry Page:
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-google-investor-apr-12-20...
There are also plenty where a company is named rather than the CEO, but the CEO at the time is male. For example, HP:
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2010/09/13/h-p-s-pricey-shopping...
http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/13/hp-continues-shopping-spree...
http://markets.cbsnews.com/cbsnews/news/read/14673193/hp_con...
http://qz.com/29535/autonomy-is-just-the-latest-bad-egg-in-a...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/09/13/hp-acqu...
There are many more, for many companies.
[+] [-] dangrossman|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkrich|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] PhilipA|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billybob255|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thorum|12 years ago|reply
Edit: Criticism retracted - searching around in Google, it looks like this is a common phrase when referring to companies that make a lot of purchases in a short period. Apologies to the author for implying something negative.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] pauletienney|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dpritchett|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guttermaw|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonsexism|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] sabat|12 years ago|reply
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