This is possibly the most source-friendly piece of tech journalism I've read in a while. I don't think there is a single point in that piece that would make Yahoo PR the least bit uncomfortable. Credit where it's due, the article is incredibly well written and beautifully presented. It's just a shame to see such unquestioning faith in a source. One by one, Levy hammers away at every recent criticism of Yahoo. Anything that could not justified was deemed to be overblown.
"Some of the various flaps involving her leadership were crazily overblown, like her personal child care accommodations, or an edict against working at home that affected a tiny percentage of Yahoo’s workforce."
Every original fact in this article is information Yahoo would obviously want to share, like the success of its revamped ad platform. Based on the way he has failed to question anything else that Mayer has done during her tenure, it is hard to believe that these facts were questioned and examined in any detail.
Don't get me wrong: I think that Mayer may be doing a good job. I'm not too sure either way. I just think, as a piece of tech reporting, this is embarrassing.
And in his own words (https://medium.com/@stevenlevy/im-moving-to-medium-6869c0e32...), he was hired by Medium to "establish a tech hub that strives to bring well-reported, lively, and meaningful reporting and writing to what is already shaping up as a terrific platform for the written word."
I agree the article is favorable to Yahoo, but it strikes me as likely that the author conducted interviews, reviewed the facts, and wrote what he thought was the truth. Some folks on this thread may disagree with his conclusions, but that by itself does not make it bad journalism.
Disclaimer: Steven is a friend, occasionally a competitor (before I left to found Recent.io), and someone who once approached me to work with him.
PR piece: embarrassing.
Hit piece: equally embarrassing.
Why are the critical articles more appealing in this case? Is there some inherent desire to see the criticism turn out to be true which is greater than the desire to see the criticism turn out to be unfounded?
As much as you can disagree with the content of this article, it's hard to argue that it's as light and fluffy as the PR piece served up by Levy.
Regarding Carlson's stuff on Yahoo, you might disagree with some of his opinions. You might even think his book is a hit piece. But, at the very least, it's a well-researched hit piece.
Levy only seemed to speak with Yahoo PR and republish their opinions directly. I don't think any reasonable reader could assume that Carlson only spoke to a hedge fund manager short on Yahoo.
I'm one of those people with a yahoo email account, mainly because I'm on the old side now and got it way back when yahoo email was, well, kind of like hotmail for people even older than me. The article refers to people like me as loyalists, but I'm really not. I honestly don't like my yahoo email account.
It's not technology, it's the the nature of the company itself. I know all websites want to keep you around, but the difference between using gmail and yahoo mail is remarkable.
I just went to mail.google.com, and I see my email. Now I'm going to yahoo mail… there's a big ad for life insurance next to my messages. Above them is a slightly larger link, intended to look like an email messages, for "rich dad, poor dad." Actually, something interesting has happened lately… the link expands in size about 3 seconds after the page has loaded. I'm starting to wonder if yahoo has noticed that if they do this, they will expand the ad just at the moment that the users wanting to check their email click on the first, top message, leading them instead to click on an ad, increasing "click through".
I'll admit, I'm leaning toward the tinfoil hat side of suspicious with that last one, but there's a reason I've started to think this way. Go to yahoo's front page, and it's click bait city. It seems like yahoo will do everything in its power to make sure I don't do what it is I came to the site to do, run a web search, or check my email.
In short, it appears to me that yahoo is still a media company, following the portal model, trying to get people to stay on the site for reasons that had nothing to do with why they came to the site. And by click bait, I mean titles like "the one medical test you shouldn't skip!", or "the 5 signs that he's manipulating you". In short, I'm starting to wonder if having a yahoo email account is actually a risk to my ability to concentrate.
Maybe yahoo is becoming more of an engineering/technology company, maybe not. If Mayer can make this happen, that'd be quite an accomplishment. There's definitely a huge legacy of specifically intending go not be an engineering company.
Back when I used to QA emails, I'd check Google, Hotmail, Yahoo!, and Aol. in the various browsers.
I listed them in that order for a reason -- Gmail was the cleanest and the most usable, while the Aol. web client was half ads and irrelevant columns, requiring you to click on the inbox to even read email, and displaying some of the most ridiculous bottom-of-the-barrel flashy ads that you can get before you end up seeing Adult Friend Finder or penis extension animations.
If ad quality is directly related to how much the host website needs the revenue and/or how valuable the clicks are, it's clear which company is doing the best online.
Actually, something interesting has happened lately… the link expands in size about 3 seconds after the page has loaded. I'm starting to wonder if yahoo has noticed that if they do this, they will expand the ad just at the moment that the users wanting to check their email click on the first, top message, leading them instead to click on an ad, increasing "click through".
This happens all the time when I read Ars Technica on my phone. That effective clickjacking, combined with the GE puff pieces of late, have notably reduced the frequency with which I visit Ars.
Have to agree completely here, and their mobile news app has started to fail completely for me on a galaxy s3. I dont think i'm too far off the new-every-two mobile cycle that the app should be crashing this much.
I've spent this month reassigning most of the email i care about to gmail. After that, I'll figure out a way to migrate off of Fantasy Sports, which is the last app I'll have from them. After that, maybe I'll boomerang back as a customer. But, we'll have to see how much more changes.
Is it strange that people defend Mayer so much ?
I find it a little strange.
I'm having a hard time figuring what the baseline of criticism is for a tech ceo, and how much they get defended from it.
I know Jobs, Gates, Ballmer, and Zuckerberg, have a crazy amount of criticism, and usually the (if it ever comes) defense comes later after the company/project gets huge or financially successful.
There's a good amount of criticism as well as praise for her, and I'm not entirely sure your question is entirely fair.
The reality of it all is that transformations take time, especially when things at Yahoo had been so Scott Thompson'd. Marissa has been rebuilding a sinking ship from the inside out - where most people would've just tried to patch it up as it slowly sank, or sold it off for parts; I think that's what's admirable. I think that's why people defend her. She dared to defy the status quo. She dared to employ the same dedication as founders do day in and day out, and she demonstrated over and over again, the audacity to take risks.
I find it stranger that more people don't defend her. All of us should know that technology companies thrive or die from the inside; it's why startup founders spend such a disproportionate amount of time hiring great people. To anyone who actually bothered to pause and compare Yahoo's culture today to yesterday's, it would be obvious that Marissa's conviction and aptitude is heralding a new era of prosperity; the transformation is apparent - and even if not yet absolute, it is still miraculous.
>That’s why she has spent $2 billion on acquisitions, most notably the $1.1 billion for Tumblr, which instantly gave Yahoo a credible entry into social networking and user-generated content. (It was, in fact, a Tumblr post that was Patient Zero in “The Dress” contagion that ate the Internet last week.)
I think the above excerpt, is a good reflection of what I believe the OP means by defending MM.
It may be unfair to try to sum up MM's time as CEO in terms of acquisitions, but its simply what the media has highlighted and I am sure Yahoo wants the media banging that drum for all its worth. Therefore, if the biggest argument for the $1.1B Tumblr acquisition is pointing to the latest viral post, I consider that running to her defense. From the tone of this article, the stockholders are demanding cost savings (sounds like less employees), new revenue streams and a general direction for the company. For better or worse the CEO is responsible for making the stockholders happy, I personally think Yahoo's niche could be in privacy - give users alternatives to Google, Facebook, Gmail, cloud storage with a focus on what people want...privacy. IMHO Yahoo has always had a respectable focus on the cross section of technology, privacy and human rights (maybe one of the first in tech to create a human rights program).
privacy typically does not drive revenue up, unless you are violating it. this might be something your social circle claims to want, but if you look at the "average" person, they have next to zero concern for their privacy.
New startup idea: convert existing privacy-apathetic customers of big companies like Google/Yahoo into privacy-aware customers who fear their data or identity being stolen, then sell conversions to a Google/Yahoo competitor who values privacy more highly.
If fear mongering works for wars, it should work for tech company privacy concerns meets mass consumerism!
>this might be something your social circle claims to want,
Professionally I practice law so yes, myself and my colleagues are concerned about government entities violating not just privacy but the attorney client-privilege...though I digress and this is not what I am talking about, but it does happen.
>but if you look at the "average" person, they have next to zero concern for their privacy.
The "average" person isn't using Yahoo, that's why it would be a niche. I'll leave you with a interesting quote: "A search engine whose users consisted of the top 10,000 hackers and no one else would be in a very powerful position despite its small size, just as Google was when it was that search engine."[1]
It's an interesting thought for sure, I just don't see how you sell it to shareholders. If I had to make a baseless assumption, I'd say the bulk of yahoos users are seniors who moved on from AOL, and don't know any difference.
I would be really interesting to see yahoos audience demographics to confirm or deny that though.. Perhaps they have a larger international audience I'm not aware of.
To anyone who actually bothered to pause and compare Yahoo's culture today to yesterday's, it would be obvious that Marissa's conviction and aptitude is heralding a new era of prosperity;
That is the complete opposite of what I've heard from those still at Yahoo.
Yes her mandated Quarterly Performance Review system in which managers were forced to put a % of employees in under performing buckets single handedly damaged the moral more than anything in the companies history.
> in which managers were forced to put a % of employees in under performing buckets
... except other managers, of course! ;-)
I'm an ex-Yahoo, and I feel that Yahoo has too many layers of management. Marissa would be well served by reducing the ratio of managers to engineers to something like 1:10 (currently I've heard it's close to 1:3, but that's just rumor and speculation).
Another possible explanation is the state of Yahoo in years preceding her. Basically a company that everyone was kind of surprised was still around. For as much as people dislike Microsoft or Facebook, I don't think many people think "why does this company still exist?" (There was definitely a time when people thought that of Apple though...)
(In particular, I remember a lot of this sort of anti-Yahoo sentiment in the months prior to Marissa Mayer, particularly around the time that the Yammer CEO made some announcement that he would not be hiring ex-Yahoo employees because of Yahoo's patent stance. People decried that CEO as being ridiculous, but there were also a lot of people expressing anti-Yahoo sentiments.)
Probably some combination of both, as well as a few other factors.
she also represents the seductive (at least for techies) narrative of an efficient, engineering-focused ceo coming in and cleaning up/revitalising a moribund "suit-driven" company, and hopefully returning it to its glory days when technology was king.
Another possible reason is that she has not actually done anything significant. Her time at Google was not spent working on any projects that produced notable success or revenue. Many think she was hired at Yahoo simply because of voodoo logic: she'll somehow bring Google Magick with her because she happened to get hired at Google early on.
> Her time at Google was not spent working on any projects that produced notable success or revenue.
Her CV begs to differ: she was VP of Search Products and User Experience, and then held key roles in Google Search, Google Images, Google News, Google Maps, Google Books, Google Product Search, Google Toolbar, iGoogle, and Gmail.
Mayer is no doubt smart and talented, but she was also at perfect place at the perfect time and rode the Google rocket ship straight to the top. So it's hard for outsiders to really separate talent from circumstance.
That said, you're very wrong. She had a defining impact on Google Search from the start, a project that did in fact produce notable success and revenue for the company.
> Is it strange that people defend Mayer so much ?
I've found just that opposite, that people generally seem critical of her time spent at Yahoo so far. Common targets are her seemingly haphazard app acquisition strategy, or how she frequently is late to meetings or misses them entirely, or how she has hired the wrong people high-profile positions. And often the conversation steers more towards her personality quirks.
Here was a particularly damning article published in the New York Times in December:
This is a Steven Levy interview. He gets access in exchange for allowing the VIP to tell her story her way. (I happen to be anti-anti-Mayer, but that's a different issue.)
Sure, every CEO faces some criticism. But the criticism directed at her is often petty and "gossipy". People pick on her fashion sense; but no one criticises (or praises) Zuck for his sweatshirts.
Well, I think if you compare her to the previous string of unsuccessful CEOs, it's hard to see her in a bad light. So in the context of Yahoo I think she's done well.
I definitely think she deserves criticism for stopping the work from home policy. This industry had a huge chance to move away from traditional office work to a much more flexible type of work environment. Her move put a significant dent in that.
No! Her job as CEO was to fix Yahoo. If the work-from-home program was a problem at Yahoo, it was her responsibility to address that.
You speak as if it's a foregone conclusion that working from home is a good idea, but not everybody agrees with that. So you're suggesting that she should have made a decision she felt was bad for her company to advance your personal agenda, and that's a little bit crazy.
I'm honestly not sure if Yahoo is "fixable." I don't use any of their products and I can't see any reason to change that. Everybody else does everything they can do better or is utterly irrelevant to me. But even nobodies can get people on board with a compelling product--I still remember abandoning Infoseek for the then-unknown Google--so it's up to them to create a reason to use it.
I've worked from home for over three years now, 100% of the time. Having done it and seen how big a difference it makes in feeling connected and involved, I can understand her rationale. It makes tons of sense for Yahoo specifically.
That's not to say a highly or fully remote team can't work. Clearly it can. It's probably not ideal for a sinking ship like Yahoo, though. You really do need all hands on deck, top to bottom.
Don't like it? Don't work for Yahoo. It really is as simple as that. I like the move, though, given their specific situation.
>Don't like it? Don't work for Yahoo. It really is as simple as that
Not so simple. First, jumping jobs for a lot of people is difficult. Second, it also set a trend in the industry. HP soon after started a program to make people come into the office.
> Not so simple. First, jumping jobs for a lot of people is difficult.
It really is that simple. If you want to work for Yahoo, you'll need to relocate. Otherwise, there exists a full world of other possibilities out there for you to pursue (many of which embrace remote working).
Having worked in a couple of teams with prevalent work-from-home policies, it can mask (or even encourage) some really unhealthy behaviour in depressed teams. While we might want the industry to move that way (eventually), it was probably the right move for Yahoo.
The WFH policy literally impacted about 1% of the people. And of those impacted, many of them got an exemption (based on performance) and continued to WFH. It really was made out to be a much bigger deal in the media, than it really was.
because people are desperately wanting her to be successful, not because they love yahoo, but to prove that women can run companies.
also, any criticism of a woman in tech is automatically labelled "misogynist" by the internet hate machine known as Tumblr (which Yahoo owns), so where she might get more criticism, people are giving her a free pass.
I have trouble believeing that you can back any of this up. It seems extremely unlikely to me that the number of people who want to "prove that women can run companies" outnumbers the number who want to prove that women can't.
Anyone who has any background in the subject knows of the many women who do successfully run companies - they know that there is no need to prove anything of this sort.
I don't like when people say, "Just look at the stock price." The stock benefit came from not undoing the work of her predecessors who purchased Ali Baba. The article does jump into this later.
Turnarounds take a while, and this is indeed Step 1. I can't think of another "It" company that returned to greatness. Perhaps AOL is the closes. (For those who argue for Apple, I don't think it was the "It" company the first time around)
I don't think yahoo was ever really an 'it' company...they were (maybe) an 'it stock', but that's a who nother ball of wax. At the company level, in terms of having a "category killer" product, they never had one.
In order for Yahoo to ever right the ship, that is what they need. They need to become indispensible for either offering something unqiue or something of unqiue value.
Their investment in alibaba was close to that...both unique to investors and great value...where else could you a private equity stake in a huge chineese start-up?
The issue there was the "killer product" was a specialized financial asset with a finite life. This is distinct from something with an evergreen consumer service or product that will be monetizable over the long run.
The task for the CEO is can take the capirtal on hand and start building good (evergreen) products?
If nothing else she should be given (retain) some capital and another 3 years before making a final judgement. At that stage, take a look at the pipleline and if there is nothing in it...that will be a signal.
Yahoo right now is like a pharma company which had a blockbuster come off of patent...its all about the ability to re-plenish the pipeline...the profits that happened previously are nearly irrelevant except for providing the position/capital to recruit people for the next round of product development.
I think yahoo's 'it product' has been their fantasy football offering. It has been the crowd favorite for many years, and neglected for a majority of that.
I would have agreed until this last round of "we changed it, you'll like it, and we won't change it back" has my group looking for a different league host for the first time.
What did they change, if you don't mind my asking? I've been using it for two seasons now, and haven't noticed anything too annoying, although I have been in public leagues only so far.
I'm not sure how you could argue Apple wasn't an 'it' company. Obviously that's a pretty subjective term but not only did they have a revolutionary product but their IPO was a pretty big deal as well. From the Apple Wikipedia article:
On December 12, 1980, Apple went public at $22 per share,[30] generating more capital than any IPO since Ford Motor Company in 1956 and instantly creating more millionaires (about 300) than any company in history.[31]
Fair enough. I've been an Apple fan for a LONG time, and have always felt it was the alternative, and never the main player. For a long time it seemed like it was just a few bad quarters from selling to IBM. It seems like the "It" companies were the ones that owned their markets.
In defense of your positions, in the early 90s, many of the most talented engineers that I knew flocked to Apple. They left later in the decade, and then returned post-bubble.
I like that phrasing in the title. She's done a lot, but there's clearly a lot more to do. This is a well written piece of long-form.
I do often forget about small things like the Weather app, which is absolutely delightful. I hope they apply that level of polish to their other apps. Personally I think they should skip small apps such as Weather and just dive right meatier categories such as Mail
Yeah. At his 31 months back at Apple, Jobs was getting ready to launch the Power Mac G4 Cube and the Flower Power iMacs... The investment community thought he had lost it, and Apple's stock price collapsed. (There was also that dot-com bust thing, I know.)
At the same time, Apple was building the iPod. When product cycles are long and vision spans even longer, current performance may not be indicative of what's coming.
Sure. But by 2001, the 15" CRT form factor was getting stale. Apple tried to refresh the design with patterns named "Flower Power" and "Blue Dalmatian":
I'm not sure that's true. I think a lot of problems we have with software is that we don't think it out like we do hardware (the I can always deploy a new version mentality).
Only thing I hope is that this company will die out before shelling out another billion at the next big social thing and kill it like they know so well how to do.
I had another comment downvoted and invisibanned for suggesting that yahoo is basically an SEO spamhouse now. Look at their landing page in the uk at least. Right now it is articles about people's sex lives, adverts for makeup, adverts and viral videos
Oh yes I would downvote you too, don't you realize the effort that comes into crafting all this content that you qualify of spam? Many people have to come together and figure out ways of making seemingly non-intelligent beings click on things. This is in no way a small feat and I must say they are very good at it, almost Buzzfeed-level of perfection.
A while ago after I installed uTorrent all my browsers (Chrome, Firefox and Safari) switched to Yahoo as my default search. Then I changed them back to Google.
After a while (I guess after I rebooted the computer) again all browsers showed Yahoo again. I googled for some help I found a hint that I have to disable and remove the 'Searchme' extension. I did so.
After a while (I guess after I rebooted the computer) again all browsers showed Yahoo again and the Searchme extension showed up again. And still Searchme is there—I took a screenshot http://imgur.com/OsH9o0m
Back when Google was paying for Chrome to be bundled with installers for Flash, the installer would silently switch your default browser to Chrome. Do you consider Google to be a reputable internet company?
"Some of the various flaps involving her leadership were crazily overblown, like her personal child care accommodations, or an edict against working at home that affected a tiny percentage of Yahoo’s workforce."
Every original fact in this article is information Yahoo would obviously want to share, like the success of its revamped ad platform. Based on the way he has failed to question anything else that Mayer has done during her tenure, it is hard to believe that these facts were questioned and examined in any detail.
Don't get me wrong: I think that Mayer may be doing a good job. I'm not too sure either way. I just think, as a piece of tech reporting, this is embarrassing.