For those confused, this filing is reporting a name change because the operating business (including its brand, domain name, etc.) is being acquired by Verizon out of what is now Yahoo! Inc. So the Yahoo business, its name, domains, and so on are not going anywhere as a result of this announcement. Altaba is just the name of of the company that will hold the investments that Verizon didn't acquire, including Alibaba shares.
Rather than the inevitable bashing of Marissa that will undoubtedly unfurl on this thread, I'd like to put in a little reminder that we usually celebrate taking on big projects and big risks and that we should commend her for taking on the immense challenge of steadying the Yahoo ship.
Yes, she wasn't able to keep the ship from sinking. But I do think she put in a good-faith effort.
Steve Jobs worked himself to the bone and took zero money for years when he was trying to save Apple.
That's what a good faith effort looks like.
If he had failed he would have wasted years and got nothing in return. If Mayer had done this I would be impressed.
But Mayer had no vision, didn't put in the effort required, and milked Yahoo for a hundred million dollars she didn't earn.
Silicon Valley loves failure like Elon Musk's rockets blowing up the first few times. But not this corrupt Wall Street-style failure.
Marissa Mayer's failure at Yahoo was caused by pure incompetence, negligence, and laziness of all involved. Nothing about it that deserves praise.
"... milked Yahoo for a hundred million dollars she didn't earn."
"Marissa Mayer's failure at Yahoo was caused by pure incompetence, negligence, and laziness of all involved. Nothing about it that deserves praise."
I just wanted to thank you for this comment, because it is important that we get the facts straight. There was not one thing she brought in the company that showed a hint to financial success.
Reading some other comments, I think the suggestion is that the overrating was fraudulent. In which case the price is a relevant factor. Mayer was worth some amount of money, a mild overestimate would be human error, but a massive overestimate would be evidence towards a fraud claim (in the sense that the error would demand explanation as unintentional). I don't endorse that on a Mayer-specific level, but I think it's the shape of the argument.
None of which disagrees with you, it's just an interesting note for assessing what a hypothetical fraudulent CEO appointment would look like. Presumably it would factor in price in the sense of "could a reasonable person assess the CEO's worth at this value?"
Appendum:
When I said "She is overrated at an almost fraudulent level." I meant the she and other people from the board created an image of superiority around Meyer, that led to and justified a fantastic compensation plan. Then when you compare this fantasy image to her real accomplishments, the term "delusion" would not be wrong. And at a certain level of delusion, we can also name it fraud. Yes, I think this is fraud.
Not sure why a "good faith effort" requires taking such a crazy amount of personal risk. Yahoo was willing to pay millions to the exec they thought had the best chance to turn the company around. She should have declined that and and unnecessarily played on Extra Hard mode instead?
I'm trying to imagine Jobs taking a 'free' turnaround role somewhere other than Apple. That was a labor of love, but it's pretty hard to import talent on those grounds - particularly if no one has significant affection for your brand.
Part of the power of startups (and Apple) is that they get some economically-irrational commitments from people who care deeply about them, and it's pretty unfair to expect that for other organizations.
The money they paid out to Meyer was not a problem for yahoo, even from a opportunity cost perspective. Deciding to only pay someone willing to work for close to nothing would have been really foolish. Not sure what you are proposing other than like bringing back Jerry Yang.
Sorry, my comment was too short. I said nothing about money. I simply pointed out that they should have done more due diligence when choosing the CEO. (Based on what I read at the time though, sounds like they didn't even try -- they went for short-term gains based on her name recognition).
It's funny how many on the right (not you, mind you!) simultaneously hold that
- the rich are sensitive to incentives, and big option packages and low taxes are required to align them with the shareholder and make them work hard enough
- the rich are not sensitive to incentives, being so rich that they do not need any extra money, therefore are basically immune to corruption and not really in need of any legal oversight
You're worth $100m and are running in a crowd of high achievers worth a lot more, suddenly it doesn't feel like very much even when all of your basic needs are more than met.
The human condition is such that we want what we don't have and we can never have enough.
We don't need a narrative of sacrifice to glorify an exec with. She has a family, 100 different wealthy suitors if she were to look, and the board approved the compensation because they thought it was worth the risk of turning the company around. The reason was because she could and had to reason not to.
Jobs was paid in the form of the NeXT acquisition and the personal vindication of being brought back and turning things around. He was strongly personally invested.
Mayer was brought into a company in a death spiral, that she had no strong personal investment in, presumably knowing very well that odds of failure were great and will likely affect her future opportunities (I'm sure she'll do fine, but I'm sure she'd have done better if she'd gone to a big success)
How many people would take the Yahoo! CEO job without a significant risk premium over their market rate?
I know, crazy, like what kind of person would accept that kind of money if offered? It really boggles the mind. Hell, I was offered a raise recently, but I told them no way. I won't play that game!
Don't blame Marissa for simply accepting what the CEO market was willing to pay her. You and I and every single human being would do no different in her shoes. If you have a problem with it, blame the market for poor judgement in capital allocation.
What? If you already have $100+ million in the bank it's a given you'd take a crap job just for more play money?
The whole point of FU money (which she already had) is you get to make big decisions, like what you're going to spend the next 5 years doing, without worrying about personal financial impact.
His total grants from 1997 and until death amounted to 5.5 mln AAPL shares (one would have to multiple this number by 7 to account for 2014 stock split).
> Neither needed the money at all. Jobs knew that and didn't take any. Mayer for some reason took as much as possible.
Apple was a company that Jobs founded and got fired from. Coming back to "save" it would have been a very personal battle, and a way to prove people that fired him wrong.
Why on earth would anyone want to do the same at Yahoo for free (and tie their personal reputation to the success or failure), even if they didn't need the money?
As one of the founders, Jobs had an emotional investment in Apple you could never expect from an outsider brought in to helm a mature company.
The problem with Yahoo is nobody knows what the company does. I don't see how anybody could have turned what amounts to a couple popular news websites into something like Google or Apple without engaging in some kind of very-low-odds moon shot.
What they probably should have done was liquidated the company. The web sites would have fetched top dollar, and the company has technical expertise in business units that seem to be pretty much wasted at this point.
I am not suggesting that working long hours, even as CEO, is necessary or even good for success but I, for one, would definitely not assume Mayer isn't really trying to do a show of good faith, regardless of how much money Yahoo and its board agreed to pay her.
I think there is absolutely no indication that anybody, other than Jesus Christ himself descending from the skies mounted on a Harley Davidson in flames, could have saved Yahoo.
So, bashing Marissa here would be really, really pointless and sad.
I don't think that is true. In 2012 Yahoo had $5B a year in revenue and was the second most visited property on the web.
When Thompson stepped down the board were given two proposals. The first, revive Yahoo as a premium tech firm lead by someone like Mayer, or 2. admit that Yahoo is now a media co and double down on the verticals where Yahoo is winning - especially those where you can sell premium ads (Finance, Sport)
The board had delusions of grandeur and saw Yahoo's as still being on the same level as Google rather than taking the safer bet and building out the media company.
Being a media company isn't as interesting - but there are a lot of public, medium sized tech media co's out there who get along just fine (and some even have an innovative breakthrough every now and then - like IAC) - and Yahoo, with the later plan, would have been the best of this bunch.
The problem is that Yahoo was never a media company, either. They never had a lot of success in media, at least not past their early properties like Finance and Autos. They failed to do anything meaningful with video, or mobile, or flickr, or much of anything past their early success.
Yahoo tried to be a media company for years. They called themselves "the premier media company". They had two different CEOs pulled from the media world, Terry Semel and Ross Levinsohn. Levinsohn didn't really have much time, but Semel did. If Yahoo was a media company, they were unsuccessful at it.
I always wanted Yahoo to rebound. I worked there for a few years and my team seemed quite good. But there was always the problem that the company didn't quite seem to know what it was trying to do. It didn't have a real plan for winning back search nor for winning in media, and it didn't have deep enough pockets to dig indefinitely. What it had were initiatives like Livestand that failed to compete with apps like Flipboard and an ad network that never competed with AdSense despite Yahoo actually buying Overture.
"They never had a lot of success in media, at least not past their early properties like Finance and Autos."
News was launched in 1996, roughly a year after Yahoo became Yahoo and only four months after the IPO. News is most definitely an early success.
Yahoo's problem (or one of them) is that they've failed to have any significant new successes in well over a decade (that I can recall at least). The best they've done is maintain their early wins, but those have been eroded, as they completely lost search and mail to Google, much of the news/finance/autos/sports traffic to dozens of competitors, etc.
I was surprised to learn at a conference in October that America Online still exists(!), and this (media) is the route that they took. Apparently they own the Huffington Post and Engadget now.
AOL was acquired by Verizon, so in a sense they still exist, but in another sense not. They did own/operate HuffPo, Engadget, and other properties for some time prior to the Verizon acquisition.
I agree with you, and would like to add that Yahoo was in denial of who it was and what strengths it had.
Still however, comparing it to a company like IAC is quite insulting. Yahoo was something more, it was a chance for a media company to rule the internet once again. It was how tech did media.
there is a middle ground too. Two of the verticals Yahoo doesnt experience a lot of competition in are Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Fantasy Sports. (edit: rereading your comment, I see you mentioned the exact same thing and I skimmed over it.) And then there is a squandered userbase of Yahoo Messengers that were left to dry.
If I were Yahoo CEO, and the company had chosen the media empire route, I would have explored a Yahoo Finance 2.0 as a social network. Step one, acquire or clone OpenFolio and Robinhood and maybe buy something like SumZero for its social graph slash userbase. Create a Free and Pro tier. Other companies I have mentioned before as a good fit in this idea are Forcerank and Sparkfin. Motif is another company trying to make stock picking more social. Having a unified messaging layer across the bottom of ALL its properties (like Facebook) would have benefited here too.
Yahoo should have made a push to be THE fantasy company, instead of covering its product in daily fantasy ads, trying to squeeze out the last of the value. Sports is a huge vertical other tech giants like Google and Microsoft and Apple dont play much in. Being cash rich, they could have bought one of the major Daily Fantasy empires, which basically print money. I cant think of many better easy ways to return shareholder value. Again, a messenger bar at the bottom of the screen would have really tied the place together.
Now if I want to talk with my group of friends about my fantasy picks or my stock picks (or my fantasy stock picks in the case of Forcerank) my group conversations carry over between properties. The thing about Finance and Fantasy is they both involve an element of competitive "I know more than you and can make better predictive decisions." Stock Picking and Fantasy Drafting slash Lineup Setting are more closely related mental tasks than they are given credit for. Both are pleasurable when you are right.
I think its odd to say Yahoo went the tech route, because outside her acquisitions, it does seem they doubled down on the editorial media vertical side (tv shows, news anchors, major tech journalists) without creating any sort of modern cms, without actually introducing ANY tech innovation in house.
They also scrapped Yahoo Voices, right as Medium and Kinja and Chorus and Wordpress forged a new era of blogging. Ive said before, Atavist would have been a great fit in their tech/media empire niche. After buying the tech, they should have acquired some really popular high quality independent blogs/bloggers.
I'm reminded of Second Life, where a vital arts colony turned into a gambling and pornography den. Its kind of like how depressed town centers turn into just antique shops and hair stylists - its the lowest form of life, turned to when everything else is gone.
So yeah, Yahoo could have given up and become a gambling site only.
this is sad tho in some fields yahoo contributions where huge even as of today just look the research they published and contributed to in the machine learning field. this is definitely premium tech firm level
Bashing her may also be naive. She may not have been hired to "save Yahoo!". She may have been hired to make a lot of money for Dan Loeb's hedge fund, and succeeded at that, if you believe the telling in this piece: http://www.businessinsider.com.au/marissa-mayer-biography-20...
Summary:
- Loeb decides he can make a bunch of money if he can invest in Yahoo!, clean out the board, and get a more compelling CEO in charge.
- Loeb buys 5% of Yahoo! (presumably at a price in the mid-teens) and starts a campaign.
- Loeb ousts then-CEO Thompson and recruits Marissa Meyer from Google to take the CEO job. She is announced in July 2012 to massive fanfare and media attention.
- Yahoo!'s stock rises to $28 or so over the next year. Seeing as how they shipped no new products of note during that time, it's fair to assume this was largely due to Meyer joining the company. In July 2013, Loeb sells off most of his holdings and is removed from the board.
Given this, it seems unfair to bash Meyer for not saving Yahoo!. She was never hired to do that. She was hired to make money for Dan Loeb and did a great job. All the handwringing about "saving Yahoo!" is a fake narrative foisted on the public by the tech press and Yahoo!'s PR people.
Once a company becomes a zombie, there's generally no saving it. If you can get enough people to believe it might happen though, you can make some money.
Also: This reading helps make sense of some of the other weirdness around Meyer's tenure. Why did Henrique De Castro get such a rich contract? Why did Meyer? Perhaps in part because some of the people negotiating those deals (Loeb and Wolf, ex president of MTV hired by Loeb to help with the Yahoo! affair) knew they'd be gone in a year and didn't care about the fallout.
Loeb's thesis was simple - that Yahoo is worth a lot more as the sum of its parts as it was a combined entity. He was right - there were long periods of time where Yahoo on its own had a negative value.
The stock price was largely driven by Alibaba - hence why attributing stock growth to Mayer's appointment was misplaced.
The idea was that you sell off the BABA holding, distribute that to investors and then you end up with Yahoo on it's own which is then pivoted to being a tech company (higher PE's) rather than a boring media company.
Mayer ended up becoming far from the ideal hedge fund CEO. She kept more of the BABA sales for acquisitions than the activists wanted, she spent hundreds of millions on silly recruiting like Henrique De Castro and then spent $2.5B+ on 50+ acquisitions - all of which didn't move the needle and ended up being written down to near-zero.
That's a lot to spend for a company that had a negative value - and Mayer hastened / worsened the situation (hence why Loeb got the hell out of there when offered $29 by Mayer)
I like your narrative and Dan Loeb should certainly send Mayer a Christmas card. Still, if indeed she was hired to make money for Dan Loeb then that does not speak any better to her managerial competence.
Walter exactly right. Not even Marissa feels sorry for Marissa given the payout she has received. A couple of hundred million dollars heals a lot of hurt feeelings.
Everyone loves a good turnaround story versus slow-death story. As Google's 20th employee she was already approaching the tres commas league.
Remember when she was confirmed as a hire, the feeling around the Valley was less of "wow, a new CEO" and more of "how did someone like Yahoo get someone like Marissa". The previous CEOs include alumni from PayPal and AutoDesk, so getting someone as successful was a win for Yahoo at the time.
For sure. For perspective, that's around 2000X more than an average tech salary in Silicon Valley. I'd be thrilled to [Not Turn Around Yahoo] for that much money. Hell, I could have done it for a fraction of the cost!
If that's really the case then Silicon Valley salaries have gone through the floor recently. That would be considered an insulting salary for a developer in London, in GBP.
If you search for web designer jobs in the UK on Indeed, most jobs are in the £25k to £30k range, with a slightly smaller selection between £30k and £35k.
London may be in a class of its own, but elsewhere in the UK £35k is considered decent money.
Don't disagree about £35k being decent in the UK - easy to take for granted how well paid the tech industry is.
That said, a "Web designer" role and a "Developer" role are two completely different things. £35k is about right for a decent web designer salary; but for a developer, that's more of junior to mid-level role, even outside of London.
(Good) developer jobs tend not to make it job sites like Indeed. I'd expect a developer job somewhere other than a small agency to be starting at ~£30k anywhere in the country, and £35k in London. In London a half-decent developer can make ~£50k easily, and much more than that if they're good, or willing to do contract work.
Of course not, but then when I failed which would have been pre-ordained and actually entirely foreseeable, bashing me here would NOT be really, really pointless and sad. However, if you are respecting her for picking up a paycheck, that is your right.
I think it's pointless and sad to bash her because, once again, I don't think it can reasonably be said that somebody else had the expertise to save Yahoo. We'll never know, of course.
Also, being the CEO of an "old and out of touch" company with services that only grannies use nowadays leaves you open to lots of undeserved bashing. So bashing her is easy. But she should be bashed if she was a bad CEO (which she wasn't, I think) or if somebody else would've done better than her (a person that most probably doesn't exist). So there's that.
(Yes, most of my comment was facetious. Don't take it literally)
Basically, Yahoo has had exactly two successes: its investment in Google signed in 2001 when Yahoo used Google's search results and Jerry Yang's heroic investment in Alibaba. Everything Meyers did was simply spending that money.
It's easy to spend money, especially when you have a lot and you are getting paid bank.
This "bashing" seems to be an attempt to deflect any and all criticism of her countless mistakes at Yahoo! - not least of which was that they helped leak vast swathes of personal data due to their CEO's reckless indifference to security.
>Also, being the CEO of an "old and out of touch" company with services that only grannies use nowadays leaves you open to lots of undeserved bashing.
So are CEOs responsible for the company or not?
Because HackerNews seems to want bank executives to go to prison for actions taken by the company and its employees. However, we don't want to even hold a tech CEO accountable for the financial results of the company because the culture is "stodgy"? One of the CEO's jobs is to change the culture.
Where can I sign up for a job making 7 figures with no "performance clause?" Even better, she probably had something like a "no downside performance clause," but would still receive lavish bonuses for any upside.
Whatever. Yahoo was already going down, and she just looted it for an order of magnitude more than "f-you money" on its way down, without much steepening its decline. Things end as they always would have, and Mayer retires to the island she just bought.
Well I work for a company where C level execs have 100m+ contracts and they are behaving in exceptionally bad ways. Also Dir/Sr Dir level may have around 1m+ contracts and they seem quite indifferent to project health. At this point I guess they think reward is enough for indifference or non-performance.
This is not a convincing argument. The odds are certainly against Yahoo, and the promise of MM was it will turn Yahoo into a Engineering powerhouse, which never happened. On top of that the Yahoo hack handling was not leadership.
She tried, well but her Participation Trophy was worth $300 million including Golden Parachute. That is a grave sign!
Yahoo was dying. They were dying no matter who was at the head. And whoever was holding the reins when Yahoo went down would get to be known as the person who killed Yahoo with the appropriate reputation hit. They might never work again, almost certainly never be the CEO of any significant company.
Meanwhile the board needs a big name at the helm. Someone to goose the stock price at the end, someone to guide the company on a smooth glide back down. Someone to take the blame. If the board doesn't get someone big and credible, they lose money, they take the blame.
Marissa Mayer didn't get paid $300 million despite presiding over a sinking ship. She got $300 million to preside over a sinking ship. That was the price of her reputation as a CEO.
Yahoo was dying when I was there in 2005-6 - the internal political structure, in-fighting, and general disdain from the US for anything not made there was terrifying.
But with billions of dollars propping it up, it takes a long time for a corpse to actually fall over.
> absolutely no indication that anybody, other than Jesus Christ himself descending from the skies mounted on a Harley Davidson in flames, could have saved Yahoo.
I mean, Yahoo has essentially failed so there is no way to validate your or my claims, but I disagree very much with this. If Yahoo had focused on its core strengths versus its flipping and flopping between becoming a media company or not, I think it could have become great. They also lost quite a bit of their best talent due to policy changes, work changes, etc.
Honestly I still think there are ways to turn the ship around. It may never become as big as it was before but I see no reason it can't become profitable and stick around for a long time.
What are Yahoo's core strengths? Near as I can tell, its core strength is possession of heaps of Alibaba stock. What core pieces of Yahoo, aside from its Alibaba and Yahoo Japan stock, could be focused on in a way that would make it meaningful as a multi-billion dollar company?
- It's still #5 in the Alexa website ranks. That's HUGE. Hugehugehuge.
- Trumblr is still huge (arguably mismanaged but still huge)
- Their fantasy football is the largest in the world as far as I can tell. Huge user base.
- Yahoo mail is also huge.
Their core strength is their hugely popular front page and their web applications. Sorta similar to Google in a way. Or even Microsoft and some of its properties. Arguably they could focus on these web products and continue making cash though they'd likely need to downsize a bit.
She was paid to succeed and paid excessively on any level. Why should we not hold stars in the tech industry to higher standards. Why should we not vilify them like any other CEO presiding over a failing or failed company which sheds thousands if not tens of thousands of employees? She is the quintessential example of the CEO type many dislike. Overpaid, doesn't deliver, and walks off with money in the bank.
>So, bashing Marissa here would be really, really pointless and sad
If this was actually evident, what's the point of hiring her for the position with huge compensation? What's the point of taking the job, and why should that decision deserve praise? It sounds to me like she accepted an impossible task for tons of money. That isn't impressive.
I think back to Gillard and Australia. I liked her as a PM and felt that the reason she didn't make it is she simply wasn't heartless and evil enough to fight in that chaotic, insane and corrupt political environment. Abbott was and Rudd..ugh..something something party implosion; whatever.
It has nothing to do with her being a women. There just aren't many people who can put up with that endless rubbish.
With Yahoo, you have to give her credit. She has been there for a while and has attempted quite a bit. Saving Yahoo was going to be a totally chance attempt, as its competitors are crushing it in ... everything. From the surface it looked like she was in a better environment overall as well (compared to my Aussie politics stretching example anyway).
I think a company like Yahoo could have, and may still turn itself around. AOL did, mostly by investing itself in news and editorial sites. Maybe Verizon will be able to do something with their data, customers and brand -- and maybe like AOL we won't even realize they're the company owning the articles we're reading or the services we're using.
> she simply wasn't heartless and evil enough to fight in that chaotic, insane and corrupt political environment
What are you talking about? She managed to make enough backroom deals to oust a standing Prime Minister. That's pretty strong evidence that she is Machiavellian enough to play the game of politics.
> I liked her as a PM and felt that the reason she didn't make it is she simply wasn't heartless and evil enough to fight in that chaotic, insane and corrupt political environment.
She became PM by playing that game. Her public persona was ruined because she played it too publicly and she should be held responsible for starting a decade long period of political instability.
She ousted a sitting first term PM through backroom deals to make herself PM. This kicked off a decade where the Prime Ministers office had to get a revolving door installed.
I don't blame you. In Australia we have had a marathon run of the most monumental moments of bastardry, incompetence, bigotry and squandering of opportunities. I mean, this inevitably happens at the best of times but we got Rudd (who was, for his flaws, quite visionary), then Gillard who ousted him because of the negativity of Tony Abbott. Then we got Tony Abbott because of the way Gillard and co. shafted Rudd. Abbott, it turns out, was more arrogant, had less ability to govern, showed what those who watched him over the years already knew: he has terrible judgement, and thus led the least successful government of any era in Australia and lasted less time in the job than either Gillard or Rudd before Turnbull (who Abbott had actually ousted when in opposition) ousted him.
The Turnbull government has no chance of doing anything other than warm the seats for the next bunch.
So I sort of wish this was only Yahoo we were speaking about, but it's not: it's Australia's Federal Government and every Australian is currently looking into the abyss as the likes of Brandis, Dutton, Morrison, Barnaby Joyce, George Christianson and Eric Abetz destroy our society and economy for their own personal agendas.
What exactly do you want to accomplish with this comment?
Are you really suggesting that we shouldn't analyze and criticize Marissa for failing? Why is it important to you to create a safe space for this CEO? This CEO had a very self-confident attitude but in the end got nothing right. There were no signs progress and development with her and the company. She showed no intrinsic focus and absolutely no creativity.
And what are this big risks you are talking about? "we usually celebrate taking on big projects and big risks ..."
All I know is that she got a compensation plan in 2012 for about 120 mio. dollars. If you play in this league you dont get points for "good-faith". Why gets someone who failed such a high compensation and why should it be wrong to criticize and even bash such a person?
I can answer that: because she's a woman. That's the ugly truth behind the rabid defense of Marissa. Because she joins a long line of failed female CEOs and the mere recognition of this fact sends certain people into a frenzy, so just deny, deny, deny.
I fully expect to be repudiated as a misogynist by a tidal wave of people drunk off this cognitive dissonance, but I simply speak the truth. Marissa was an abysmal CEO, and for years people will try to whitewash that to avoid its ugly stain on female professionals.
Trying to tie this to her gender would require a lot of evidence to be remotly meaningful. Yahoo has been failing for a decade and a half, largely punctuated by a couple of lucky investments (Google and Alibaba).
I also see little evidence of rabid defenses of her. I see some that don't believe she deserves to be crucified for failing to save a company that's been failing for a long time before she joined, and a lot of rabid attacks on her with little substantive.
Here's the thing: If Yahoo was in such dire shape that it couldn't be saved (that seems to be the consensus), it should have been scrapped and sold for parts to maximize shareholder value.
Instead Marissa squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on random acquisitions and Katie Couric. In my mind there is nothing noble or defensible about coming into a dire situation, throwing a Hail Mary and then shrugging when it doesn't work.
The board hired her presumably believing that there was some non-zero chance that she would manage to turn Yahoo around, just as it has done with a string of past CEO's. Presumably they also surmised that even if she didn't, shareholders would come out of it ok.
And lo and behold: When she joined the share price was below $16. It's now above $42. A lot of that (maybe all?) is the Alibaba holding, but the point is that whether not Mayer did a good job or not, Yahoo! as a whole is still worth a lot more today.
But presumably this is part of the reason they took the risk: Yahoo!'s core businesses were valued extremely low - the total value of the business is tied up in the Alibaba holding. As such spending hundreds of millions to try to turn things around meant betting with a miniscule proportion of the value of the company with a potential for huge payoff if it succeeded, and very little downside.
In retrospect its easy to say she didn't achieve what they hoped. But it's not so easy to say the alternatives would've been better.
I'm sure she did stupid acquisitions. I'm also sure most of Yahoo's CEO's have done plenty of stupid acquisitions. I'm equally sure Yahoo's board signed of on all of them.
The point isn't that she has no blame. The point is that she is par for the course for Yahoo, and there's little indication someone else would have achieved better results.
I think there should be more female CEOs. But if they are overbearing and underdelivering we should be allowed to talk about that with no restrictions.
I'm not going to repudiate you as a misogynist because I think some of what you're saying has merit. And I don't believe you're saying it because you think females make bad CEOs.
But I'd hardly call my comment a "rabid defense" of Marissa. I was attempting to set a balanced tone for this discussion. I readily agree that she failed to prevent Yahoo from failing.
The reality that you yourself need to confront is that there are way more people who will shrilly call her "an abysmal CEO" without really weighing the facts.
> Because she joins a long line of failed female CEOs
I wonder: how many appointed CEOs, as opposed to founders, succeed? And how many of them them are appointed to floundering companies, versus say the transition that happened at Microsoft and/or Google? Heck, even Ballmer was a disaster.
How much of the history of failed female CEOs is likely because they get much, much less of the Bezos/Brin/Page/Gates initial growth, I am unsure, but I'd be interested to know.
> Reduction in unsubstantiated nasty comments. A better conversation.
At the time you wrote this, there where zero nasty comments. Not even substantiated ones.
> Attempting to save a company that appeared at the time to be completely unsaveable.
Why do make that claim? This and similar is repeated here often: "A sinking ship", "Could not be saved even by Jesus", ...
This is completely wrong! Either a company is beyond repair, then no respectable CEO would play the hero here. Or it shows potential for some kind of transformation process, where the company can find a new and successful purpose. In both cases the company is in a fragile state, because it is very hard to measure its true value. It's in a situation that is opposite to a very promising company: there is a chance that this company is underhyped. Yahoo was underhyped and underestimated, probably also by Marissa Meyer.
> Why not? What's different about that league compared to the one you and I play in?
Let me use an analogy here: When you and I are football players, then Marissa would have been our trainer. The problem is that the compensation plan made her also some kind of a Ronaldo.
You would be right about what to do with a struggling company if you had perfect information. However most of the time a board is not working with perfect information and must make a judgement call. Pretending after the fact that they could have known how this would play out is ignoring that. It's an easy decision to criticize in hindsight after the fact. Much harder to get right in the moment.
Upvoted since I think this discussion might be interesting.
I'm wondering why people focus on financial compensation so much? Why does how much someone was paid justify more or less bashing, as the case might be?
And what's unhealthy about tone policing? I'll leave aside the way you've negatively framed my attempt to steer the conversation in a more positive direction, and just say that I don't see what the purpose of publicly bashing a well-compensated CEO who didn't have much success is.
Who is this unhealthy for? For her? For us? For future boards of directors who may be trying to attract a CEO to turn their company around?
> I'm wondering why people focus on financial compensation so much? Why does how much someone was paid justify more or less bashing, as the case might be?
To me it's because she wasn't taking a risk, she was getting paid massive amounts regardless of what she did. Why celebrate someone who enriched herself as the company imploded and had to lay off thousands of people? There are so many other people worth accolades.
Are you so confident in knowing what her objectives were that you can make that statement? For all we know the board wanted to maximize value on the way down.
>I'm wondering why people focus on financial compensation so much? Why does how much someone was paid justify more or less bashing, as the case might be?
It's simply the issue of gratuitous executive pay. If her pay hadn't been >>100x what a typical SV worker makes I think she'd get significantly less flak. The idea of someone being granted enough money so their great-grandchildren never have to work a day when that person did a poor job after only 4 years on the job just makes people sick. Don't forget some bad stuff happened on Mayer's watch; like 1B user accounts being compromised.
> I'm wondering why people focus on financial compensation so much? Why does how much someone was paid justify more or less bashing, as the case might be?
The payment and bashing might be slightly related, but I tend to think it's a minor factor. People focus on financials so much because that's what the western culture is built upon. The American Dream, if you will. However bashing, complimenting, or mentioning someone at all comes with fame. I'm fairly certain people would talk a lot about Marissa Mayer regardless of whether she got paid anything. The ratio of criticism-to-compliments tends to go hand-in-hand with the person's perceived success-to-failure ratio. Marissa Mayer wasn't that successful, and thus she'll mostly get criticism.
> The ratio of criticism-to-compliments tends to go hand-in-hand with the person's perceived success-to-failure ratio.
Intuitively this seems accurate. Wondering if you know of actual research regarding this though?
To add to that, I think people have a hard time assessing relative success. Imagine being dropped in as the captain of the Titanic after it's hit the iceberg. If you manage to delay the sinking for an extra hour, which allows more people to escape, you are successful even if most people do drown. You're successful relative to some expected value. But drive-by armchair analysts will just see that the ship sunk and a bunch of people died and blame you.
Obviously this situation is much more complicated, since opinions will differ about whether Yahoo was in fact inevitably sinking, or whether a different captain could have helped it survive.
I think the comment you're responding to is suggesting that though giving someone (Mayer) the benefit of the doubt might be humane, it may not be, strictly speaking, rationally appropriate.
I believe the financial compensation angle is that because she was particularly well compensated, she is perceived to not have much skin in the game. As an aside, I don't think this is especially productive because it is incredibly rare to find someone running a company who isn't deeply emotionally invested in that enterprise, but the perception remains.
Obviously, though the crowd wants to excoriate Mayer I think if folks have a problem with her compensation they should look to the board.
> I'm wondering why people focus on financial compensation so much? Why does how much someone was paid justify more or less bashing, as the case might be?
Because it reveals the tenuous relationship between executive pay and company results, and people prefer to take it out on the obvious cases rather than accept that there's little evidence they correlate very well.
If I take the time to put criticism of the contract in one mental bucket and criticism of the person and/or her performance in another, I get the impression that the preemptive tone policing loses much of its cause. I'd rather have those two buckets nicely separated than shushed together.
Indeed. I recently found out Michael O'Church was banned from HN because he called her the c word because of the anti-worker policies she implemented at Yahoo. (somewhat indirectly, and I'm hesitant to use it myself for fear of being banned).
I didn't downvote you but I think you see the issue with your statement yourself. HN does not censor words.
While name calling is completely childish it is most certainly tolerated by other users on HN (Do a search for "is a [insert derogatory word]" site:news.ycombinator.com. Steve Jobs is called an asshole in every HN thread.
For sure ochurch stepped on toes here but one thing he was passionate about is improving the profession of software development and in general the tech industry and he saw MMs actions really harming the profession and the industry. I obviously think HN is worse off without his commentary.
I'd want to be well compensated for taking on a job where I was fairly certain I was doomed to fail because the company is being eaten alive by its competitors.
Wouldn't it be unethical to take on a job you were certain you'd fail at? (If you disclosed that, and they hired you anyway, then there's no ethical problem.)
"Fairly certain", though. If her odds of saving Yahoo were twice as good as an alternative CEO, that was a possibility worth a small fortune. And presumably, they knew the odds were low after sacking the last few CEOs. I'm hoping that she didn't even have to say it - a competent board could approach the whole thing with "we're in deep water, we think you're less doomed than most people would be".
That may well have been the case, but if those odds are 1% and 2% I wouldn't want my compensation to depend on me saving the probably-doomed company.
It's perfectly ethical if you've had a frank discussion with your employer about your odds of success. If you sold them the idea that you could save it, but privately were certain you could not, that is plainly and simply unethical.
What level of compensation would it take to make such a statement OK? I'm sure plenty of execs turned it down because of the risk of failure and the inevitable microscope and personal attacks associated with being the CEO of one of the most recognizable but failing companies in the world.
(reasonable) tone policing helps prevent a bunch of armchair quarterbacks with modestly successful programming backgrounds from assuming they have any idea what happens at the executive level of a company like Yahoo.
Side note, but are there any good resources for learning how these things work in reality at the executive level? I haven't found much good reading that isn't a bunch of fluff. Any good educational resources on how these situations are run, how the politics work, how to navigate them, etc. Would be really helpful.
> Yes, she wasn't able to keep the ship from sinking. But I do think she put in a good-faith effort.
Are we giving out an A for effort now? CEOs are hired to achieve results. If they fail, it doesn't matter how hard they tried.
Maybe nobody could have prevented the failure of Yahoo. But that doesn't get Mayer off the hook for being a bad CEO -- she made bad decisions, managed to piss off the shareholders, executive team, and rank-and-file employees, hid major security breaches, and did not succeed at any of the things she tried to do. She had no major positive achievements during her entire tenure as CEO.
The best that can realistically be said about her is that she was a bad CEO stuck in an impossible situation.
I can't speak for the rest of HN, but part of the "bashing" of Mayer is not just a personal attack on her, but a critique of our entire culture and economic system.
At the end of the day, she'll receive multiple millions of dollars for doing and achieving nothing.
Not a bad job of you can get it, but the phenomenon itself seems eminentl, judiciously and justifiably open to criticism to me.
She's just another caricature in the social pattern...
This. None of us know Mayer, have met her, really, none of us give a monkeys about her. I'm sure she's a lovely and pleasant person.
Criticism of her in this context are entirely criticisms of the events surrounding her time at Yahoo, for which there are multiple other examples. The habit corporate boards have of rewarding failure is a problem, but it's not clear how to solve it.
I didn't see a good-faith effort, what I saw was a lot of conservative policies that tamped down innovation and then efforts to chase the market leaders.
Marissa Mayer didn't do a good job, her first acts at Yahoo alienated the loyal employees that she needed to embrace. I don't know if anyone could have saved Yahoo from sinking but she sure as shit didn't do anything to stave it off.
Yes, the pay is excessive and probably unnecessary, but BoDs that approve it are often comprised of CEOs at other companies. Quid pro quo.
CEO compensation increased dramatically at around the same time that the finance sector started capturing a bigger chunk of the GDP, which is around the same time that many large companies created mini hedge funds internally. Maybe it's more to do with that, but the country club networking opportunities can't hurt.
Her financial compensation largely depended on stock performance, as is typical with anyone involved at the C-level. A share of YHOO is worth $41 today vs $15 (and lower teens) at the time of her hire five years back.
If the YHOO stock was anywhere near 2012 levels (or lower, or zero), her total compensation would look very different.
There was a pretty major risk that her name would be tarred as "that loser who wrecked Yahoo". It might affect her ability to get any further C-level positions. That risk might not be something that a normal human being would want compensation to take on.
By the time you're that rich money & wealth is just a scoresheet, not a means to an end.
Competitive, successful people like winning more than they like money, otherwise people like Larry Ellison wouldn't spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the Americas cup.
> By the time you're that rich money & wealth is just a scoresheet, not a means to an end.
Yo'ure no doubt right, but when a majority of society is told to accept that money is "food, shelter, and a decent existence" to most people, and "points in a senseless ego game" to a few, things have gone badly off the rails. Those differences in perspective tend to be resolved violently and badly.
I blame her for allowing the NSA to (illegally) get root access to Yahoo's servers so they can spy on everyone whenever they feel like it with no oversight, for doing it behind the security team's backs (not that it matters much in the grand scheme of things, but also shows what kind of person she is), and (perhaps related) allowing 1 billion of Yahoo accounts to be hacked so easily.
So what does this show us? Beyond her failing to "make great new products at Yahoo", which I guess you could argue no one other than Steve Jobs may have been able to do at Yahoo anymore, it shows that she likes to betray not just her colleagues but also the users at the companies she leads. And in the end she ended up getting paid more than handsomely for all of those failures or malicious actions in which she engaged.
So I'll make sure to never ever use a service run by Marissa Mayer and that everyone I know stays away from a company run by her.
She got paid an obscene amount of money to continue driving a sinking ship into the bottom of the ocean. She is not a plucky entrepreneur risking everything against the odds. She gets zero kudos from me.
I do as well. As outlined in The Halo Effect, people want very tidy, clean, and rational reasons why a company failed. Blame must be specifically laid somewhere. However, there's a pretty good chance no one available could have saved the demise of Yahoo. Variance is a thing.
I do think there's something wrong with someone earning massive amounts of money to fail and then everyone saying, "Oh well, anyone would have failed in that role."
Why pay someone huge sums of money if failure is the expected outcome?
> Why pay someone huge sums of money if failure is the expected outcome?
Because the people making executive compensation decisions are from a narrow elite class and are the people benefiting from executive
compensation decisions.
Well-said. Major example: interlocking boards of directors. They clearly demonstrate cartel-like behavior where it's "us vs them" at one level protecting their personal profits and "them vs them" at another level competing for good positions, policy preferences, or market share. Unsurprisingly, it's one of ideal moves a capitalist can make in an environment like the U.S. given it gains the personal benefits of capitalism while minimizing the risk that real competition or cost minimization of labor would bring them. They must operate collectively to defeat what threatens their wealth.
EDIT: The answers all around yours are screenshot-worthy. Perfect example of what the elites bought with all those donations/visits to universities, textbooks, biased media, and so on. Many still believe they have to earn it in a way that's about merit as an employee of the company. Thousands of years of human history showed nepotism, classism, and other rigging were main ways people got ahead. Then it suddenly is out of the equation for many analyzing success of modern elites. ;)
The "failure" is subjective. What's objective is the stock price, which has grown from $15 to $41 under her management.
As bulk of her compensation is locked in stock (negotiated at 2012 prices), it's increasingly hard for her to get compensated less while the stock has tripled in value.
That may be, and you seem to have a better scoop on the internals.
I was just pointing out that there are very few YHOO investors unhappy with the stock moves 2012-2017 (when benchmarked against S&P 500 or whatever else is commonly accepted metric) compared with, for example, Eric Jackson's war against Terry Semel's (and some directors') compensation package while the stock was in consistent decline https://www.law360.com/articles/26456/advisors-oust-yahoo-di...
>Why pay someone huge sums of money if failure is the expected outcome?
Because all big C-level positions work this way? Doesn't make it a good idea, or even rational. But humans are of the rationalizing type, not actual rational beings.
I suppose, there's a huge responsibility coming with that role, and you also know your name will be stained forever. But it's something somebody has to do.
their names are never stained. she will resurface in some other high profile position in no time. these C*O's live in their own universe, where common sense and peasants' logic do not apply.
Because it wasn't the expected outcome. Or, at least, there was a chance that things could be saved. The high risk is even more reason to offer huge compensation.
We can only see in retrospect that it was doomed to failure.
The risk of her future income being depressed. The risk her compensation package mitigated by paying her millions even in the face of a perceived failure.
One reason I heard for the demise of Yahoo, from someone who worked there, was tech was totally anarchic. They didn't build up the vast amounts of shared software infrastructure that Google, Facebook and Amazon did. Apparently, each separate business unit did a lot of reinventing the wheel. That might have been something someone with a background in big company software architecture could have focused on, but that wasn't Marissa.
if only they had a chance to rewrite their web site in angular 2, things would have been so much different.
jokes aside, they rewrote their yahoo finance site in some JavaScript framework, so it became plain unusable. they moved ticker box to the right side (congratulation, Marissa, deeply strategic decision! how many millions did you get for this one?) and hooked it up to shitload of JS, so entering ticker and pressing enter just don't work - I have to slowly press keys and patiently wait for some unwanted intellisense magic to wake up and help me to understand that when I type JNK I really mean JNK.
I'm not 100% sure but I am guessing based on few thing I see in the current code browser side. Finance probably copied a lot of what sports was doing. Sports was ahead of the game a little because it was not as old as Finance.
I know that Angular 1 was not allowed back when it first started to catch on. I am not sure if it was because of the CLA or the license, but I do think there was something legal around patents. Yahoo still has a ton of patents.
Sports was already working on a new framework that I believe predates Angular. Some of that crazy JS was there to support precog, a preloading interface and some other things. Some of it was based on the horrid work of an architect that did not last long after MM started. Still I can't say he did that or she did this. There was a period of trying to get modern that failed before MM showed up. I do know of several folks that did what they could do and made that framework the best they could.
Now to get back to finance. When I was leaving, finance was still in many languages. In 2015 some parts of finance pages where still rendered in C. Yes think sprintf and friends. When you have something like 5 languages rendering a page doing the whole, "we are going to rending in Angular" isn't really an option.
This is the very definition of technical debt. Does it suck? Yes. Is this something a CEO can fix? No. Can we blame one little framework on the demise? That would just be stupid. Technology does not work in a bubble. It works on the shoulders of it's creators and has to overcome the faults of those creators. This is much as is life, we evolve when need be, but until then we live on.
yahoo finance was fast, old fashioned site used and scraped by lot of people. kudos to them for being one of the few sources of free EOD data and options chains. the decision to fuck it up (meticulously executed) must have come from the top. i am not blaming Marissa for choosing the wrong JS framework, but for being completely clueless while one of the pillars of yahoo online business was being destroyed.
It was both and more. I started there back when Bartz was CEO. Bartz continued down the media company path that was already established. Thompson doubled down and cut huge amount of tech talent to focus on media. Like he literally almost completely killed labs the PhD wing that did research. There are other things that elaborate on that really hurt and created the outcome we see today.
When MM started she had no idea of the technical debt she was going to inherit. Something to keep in mind is that Yahoo invented web at scale. It started on FreeBSD and had kernel contributors even when I started. I think they all work for Apple these days. To help handle scale Yahoo would create Yahoo versions of software via things like kernel extensions or software patches. Nobody was doing these things back in the late 90s, but it was needed. Back then nobody knew what we know now and they literally where making it up as they went along.
The thing is when you are the first to the table it sometimes creates technical issues. Sometime before I started there was a decision to shift from BSD to Linux. That was probably a good decision, not because of the merits of FreeBSD, but because Linux was getting a lot more headway with extra contributors. When you have code that was dependent on kernel extensions and you change kernels you get some pain points. Some are manageable others are not. I don't think anybody knew how painful that transition would be, well maybe Filo did because he was crazy aware of everything. As a side note when I started Filo was maybe a L3 but I think a L4 because tech was just that that devalued. So if he did know he probably didn't have much say in the matter. Even as a major stock holder he is not the kind of guy that throws that around, I really think he cares more about the tech then his bank account. If I had his bank account I probably would be in the same place.
Yahoo also made a somewhat fatal accounting issue prior to me getting there and probably early on. This was probably the right thing at that time, but it morphed into a bigger issue later down the road. They wanted to isolate "properties" or business units financially. To do that each property, such as news, sports or mail had their own hardware and justification for the hardware. This unfortunately creates a hoarding of assets since you never know when you can get more compute or storage. Keep in mind we are are talking pre-VM tech for you young folks and buying a server cost some big bucks. This created a culture or inertia that made to switch to VM very difficult. That wasn't the only thing. If the sports "product" is separate from the news "product" and assets, both physical and talent wise are isolated, then where is the incentive to share? This doesn't mean there was no sharing, there was, but it created a culture of do it your own way to get things done.
When MM started she focused internally at first. If you where in the building you got that. If you where in IT then well you knew there was a laser on you. It was all about getting the simple things first, upgrade outdated laptops etc. Then it moved to getting infrastructure in place. She was trying to shift the culture from mediocrity for developers to a developer and product first standpoint. It then became about reducing technical debt and lifting the barriers between groups. That ship does not correct overnight. There was some point in this that she did have to embrace the media focus and did a few big deals to get media talent, just is just a guess, but the timing is right.
Probably the final nail in the coffin was delivered unknowingly by co-founder Jerry Yang. With all best intentions Yang helped his friend Jack Ma with the Alibaba venture. Instead of a personal investment Yang opted for a joint venture where Alibaba got Yahoo China and some cash and Yahoo got some shares in Alibaba. Well as we all know Alibaba took off and the deal is just epic in terms of ROI. That created a big issue though. When MM took the reigns she would grow the stock price marginally which should have bought time, but Alibaba took over. The stock price became a proxy to Alibaba and the hedge funds took notice. Enter Jeffery Smith and his hedge fund. He did his job, as unpleasant as some of us might think, and went to work on maximizing return. Most of that return is in tax savings so he started working that angle which is ultimately why this sale is going to happen. When a company goes from $15 per share to $40 per share because of a holding, you are and investment company. There is nothing that can be done you are tied to the holding.
When Yahoo hired MM they had fired 2 CEOs in the past year, had two interim CEOs, and was probably looking to just get somebody that had a chance of righting the ship.
This is true, and what Yahoo did in its early days was definitely impressive, but the talent that did it moved on, and was never replaced.
When I joined in 2013, I encountered a lot of systems/processes/whatever that would have been impressive in 2003, but hadn't been updated or replaced in 10 years, and the culture inside Yahoo was still stuck in a weird not-invented-here bubble where a lot of people thought their 2003 tech was still impressive.
Turns out, if you gut the engineering organization over a decade, you end up with a B team, and you're completely unable to attract the A players necessary to keep innovating.
There's a lot of criticism in this thread that Marissa didn't do anything worthwhile, but she sure as hell tried. All those acquisitions? Almost all of them were acquihires, in a desperate attempt to get A players. Most of those didn't stick around very long though, because there's only so much shit and technical debt you can stand, and then the company is out the money, and has very little to show for it. It could have worked, but it didn't.
I believe we fought many of the same battles then. I think every Yahoo engineer at that time can curse ylock. If you where good though you looked at it with the WTH ylock did and thought hell it wasn't that bad for 20th century or early 21st, unfortunately there we where in early twenty tens constained and just trying to get a 64-bit kernel.
It's worth note that Facebook also had some similar challenges. They had so much in PHP and if you are an idiot and think just rewrite well then you would be doomed to failure. The advantage that Facebook had a few years back was that the didn't go through a period of removing tech talent in the same fashion that Yahoo did. They also had cash, a lot of cash. They could afford to pay for things like HipHop. By the time Yahoo needed a tech refresh they had already burned the cash and caused the talent to leave.
I know that sounds bleak, but at the same time while I was there after MM I did find really great talent. Some of that existed before she was there. I can think of several folks on tech47 project and they know who they are. They don't really need to be told they are talent. At the same time I can think of many new guys that brought it on. I still think one of the better talks I had was a with the new guy that wrote some of the Android network stack. Without telling names, he was describing the issues between dropping WiFi and dropping cell. One is easier then the other, if I drop WiFi and still have cell I can continue. If I drop cell I can only hope for WiFi. Either case is hard because the stack needs to understand an IP address shift and adjust accordingly. When you have that talent that understands and can code it, then you get things done. Unfortunately with everything else in the valley getting a quick hit and retaining are two different things.
Facebook also has one single product, whereas Yahoo has I don't know how many products, and they're all completely different, on sort of different stacks, in different silos and budget orgs, and all slightly different such that unifying them is an enormous task.
If they had had the engineering talent and budgets to build the kind of shared infrastructure and fundamentals that for example Google did, they would have been in a very different spot.
The alibaba investment was probably Jerry Yang's best ROI decision aside from being a part of starting the company in the first place...
Unfortunately for Yahoo itself that decision was SOOO good that it would eventually consume the company.
Because there was basically no way for the company to overcome how valuable it was as an Alibaba proxy and wall street started to look at all of its other endeavors as just high risk low chance of return gambling with the Alibaba money.
As an enthusiast photographer, she did one great thing in my book: She oversaw the attempted revitalization of Flickr. The old Flickr product and UI had stagnated for the better part of a decade, and under her administration, Yahoo rebooted a lot of the core experience. Some parts were rebooted more successfully than others, but on the balance, it was for the better.
She did the bare minimum that needed to be done to keep flickr alive, I'm not sure it's worthy of praise. Flickr is currently comatose or dead, given that they haven't updated their mobile app in over a year, let alone anything else on the site. Yahoo could've used flickr to pre-empt YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram all in one, but Yahoo instead neglected it and ran it into the ground. I feel bad for the engineering talent that Yahoo wasted, but the executive leadership deserves nothing but scorn. They missed so many huge opportunities.
Flickr's a tough case. You make it Instagram or Facebook, even successfully, and it's not Flickr. I know I've personally bitched about Flickr stagnating but, when I think about it, I'm not sure how I really want it to change. It's a hosting--and, to some degree, sharing--site mostly for people who are relatively serious about photography. I can think of a few changes I'd like but I suspect that the original Flickr vision is fundamentally a niche market at this point.
No I don't even have any photos on there I just use it to browse photography stuff and the ads are tasteless. Yes I realize it's not free to run. I'm still not a fan of this change and think there must be a better way.
If I may use the full benefits of hindsight, I wonder if Yahoo, instead of Google, ought to have been the company to go all-in on a social network competitor to facebook, (and I don't mean 360°). Yahoo had more organic components of a social community across its properties than Google ever did. If they wanted to mature into something that was more than a media company, that seems to me like the path to take.
Of course it's easy to say that. I have much more faith in Google's ability to execute on that front than Yahoo, and look what happened to G+. So who knows if they could have done it right.
Flickr was the only service that insisted I should stop paying the yearly fee and switch to a free plan. Shortly afterwards they drove me away for good with some silly zoom and pan effect on photo views.
I do not think she put in a good-faith effort. I am an ex-Yahoo, and found the hiring of several mid-level Googlers and buying a startup run by an ex-APM investigation-worthy.
There are challenges and then there are challenges.
When the challenge is... "Try to increase/stabilize Yahoo profits and keep relevant/hip, and, no matter what, we'll give you X millions of dollars." I don't think that's a challenge, let alone an immense challenge.
Start with nothing. No code, no customers, no brand, no employees, no customers, no investors, and very little cash in the bank for runway, and try to build that up to Yahoo's level -- that's a challenge. That's a big challenge.
Being able to parachute into a high status, high privledge, highly paid (no matter what) role, where you can just kind of twiddle the bits and get to spin every more you make as the obviously smart thing to do -- that's easy. Even if you "fail" you still win. Very different from situations where when you fail you... starve, get evicted, etc.
> Yes, she wasn't able to keep the ship from sinking. But I do think she put in a good-faith effort.
yahoo was a sinking ship already but she illegally fired men because they were men and got rid of remote workers, is that really considered "good-faith effort"?
I want to echo on your message and also to thank you for contributing with a positive comment and not with a harsh one like most people often do.
I remember a few years ago when some of the stuff that Marissa was doing to reshape Yahoo's internal structure were being looked with good eyes and were being replicated in other companies (Bringing in remote people, focusing on some products, etc.) I guess we can all agree that in the end she didn't do the best job but maybe no one else could've done it differently. No way to know now.
> doing to reshape Yahoo's internal structure were being looked with good eyes
My recollection of those events were that Marissa Mayer exercised her privilege to have a daycare next to her office while ignoring the needs of all the parents that worked for her. Those were the events that made me dislike her, it showed antipathy for the people that had stuck at Yahoo.
Out of curiosity, why do you call her by her first name instead of her last name (Meyer)? Is there another famous Meyer such that there could be a confusion here?
There’s no reason to be confrontational here; I’m wondering why we refer to some people by their first name rather than they last name. The most obvious reason is when there’s already a famous <last_name> (e.g. "Hillary" vs. "Clinton"), or if you know that person personnally. Wikipedia refers to both Marissa M_a_yer and Larry Page (and everybody) with their last name. Do you have some examples of e.g. press articles where Brin or Page are referred to by their first name?
> Each of David Filo, Eddy Hartenstein, Richard Hill, Marissa Mayer, Jane Shaw and Maynard Webb has indicated that he or she intends to resign from the Board effective upon the Closing, and that his or her intention to resign is not due to any disagreement with the Company on any matter relating to the Company’s operations, policies or practices.
Which indicates that she'll resign from the board, but doesn't say anything about her resigning as CEO. Is that just left off here because it doesn't require SEC disclosure, or is it a possibility that she'll stay?
If she stays, it should be with Verizon Yahoo, not with Altaba (shell containing Alibaba shares formerly known as Yahoo), which is a kind of company Mayer has no experience managing (and also not a managerial challenge worth the kind of salary she can get elsewhere)
Interstingly this could make sense, because they're selling off all of the Yahoo! assets there is no reason there is no incentive to use Yahoo! mail and in fact they lose the rights to those assets once the sale is completed.
Altaba will still be holding all of the other assets not sold to verizon so this is likely the best way to move forward for whoever is left working for this not quite dead entity once the sale is complete.
Maybe I could be hitting a cache or something, but here's what I see:
$ host Altaba.com
Altaba.com mail is handled by 10 alt4.aspmx.l.google.com.
Altaba.com mail is handled by 1 aspmx.l.google.com.
Altaba.com mail is handled by 5 alt1.aspmx.l.google.com.
Altaba.com mail is handled by 5 alt2.aspmx.l.google.com.
Altaba.com mail is handled by 10 alt3.aspmx.l.google.com.
Here's yahoo.com for reference:
$ host yahoo.com
yahoo.com has address 206.190.36.45
yahoo.com has address 98.138.253.109
yahoo.com has address 98.139.183.24
yahoo.com has IPv6 address 2001:4998:58:c02::a9
yahoo.com has IPv6 address 2001:4998:c:a06::2:4008
yahoo.com has IPv6 address 2001:4998:44:204::a7
yahoo.com mail is handled by 1 mta7.am0.yahoodns.net.
yahoo.com mail is handled by 1 mta5.am0.yahoodns.net.
yahoo.com mail is handled by 1 mta6.am0.yahoodns.net.
This says Marissa will not be involved with Altaba Inc. (RemainCo) after Yahoo's operating business is sold to Verizon. Which makes sense, since any future of her leadership is with the operating business instead of the investment company Altaba.
For the record, this is incorrect. The SEC filing does not indicate she is resigning as CEO. See other comments for explanations about what's actually going on.
I wish there was a real alternative to search. I use DuckDuckGo, but I believe they run on AWS and purchase index data from Yandex et. al.
At this point, is it even feasible for anyone to enter the general search market, or has Google simply set the barrier to entry too high? Are there any niche search engines that focus on things Google has either removed or doesn't index? Are there other alternatives besides DDG, StartPage, Yandex and Bing?
Mac has a much more significant market share than it did then, there are several viable alternatives to MS Office, and iOS and Android have kept Windows from having any significant market share in mobile.
That last point is the most significant here: sure, you might not be able to beat Google at Google-like search, but you can try to start building the thing that will become more important than Google-like search in the next 5-10 years.
Mac has increased in market share yes, but it's still not even close to a threat.
MS Office is, like Windows, still the king of office productivity application suites. Yes, there are competitors, but they are not a threat to MS as far as I know.
I'm not entirely sure that mobile will be replacing desktop in the near future. People have been shouting "fire!" for years now when it comes to tablets vs. desktop. Regardless, the original comment was talking specifically about desktop.
> Regardless, the original comment was talking specifically about desktop.
Yes but that's the point. Microsoft may still be the most dominant player on the desktop, but they're no longer the most important company in tech, because the desktop is no longer the only important platform.
Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple are all now as important or more important than Microsoft, because they all run platforms that are as important or more important than Windows.
It was hard to imagine that ever happening in 1999, yet it had started happening, and it became clearly apparent that it was happening within just a few years.
Similarly, whilst Google might seem hopelessly dominant now due to their dominance in search, their dominance over tech will subside when the next important new platform emerges.
I think the OP was talking specifically about search, not tech in general. It's rather obvious that unless companies constantly reinvent themselves that the new tech will replace old methods. His question was directed toward the possibility of someone coming in and taking over search as it is today. Which i'm curious of other opinion on this question as well, because frankly I think unless a radical innovation happens in the field, that modern day search is going to be forever relegated to google.
> I think the OP was talking specifically about search, not tech in general.
Yeah fair enough, so they were.
> It's rather obvious that unless companies constantly reinvent themselves that the new tech will replace old methods.
It's obvious in theory/hindsight, but not so much in the real world, as it's impossible to predict exactly what the next important thing will look like - which is why it's pretty much always a new upstart that invents it rather than an incumbent.
> His question was directed toward the possibility of someone coming in and taking over search as it is today. Which i'm curious of other opinion on this question as well, because frankly I think unless a radical innovation happens in the field, that modern day search is going to be forever relegated to google.
Well, for what it's worth, and if it isn't already clear from my previous comments, I'm pretty sure Google will always dominate search-as-we-know-it, but that's not that big a deal, because search-as-we-know-it won't always be as important as it is now.
just because windows remains the king of desktop, it doesnt mean that change hasn't affected them... in this case, the desktop is becoming less and less relavent. it is new platforms that are rendering windows less important. android, ios, alexa, google home - computing is moving away from the desktop.
similarly, google's near-monopoly in search, is not really threatened by other pure-play search engines, but rather out of left field: facebook and amazon. google may very well be the dominant search engine in a decade or two, but search may not matter as much as it did in the last decade because other platforms rise in prominence.
Very rarely ever directly though. When Google became the number 1 search engine nobody else actually wanted to be the number 1 search engine - they wanted to be the "home page of the web".
It's going to take a couple of years for it to be realistically usable day to day, but I have some faith in the distributed search. http://yacy.net/en/index.html
In a long run, but only is personal storage going to allow this easily, but our searches are usually pretty limited in scope. I could resolve ~90% of my queries with indexes of SO, cooking websites, very limited number of blogs, documentation of standard libraries of a few languages. This would even fit on my phone right now.
What I miss about Yahoo! in the early days was explorability. Many sites were categorized. You could browse a category or find a site you liked and explore from there.
Some ideas:
a) Focus on a niche, like the best search experience for hackers, or best search experience on mobile for high school students, etc.
b) Do content-based ranking, ie. figure out the good-ness of a website based on an automated analysis of what it's about, instead of depending on the link-graph that powers PageRank.
It's possible but the volume investment required makes it unlikely. The resource requirements to create a quality scrape/search engine are pretty extensive.
Altaba is just a investment company. The operating business will be sold to Verizon (if Verizon doesn't back out), and the money from the sale goes to Altaba. At that point Altaba ought to liquidate and divide the money among the shareholders, but the management may try to invest in other things to justify their jobs.
Is this like Google's move to be under Alphabet as a parent company? Altaba is for the holding group that controls that substantial overseas investments while Yahoo becomes just a brand used for some of their web properties that can be sold off if necessary?
Ah yes, you appear to be correct. As of now she's going to Verizon with the sale. Personally I can't imagine her lasting very long there but I suppose you never know.
"In light of the fact that following the Closing the Company will operate as an investment company under the Investment Company Act of 1940" - this is why. It will let Verizon save billions of dollars on Alibaba stock if it can get Yahoo out of the way.
Honestly, he should start a new simple web directory with David Filo called "Jerry and David's new guide to the World Wide Web" and run it completely manually in a curated fashion, just like the old days.
I think it could have been saved. I stopped going there when 90% of the articles was either a sponsored story, or a story so left leaning it was almost unreadable.
Altaba? Because a rebrand is certainly going to rescue the company. I can see the meetings now. "we need to do something" "....." "Let's do a rebrand! It will all give us the feeling we are doing something"
Because it doesn't matter. It'll be a holding company for people who basically want to own Alibaba shares. From that perspective, it's a great name, because it reads a lot like "alternate alibaba".
The headline was changed but the new one reveals nothing. For those who don't want to dig through the filing: Meyer has resigned from the board and Yahoo is renaming to "Altaba".
I understand the recent security failures of Yahoo must have weakened the company brand name to certain extent, but it's a 2 decade old web company almost every know off, not sure what made the decision in favor of the new name.
Changing the brand under these circumstances doesn't make sense to me. Brands take years to build, and Yahoo dominates as a brand in Japan. It seems sloppy PR to pick a name like "Altaba" within mere weeks/months of deciding to buy Yahoo.
Yahoo is splitting into two companies: Yahoo Holdings and Altaba Inc. Yahoo Holdings owns the "Yahoo" trademark and is being sold to Verizon. Altaba is an investment company that owns everything that is not being sold to Verizon. Yahoo will still be alive in yahoo.com.
No. Nothing changes for the products. Altaba is a new company that just owns stock in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan. Tumblr will be owned by Yahoo Holdings, which will be owned by Verizon. Yahoo Weather will still be Yahoo Weather.
Changing a company name is one thing. Google did the same, essentially, with the formation of Alphabet. But please, dear God, don't tell me they are changing their domain. It's like the Eddie Murphy joke about falling down the stairs - for what seems like an eternity. ["My shoe!"]
It's hard to believe what's become of the mighty Y! brand.
Yahoo, I mean. Or shoes.. I guess that this saying would indeed apply to shoes as well. So I guess that Yahoo and shoes have two things in common. 'Being grounded' being the other one.
I would like yahoo to go screw itself for one specific reason:
Microsoft had offered its war chest to buy them, and yahoo turned them down. It had a good chance of bringing down Microsoft in the long run, and yahoo would have done a solid for the world.
But they turned them down. The ONE TIME I want a goddamn company executive leadership to take the money and run, and they didn't.
First scan read I thought they were changing their name to "Alberta Inc." and thought to myself "well, that's one way to deal with the inauguration..."
"Alt + Tab" is the only reasonable thing I can think of it being rooted in. But even that sucks like a sucky thing.
