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Yahoo! Businesses

Marissa Mayer's Reinvention of Yahoo! Stumbles 222

Posted by samzenpus from the best-laid-plans dept.
schnell writes The New York Times Magazine has an in-depth profile of Marissa Mayer's time at the helm of Yahoo!, detailing her bold plans to reinvent the company and spark a Jobs-ian turnaround through building great new products. But some investors are saying that her product focus (to the point of micromanaging) hasn't generated results, and that the company should give up on trying to create the next iPod, merge with AOL to cut costs and focus on the unglamorous core business that it has. Is it time for Yahoo! to "grow up" and set its sights lower?
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Marissa Mayer's Reinvention of Yahoo! Stumbles More

Marissa Mayer's Reinvention of Yahoo! Stumbles

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  • Analysts are essentially idiots. She has proven herself in the past more than any of them have.

    Give her time.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nwf ( 25607 )

      Indeed, she's doing better than I thought possible. Merging with AOL is an absolutely brain dead moronic idea. There is nothing of value in AOL. That's like merging Tesla with a maker of horse buggies. Merging Yahoo and AOL has got to be the stupidest idea I've heard in corporate maneuvering. I guess the thinking goes, "lets take these two near death companies, merge them, sell our stock based on the excitement to cash out, then let them die." That's the only possible reason behind something so inane.

  • How long things take.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TechyImmigrant ( 175943 ) on Thursday December 18, 2014 @06:34PM (#48629831) Homepage Journal

    People who don't make products have no clue how long it takes to make a product. Their attention span is always shorter. This is an example of someone complaining because their attention span is shorter than the development cycle.

    • Re:How long things take.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by roman_mir ( 125474 ) on Thursday December 18, 2014 @08:38PM (#48630539) Homepage Journal

      Marissa Mayer is not a good CEO, she maybe was a useful engineer at Google, but she is a horrendous CEO at Yahoo! When Yahoo! outbid FB by a few hundred million to buy Tumblr it was clear, there is no plan. But there was no plan from the beginning.

      I'll explain. You come to a new company as a CEO, WHAT DO YOU DO? What do you do first? What would YOU do? You know what I would do (as a CEO)? I would immediately run an inventory of what I have in the company, what do I have to work with, who makes money in the company, who does not make money, what investments are out there, what products, services, people, holdings, cash is out there.

      I would want a recount and fast.

      Then, as a new CEO I would definitely concentrate on those parts of the company that actually make money because those parts have already done the HARD work of figuring out how this company makes money right now.

      Mayer didn't pay attention to the content generating part of Yahoo!, which is the part that actually earns them revenues at all, she didn't give a shit that there is a part of the company that brings in over a billion dollars a year. A BILLION dollars a year and she didn't care to figure out how that's done and how to boost it before doing anything else that TAKES money, any new investments can only be done once you understand your cashflow and you know that you can actually withstand the spending that goes into the investment.

      Marissa Mayer was not hired as an engineer to build products, she was hired as a CEO, as a director to direct, to create strategy for the company. Yes, that means coming up with product ideas as well, no, it does not mean coding (which is what she ended up doing herself in many cases), that's a waste of time for her. She should be looking at markets and clients and making sure that her current accounts don't fall off the face of the earth, instead she didn't pay any attention to her advertising income (she stood up her largest clients), her content generating income (didn't even notice them apparently).

      The only saving grace for Yahoo! was their Alibaba 1Billion USD investment that brought them money and investors, who used Yahoo! to invest into Alibaba indirectly.

      As to products, what products? The fucking piece of shit Yahoo! account that I have (from old days) is horrible on Firefox under Ubuntu 11.04 that I still run on my laptop.

      • Re:How long things take.. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by tjb ( 226873 ) on Thursday December 18, 2014 @09:44PM (#48630823)

        "no, it does not mean coding (which is what she ended up doing herself in many cases)"

        Tell me you're exaggerating... if that's true, wow, she should have been fired on the spot by the board of directors. The CEO of a multi billion dollar company has lots of responsibilities, writing production code is NOT one of them. If she can't trust the engineering teams to do that, she should hire new engineers, not write the code herself.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by yuhong ( 1378501 )

        My feeling is that it is a step up over the previous CEOs, but more needs to be done.

      • ...she maybe was a useful engineer at Google...

        What makes you think that?

        • ...she maybe was a useful engineer at Google...

          What makes you think that?

          What makes you think she wasn't? She went to Stanford, which isn't exactly a school for chumps, so she probably has a pretty good head on her shoulders. However, being a good engineer does not necessarily equate to being a good CEO. If nothing else, she's useful as a PR piece in these days of "girls in STEM".

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        If she was a man, she would have already been fired. Now Yahoo is stuck with her. Fire a female CEO and the SJWs will get you.

      • If I was hired as the CEO, the first thing I'd do is whatever the hell the board asked me to do.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sribe ( 304414 )

        Yep, everything you said is correct. But I think it's not even the whole problem. In general, Yahoo's online applications are horrible. (Take their suck-ass piece of crap email as example #1.) Under Meyer, there have been many new major versions rolled out which have her much-touted design sensibility, but where the basic functionality got even worse. It appears that her "engineering" expertise does not include the functionality/UX stuff. I sure wanted it to be different, but it appears that her technical e

  • I didn't know Yahoo was trying to create some new hardware device... any details about this device?

    • It's called the yNot.

    • I don't think they mean an actual device, but a product that will make the company look hip and relevant again to the masses, like the iPod was for Apple.

    • Yes, Yahoo! has officially announced their music playing device called the "Yune".

      It's going to come in 7 different shades of purple, and offer an interface based on Yahoo!'s homepage design -- squeezing over 270 links onto the device's homescreen.

      Yahoo's CEO, Marissa Mayer apparently designed the Yune at home herself over the weekend using purple Play-Doh, and it will be officially unveiled by her in an upcoming Vogue photoshoot -- where she will be personally modeling the device along with this year's spr

  • Yeah, don't focus on products. (Score:5, Funny)

    by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Thursday December 18, 2014 @06:41PM (#48629865) Journal

    Sounds like a plan.

    Products are for suckers.

    They should focus on social clouds for wearable augmented reality drones.

  • Respect for Trying! (Score:3)

    by BoRegardless ( 721219 ) on Thursday December 18, 2014 @06:49PM (#48629911)

    You can post all day on Slashdot, but that isn't like putting your professional life on the line and giving it a go.

  • To fold up the business, I'll say it again there's no future for Yahoo, it's amazing to me it's even around any longer.

    • I think you mean AOL. It baffles me that any analyst would want them to touch AOL. The problem with Yahoo is that people think of them as a forgotten relic from the 90's even though they have hugely popular services. AOL on the other hand is a forgotten relic from the 90's that would only further tarnish Yahoo as people would continue to use the companies in the same sentence. No offense to AOL, I don't even know that they do anymore I just know public perception. Yahoo needs to just keep at it and focus on

      • No offense to AOL, I don't even know that they do anymore I just know public perception

        You don't know, but unless you have ad-block you probably have some of their cookies in your browser.

        AOL had a ton of cash (still gets something like $50 million from dialup) after people switched to broadband, so the turned into a kind of venture capital, and bought a bunch of companies. Now they own leading 'web properties,' like Huffington Post and Tech Crunch.

        AOL is producing a lot of 'high quality' content and can monetize it, whereas Yahoo is lacking in content, but has plenty of users. That is t

  • Missed the Boat by about 15 years (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Irate Engineer ( 2814313 ) on Thursday December 18, 2014 @07:13PM (#48630035)

    Yahoo missed the boat about 10 years ago. It can't even do web email properly anymore. I have a Yahoo throwaway account, and the system is so broken that I rarely check in on it. It's right up there with AOL; it shouldn't have survived Y2K, but somehow it is still here, twitching and gasping

    Marissa Mayer may or may not be very capable, but it hardly matters. Trying to get Yahoo to compete in online services and products in this day and age, starting from where Yahoo stagnated in the late 1990s, ain't going to happen. Frankly I think the best use of her time would be to start folding up the tables and chairs, turn off the lights, close up shop and sell off the company.

    • Don't be so hard on them... their weather app for the iPhone is nice.

      • Yahoo finance is still better than google finance. But that isn't saying much.

        • finance.yahoo.com is a really great thing
          probably the only thing where yahoo is still competitive, if not the market leader...
    • Yahoo fantasy football is still about the best around. Same with their sports apps. They bought up Sportstacular and haven't ruined it (it's actually gotten quite better since the acquisition), so those are great. But not enough to keep it aroudn forever.

      • Re:Missed the Boat by about 15 years (Score:5, Interesting)

        by DerekLyons ( 302214 ) <fairwater.gmail@com> on Friday December 19, 2014 @12:56AM (#48631491) Homepage

        Yahoo fantasy football is still about the best around. Same with their sports apps. They bought up Sportstacular and haven't ruined it (it's actually gotten quite better since the acquisition), so those are great.

        Yep. And their Stock, business, and financial management pages are top notch too... (to the point where Google has finally given up even trying to compete). Then there's Flickr, which, despite a few missteps, is still the largest and best photographic community out there. Etc... etc...

        Yahoo! maybe not be where the cool kids hang out, and it's hasn't been on the tech hipsters hot list for over a decade... but it's far from down and out.

  • Core business? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LordLucless ( 582312 ) on Thursday December 18, 2014 @07:14PM (#48630045)

    ...merge with AOL to cut costs and focus on the unglamorous core business that it has. Is it time for Yahoo! to "grow up" and set its sights lower?

    What exactly is Yahoo's "core business"? Their webdirectory is defunct, search outsourced to Bing, and email largely been eaten by its competitors. I would have thought "settings its sights lower" would have involved winding up the company.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Tiger4 ( 840741 )

      What exactly is Yahoo's "core business"? Their webdirectory is defunct,....

      Not quite defunct yet, but very, very soon ... http://www.engadget.com/2014/0... [engadget.com]

      • As "Irate Engineer" hinted, providing throwaway email accounts just might be their core business. Everybody has one, right? And you don't want to have your throwaway be a Gmail account, so you choose Yahoo. Hotmail doesn't still exist, does it?

        • Yeah, but you can actually setup multiple disposable GMail accounts now, so Google is even whittling away at that.

          My yahoo account is from the 1990s, and I still have it because I'm lazy, it does what I need it to do (it's a legit email address, that's all that can be said about it), and I'm not liable to inadvertently confuse it with my "good" GMail account, so it is what I give out online.

          If Yahoo evaporated in a puff of smoke tomorrow I'd probably miss it for all 5 minutes it would take to setup a GMail

        • Re:Core business? (Score:5, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 18, 2014 @08:17PM (#48630411)
          Not anymore. Yahoo requires (yes, requires, no barely-visible option to skip) a cellphone number to sign up. Because putting your only-above-AOL-mail service behind a gate that requires giving personal information to a company infamous for shit security is a good idea, right?
        • Hotmail went to live.com.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by lgw ( 121541 )

          Hotmail is a legacy now, but Outlook.com is actually pretty good. It reminds me a lot of gmail before gmail went to shit. Nice clean web UI, like gmail used to have, too. It surprised me with how it doesn't suck - give it a try the next time you need a throw-away: I ended up moving there for my real email (because fuck Google).

        • Last time I tried to create a throwaway yahoo mail account it demanded a mobile number.

    • Re:Core business? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by swb ( 14022 ) on Thursday December 18, 2014 @07:38PM (#48630185)

      I thnk their core business WAS the web directory but that seemed to become irrelevent and less useful once Google came around. Their age and size has allowed them a certain amount of inertia with users who simply don't know or care for anything better.

      I think there's some value in a high-quality curated web directory. Given what Wikipedia accomplishes with volunteers and no advertising, I would think that Yahoo could have come up with some way to basically pay people to browse the web and curate a directory given the money they have to spend.

      Google search is better in some regards and use cases but in some ways, if it isn't on the first page of results it probably won't be useful, especially if you don't know what to search for or are looking for a class of information or type of web site.

      But they seemed to have given up on that in favor of "web services" which they probably can't ever compete with. Their technology isn't competitive, they don't have any media clout and nothing unique to offer.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Chryana ( 708485 )

      I think a combination of inertia, ignorance, idleness and carelessness in changing default browser settings makes it so that their main page is still getting a decent amount of traffic. Thus, I hazard that their core business is advertising to a mostly accidental audience.

    • What exactly is Yahoo's "core business"? Their webdirectory is defunct, search outsourced to Bing, and email largely been eaten by its competitors.

      They still have a considerable gaming community. Their stock, business, and financial management pages are still top notch. Flickr, despite a couple of recent "hold my beer and watch this" moments is still strong in the photography community... Their front page still draws a huge number of hits.

      The problem is less one of Yahoo than it is of hedge fund managers

    • search outsourced to Bing,

      Yahoo did their own search at one point, but that was before anyone knew about Google ... Yahoo was using Google for search probably before you knew who Google was. They haven't really ever been worth a shit at search themselves.

  • Bewitched? (Score:3)

    by danomatika ( 1977210 ) on Thursday December 18, 2014 @07:16PM (#48630059)

    Has she even had enough time? Did they expect her to have a magic wand or twiddle her nose when she was hired? Short-term investors just need to pucker more.

    • According to the NYTimes article, she has had two years and the prospects for the stock look flat. Two years is a long honeymoon for a CEO. Is it long enough? Probably not. But if she cannot point to a reason for gross revenues to do better than flat in the near term, then two years or four years, it hardly matters.

      • Re: Bewitched? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by afgam28 ( 48611 ) on Thursday December 18, 2014 @09:42PM (#48630809)

        If they're comparing her to Steve Jobs and expecting her to create Yahoo's iPod, then it may be worth pointing out that Jobs returned to Apple in 1996 and the iPod wasn't released until 2001. Two years is a long time but sometimes great products take even longer than that.

        • Steve Jobs was brought back because MacOS Classic was a steaming pile of shit and they needed NextSTEP. Once he came on board they came up with the iMac and MacOS X pretty quickly. They also knifed the 3rd party cloning business which meant they had more profits to them. He was a bastard but he knew how to make money.

          At that time the company was doing okay. The rest was just icing on the cake.

      • With the obsessive focus on quarterly profits, 2 years is a very long time. In reality, esprically with a company that size it is not. Large organisations are very slow to steer.

  • Synergies through Mergers and Acquisitions (Score:5, Insightful)

    by aralin ( 107264 ) on Thursday December 18, 2014 @07:19PM (#48630075)

    If we only provide value through synergies resulting from M&A activity, we will eventually end up with one large company spanning the entire state and will have the perfect example of communism :)

  • it's not hard (Score:5, Informative)

    by jetole ( 1242490 ) on Thursday December 18, 2014 @07:25PM (#48630105)
    It can be done. Yahoo has the resources and man power to get there but micro managing was mentioned and that's a key problem right there. I have worked with micro managing managers and I have worked with well informed managers who keep abreast of things and is course I have worked with bad managers. Since I have begun managing myself I have seen great results and I DO NOT micro manage. The best managers I have ever had which have lead me to how I manage now are involved and aware and make key management decisions but they do not micro manage and that was key. I do not micro manage and I have seen steady and excellent growth in our business due to how I operate and how the best managers before me operated has lead me down that path. You take micro managers and they are persistent firm of stress in the workplace. They are invasive and cumbersome. On the other hand I have had managers that are the opposite end of the spectrum where they were not involved enough and/or didn't understand the decisions as best as they should have. They lead to very poor management decisions. A good manager not only knows what is best but knows where to ask and where to trust and speaking of trust you need to know your team well so that you can effectively trust their decisions.

    • What Yahoo needs is an idea (simple, to the point, effective, new, user worthy)
      followed by an execution.

      - Not 50 things. 1 to 3, done well. That's how all of the few mega-successful companies got to where they are now.

    • Oh, yes! And you don't micromanage.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ciurana ( 2603 )

      Yahoo has the resources and man power to get there but micro managing was mentioned and that's a key problem right there... A good manager not only knows what is best but knows where to ask and where to trust and speaking of trust you need to know your team well so that you can effectively trust their decisions.

      Let's just say that they neither micromanage nor, in many instances, know their teams and their capabilities very well.

      And that's all I'll say about that. Now, pass me another chocolate so I can get back to coding.

  • Is she a good manager or a PHB? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Comrade Ogilvy ( 1719488 ) on Thursday December 18, 2014 @07:47PM (#48630237)
    It some ways, I think Mayer's is a great fit for the job. But in others, well, the NYTImes article painted a very unfavorable picture of her ability to hire or manage compensation policy. The other problem is that, as TFA article points out, the core Yahoo business has shrunk to a 5-10 billion dollar company in a mature industry and zero prospects for rapid growth. Yet she was hired wave a magic "reinvent" wand and return the company to 100 billion dollar glory -- that is not a problem with Mayer, but the Board.
  • The only changes I've noticed in my Yahoo! stuff since Mayer took over is that they started sending a daily "stories" email to all my Yahoo! accounts (which I promptly turned off). If ramping up a daily headlines email was a key component of strategy.... yeesh... this is 2014 not 1995
  • Just spin Tumblr back out and sell the rest to AOL.

  • My 0.02 (Score:3)

    by DaMattster ( 977781 ) on Thursday December 18, 2014 @08:54PM (#48630627)
    It looks as if Marissa Mayer's micromanagement style might've backfired. For one, she probably killed moral for the people that enjoyed the perk of working from home. Her failure will be an ultimate win for Yahoo. Micromanagement NEVER works!

    • Micromanagement NEVER works!

      Really? Both Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos were widely infamous for being micro managers and being extremely stressful and unpleasant to work for. Simply because it might suck to work for these people didn't mean they were any less successful and any less of a visionary.

  • Show me the relevance (Score:3)

    by RubberDogBone ( 851604 ) on Thursday December 18, 2014 @09:12PM (#48630695)

    If Yahoo wants to be relevant, they should show people like me how Yahoo matters. Right now, I can't think of any Yahoo products I use even once a year, and this is not new. It goes back years like this.

    Possibly the only thing I "use" at all is email through my ISP: they outsourced it to Yahoomail, but I don't actually USE it; I have GMAIL POP it for me and never actually touch the Yahoo interface -which is an ancient address I never actually use so it's not like I even care really. If GMAIL didn't let me handle it, that account would sit for years untouched. Irrelevant.

    Anyway, Yahoo, why should I care? How would my life be better if I used Yahoo stuff to do what I manage just fine without? I don't really see it. More importantly, I don't feel like I NEED Yahoo. And what Yahoo needs is people like me to feel like they MUST HAVE YAHOO, and that is exactly what I don't feel.

    Shrug

  • I'm guessing Yahoo Small Business is how they'd like to make money, but it's a bit of a legacy monster. Certainly very hard to get a customer out of and onto a different platform. Comcast Small Biz is similar confusing mess of intersecting control panels (maybe the same software?). A few other companies run the same game, getting business clients locked in complex setups, but I'm not sure it's even intentional with these players on the bottom end of the business hosting market.

    On a similar note I called Net

  • You can still get the older version of Yahoo Stumbles here:

    http://www.oldversion.com/ [oldversion.com]

  • This reads like a hit piece (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Magnus Pym ( 237274 ) on Friday December 19, 2014 @01:12AM (#48631529)
    I would not call myself a fan of Meyer, and her use of her relationship with Page to screw over her contemporaries (read this book [amazon.com]) has really left a bad taste in my mouth. However this article reads like a hit piece. It looks like some activist investors are trying to get her to do things she does not want to do (the article suggests returning the money back to shareholders and firing all the engineers). They are attacking her personally and that stinks.
    • Exactly!!!

      I agree completely. I don't think she belongs where she is... it has nothing to do with gender or her past. I honestly believe they are assets to her job. I just never got the sense that she understands her audience. For example, how would she attract the people like Slashdot readers to her services so that we'll feel comfortable putting them on millions or billions of phones and desktops? She has done nothing to attract and endear Yahoo! to the people who will get her exposure. Yahoo's investment

    • Re:This reads like a hit piece (Score:4, Interesting)

      by kamapuaa ( 555446 ) on Friday December 19, 2014 @03:46AM (#48631967) Homepage

      That's like the first the paragraphs, you should read the rest of the article. It's interesting and informative.

      And is an interesting point that the stock market views yahoo as a negative three billion company with a thirty billion investment in Alibaba.

  • I have to wonder about the logic with acquisitions of sites like Astrid, which it owned for only two months before deciding to completely shut them down. It gives the impression that Yahoo! just causes everything it touches to wilt.

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