Marissa Mayer is Back (bloomberg.com) 104
Former Yahoo Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer is starting a technology business incubator, Lumi Labs, with longtime colleague Enrique Munoz Torres, she revealed in an interview with The New York Times. Bloomberg: The venture will focus on consumer media and artificial intelligence, according to the company's website, which is set against a backdrop of snow-covered peaks. Lumi means snow in Finnish, Mayer told the New York Times, which reported the news earlier Wednesday. The next project for Mayer, who was an early employee at Google and worked there until leaving to run Yahoo in 2012, had been a matter of considerable speculation in Silicon Valley. She left Yahoo, once a leading search engine and web destination, after it was sold to Verizon Communications last year.
And if you work with her this time (Score:5, Insightful)
you are a moron.
Re: And if you work with her this time (Score:1)
Marissa will teach you all about how YOU can run your successful business into the ground through perpetual incompetence.
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But it is still in business.
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In all fairness, Yahoo was a bag of shit before Marissa Mayer got there. All she did was add some extra incompetence to finish them off.
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I'm not sure the word "some" applies.
Steve Jobs? (Score:2)
Steve wouldn't be caught dead running Yahoo to begin with.
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Imagine what Steve Jobs could have done with it.
Marissa Mayer is an example of someone who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. When she started at Google they were a completely unknown company with 19 employees. When she left, they were the biggest name in tech. Because of that, having "14 years at Google" on your resume means you can get hired for all sorts of jobs, regardless of your lack of qualifications. (Don't forget, she was demoted shortly before leaving Google).
However, Yahoo could have hired anyone as CEO. Steve Jobs.
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I still encounter yahoo email users, so they all have yahoo logins. Some places yahoo has deals with cell providers to tie their email and auth directly to phones. Right before myspace died she bought tumblr. Instead of improving the UI and integrating it with all of the pre-existing yahoo features that it lacked but facebook had they had almost no mainstream marketing for the platform but instead worked to build new communities there. Which all turned into a freakshow of slacktavists, SJWs, tweakers
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This "business incubator" is probably just something to give her a reason to leave the house each morning.
If it loses the right amount of money each year I am sure there is some sort of accounting trick that can keep it going for a long time.
Also, just like Carly, look for a political campaign of some kind, as that's great way to mak
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A business incubator is where you basically steal other people's ideas, which is pretty much why she was demoted at Google and why she failed at Yahoo forcing work from home staff to work in the office and discuss ideas she could claim as her own and why it was the chosen business type. Likely you would be quite foolish to trust her to incubate your idea so that they could hatch it and steal it. Pretty solid track record for pilfering other people's ideas and claiming them. The Title of the article should b
Finnish affinity? (Score:2)
So is MM fishing for attention from Nokia or Linus Torvalds?
I'm betting on Linus. What is sexier than a raging, beer-fueled Finnish programmer?
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Woman-owned company, of course (Score:1)
Gotta suck that Federal teat.. Enrique Munoz Torres is probably the brains behind the whole operation, but of course she'll be listed as "owner." Let those tax dollars flow!
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I guess that is the current fad now. No more Big Data.
M&M will fail because she's a shitty manager.
Makes good candy though.
And finance is coming from where? (Score:1)
Hey, it's all good. If people want to keep giving her money, that's their business. I'm sure some of them will do well.
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Hey, it's all good. If people want to keep giving her money, that's their business. I'm sure some of them will do well.
I plan on giving her money... once this crashes and burns and she's living on a sidewalk, I'll hand her a dollar so she can go get dinner from Burger King.
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Why prolong her misery? And ours.
Re:And finance is coming from where? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, it's all good. If people want to keep giving her money, that's their business. I'm sure some of them will do well.
I plan on giving her money... once this crashes and burns and she's living on a sidewalk, I'll hand her a dollar so she can go get dinner from Burger King.
Sadly, that's not going to happen. When she left Google she already had more money than you'll make in your entire life. It's more likely that she'll be giving you a dollar for Burger King.
Again, news? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The next project for Mayer [...] had been a matter of considerable speculation in Silicon Valley.
So any SV peeps want to chime in and let us know if you've really all been holding your breath about Mayer's new job, or if no one cared for or even remembered her.
Re:Again, news? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a reason why CEO Salary is normally inversely proportional to the success of the company.
1. Its future doesn't look great, so things like stock options arn't that great of a compensation.
2. If you are going to lead a sinking ship, you better be paid more to help compensate the fact that you were CEO of a troubled company, and we get all the negative press that we see now.
Yahoo had its problems before she started. Yahoo Business strategy was poised to go against AOL, not Google and Facebook. While they had their search engine, there was a Yahoo Community and services, and games... Mostly designed to have Yahoo to be a site that you stick to for your internet fix.
They still have some popular services. Yahoo Business is still preferred for serious business folks. And Yahoo Answers is still popular. But After AOL got kicked out and Google and Facebook had risen, It pushed Yahoo out of many of its markets.
Could Yahoo have innovated sooner. In retrospect yes. But there were and are a lot of fad competition that get some traffic but just don't hold onto it long enough. However other fads just grew and become more popular.
Back when Google came out. Its simple search engine, vs yahoo with gave you a list of popular categories to help filter down from. Has me using Yahoo for years as my default search engine, until Googles algorithm got smart enough, and they were enough people with dial-up who used google because of its small download size. At the time, yahoo will just figure speed will always get bigger so just keep a lot of content on the front page. And the Google fad will wash out when everyone is at 500kbs speed. It may have worked, but it didn't.
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You certainly correct about (1). I am not so sure about (2). The plan is not sink the ship. If it were the board would not bother hiring a new CEO at all they'd do the sensible thing and hire a law firm to sell off the assets and cash out. Probably would not cost them a whole lot more than a couple years CEO salary to do.
The plan when you hire a CEO is obviously to turn the company around and make it profitable. The assumption is a number of presumable smart people think that is possible or they would
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While the plan is to turn the company around. Sometimes that just can't happen no matter if you got a Zombie Steve Jobs back, Where keeping the course will drive you down, and a rebranding will cause your existing customers to flee, so you don't have the capital to get the new branding out. Sometime the best they can do is layoff a bunch of people and make it a smaller business, hoping to find a new avenue in the future.
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Yahoo was very likely to fail. But it was not quite at the point that the board was prepared to admit the ship was doomed, rather than hire someone with fancy-sounding ideas that could be hyped but would probably fail regardless. That Mayer was easy to hype in a lot of superficial ways was part of the package the board chose to pay top dollar for -- was she supposed to not play along, not cash in?
I do not see any compelling evidence that Mayer's was not at least as good as any other Yahoo CEO. Par for th
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You think we're a sinking ship???
Oh sorry we're only interested in CEO candidates who actually like our company.
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Yeah that's a good point instead of offering a stellar Yahoo executive what they'll consider the opportunity of a lifetime... let's hire someone outside the company who is willing to stoop to the position if we pay them enough.
Maybe they figured some fresh management would help move them back into the cutting edge, like when they bought the web 1.0 looking tumblr and had major security incidents every few years like clockwork.
It's simpler than that (Score:2)
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This IS news. She'll make and then run into the ground her own business rather than fucking up someone else's.
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Is this really news?
Nope, but it's still fun to bash people like Mayer and Fiorina once in a while.
Re:Again, news? (Score:5, Informative)
Fiorina really pissed me off because she did horrible things to the computing community and then her career was promoted by feminist media when she would have been considered a miniature dick cheney by the same people if she wasn't a woman.
Can you imagine why the tech industry distrusts professional activists?
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Surely you have an example of that?
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https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
Sure. They cheered for her back when she was a piece of shit executive destroying HP. They only abandoned her when her politics became apparent.
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No. I asked for examples. This is not an example. In fact, the majority of the links on that page contradict your thesis.
Do you even understand what feminism is?
Don't bother answering, that question is rhetorical. You've already proven that you are just another stupid parrot.
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2nd hit: Carly Fiorina, the highest paid top manager in the U.S., still earns less than her male colleagues. I do not see any changes in the near future.
3rd hit: Recalling her stint as the head of the troubled computer giant Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina said in a recent interview that her enemies in the corporate and tech worlds routinely referred to her “as either a bimbo—too soft, or a bitch—too hard.” She shook up the entire company, eventually laying off 36,000 people and attr
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In the timescale I indicated she wasn't presidential nominee candidate famous outside the tech community.
I'm not even sure what you're arguing here anymore or why you'd work so hard to defend retarded political bloggers who are almost universally horrid regardless of their political leanings.
Clearly people were cheering that she was becoming yet another powerful piece of socially destructive shit simply for doing it while being a woman. Apply some logic here and refute what I've said or admit being a russi
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Producing word salad is easy. Actually doing some research as to what feminism actually is and how much actual feminists support Carly Fiorina (here's a hint: aside from some old Second Wave feminists, not a whole lot) is a lot harder. And obviously above your brain power.
I don't have to refute anything. You brought it up, yours is the burden of proof. Simply parroting what you hear in your alt-deluded bubble does not constitute proof. So here's a cracker, Polly. You're a good bird. With quite a good brain.
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I see so you're moving the goalposts. Look I support feminism too and am probably more liberal than yourself. I just don't let people off the hook because they dress up in causes I like. The feminist media has embraced radical feminism and deserves to get flak for it. Anyone pandering to toxic elements on the left should be called out. Especially since people defending and espousing toxic politics are often paid posters.
Paid posters like you.
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I don't. You're the one studiously avoiding to shore up your claim that the 'feminist media' is hailing Carly and Marissa as great examples. Without, I note, submitting any proof when asked nicely.
You're a disingenuous twat.
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I don't believe I mentioned Marissa at all I have to wonder what else you've imagined in my comments and the links I've posted.
Anyhow based on my new understanding of what's going on here I'll bid you farewell.
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You answered to a post mentioning Marissa.
Really, is this all the deflection skills you can muster? You're pathetic.
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Stallman's judgement should be second guessed but he's almost always at least on the right track.
You have to add a dash of pragmatism and a coat of PR to Stallman before presenting him for public consumption. I used to think he was a smart guy embarrassing the open source movement in negative ways but I think that FOSS is getting taken seriously enough these days. No harm no foul just stop eating your foot-flakes, at least in public.
The thing about Stallman and so many of the good guys is that they don't
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Skip all that and go directly to ICO (Score:2)
Non-news (Score:2)
Just because she can't put out a dumpster fire doesn't mean everything she touches is a dumpster fire. Just another CxO moving around.
Re:Non-news (Score:4, Informative)
In more than one instance at Yahoo, she brought a water-based fire extinguisher to bear on an electrical grease fire.
What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried to Be Steve Jobs [nytimes.com] — 17 December 2014
Keep reading from that point in the article. Her legacy of dubious guidance doesn't end there.
New nickname for Marissa (Score:2)
"Bad Penny".
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"Bad Penny".
She does keep turning up, doesn't she?
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Miss D. Opportunity.
A business incubator? So your business can languish like Yahoo while others thrive?
GIRLZPOWER !! (Score:1)
Maybe she can auger them into the earth as well... but it's worth it to inspire mediocre little girlz everywhere
Between the lines (Score:3)
focus on consumer media and artificial intelligence
I interpret this to mean they will be producing fake celebrity porn.
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Proving that if one person gets richer a lot of people usually get poorer.
How should we react to that headline? (Score:2)
Erlich Bachman (Score:3)
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Is she really a good fit for this? (Score:5, Insightful)
I would think a successful tech business incubator would require a fair amount of flexibility. Marissa Meyer's management style, on the other hand, seems very rigid, rules-based and inflexible.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Well, that means an awful lot of the CxO class should be gay, then?
Such a fitting name (Score:1)
I will only say that "lumi" means whore/hooker in informal spanish.
good at bullshit (Score:2)
Thats all it takes to be a 'leader'
Perhaps an autonimous excavator project. (Score:1)
Good CTO, bad CEO (Score:1)
I worked at Yahoo for 8 years, the last several of which she was at the helm. She would have been a first rate CTO, but she was a horrible CEO. The free food was a nice change. However, stack ranking killed morale on teams. She also had to personally approve new hires. Imagine trying to hire a new college graduate. It should be an easy, quick process when a hiring manager approves. Nope. Had to wait 3 weeks for Marissa to get to reviewing it, at which time, top talent were already agreeing to deals
There's always another job for terrible CEOs (Score:3)