You don't get paid $360M over 5 years and get to defend yourself from failure. She was paid specifically to fix things, and if she can't do it, she should get 90% of that money clawed back.<p>That said, I think everyone associated with Yahoo has to come to grips with the fact it will never again reach it's high status as before. It has a lot of money, and it just goes to show you that money won't produce innovation. They need to take that money, break Yahoo up into pieces, sell it, and then whatever money they have they should fund 100,000 startups and see what rises from the ashes.<p>The only other thing that Yahoo has besides it's pile of money is it's brand name. People know and trust Yahoo. I would probably take that and then expand horizontally, into things like banking, insurance, etc. Really boring things that aren't high growth like Uber, but things everyone needs and might be enticed to join because of the Yahoo name.<p>Buying things like Tumblr, Polyvore, etc are a waste of time because every startup in the Valley is hoping to score an oversized buyout from Yahoo, and then GTFO once their holding period is over. There is zero incentive to continue innovating after Yahoo touches them, so don't bother buying companies anymore.
I can't believe how every time this topic comes up, cutting free food for the employees is a talking point. Providing basic necessities (food, transportation, non crowded offices, sick days, etc.) to make sure your employees are happy and productive seems to me like step 0 of any successful business venture. Of course don't serve them caviar and foie gras, but I really don't get why everyone seems to think that cutting a basic cafeteria is a vital piece of any "let's put the company back in the green" plan.<p>Well I do get why so many finance people think that way, it just makes me sad that they're the ones calling the shots.
Here is the funds presentation about yahoo if you are interested. For what its worth, I think the fund significantly overplays their hand as to how effective their turn around plan would be.
<a href="https://regmedia.co.uk/2015/12/14/yahoo-springowl-presentation.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://regmedia.co.uk/2015/12/14/yahoo-springowl-presentati...</a><p>The one thing that I do think the report gets right is yahoo's head count is way too high. They should have a head count of around 4000/people to be in line with their Peers wrt revenue/employee.<p>I think the biggest issue Yahoo faces is that their competitors are Facebook, Google and Microsoft. And Yahoo is trying to run itself like those companies.<p>When you have huge piles of money coming in every quarter then you can spend freely on acquisitions to try and buy talent teams and products to jump start your company. Or put another way, making huge sums of money hides alot of bad decisions.<p>Yahoo, unfortunately isn't making piles of money and this makes it very hard to compete when your closest competitors each have large near monopolies to generate money. Yahoo just has no margin for error, and its not really clear that even if they did everything right, that they could turn the company around.<p>It would be like Canada trying to fight a war with the US, no matter how well you execute, you'll loose in the long run as your enemy has almost unlimited funds compared to yourself.<p>Unfortunately during Mayer has destroyed alot of value during her tenure. Without Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, Yahoo is down almost 40% since she started.<p>Bring in a new CEO, cut head count very deeply so you don't have to do it again.
> <i>"Marissa Mayer is a hero for taking on the challenge at Yahoo."</i> -Marc Andreessen<p>Only in the confused world of Silicon Valley is accepting $100M+ to fail considered heroic. Giving the money back would be kind of heroic.<p>Steve Jobs took a nearly bankrupt company and turned it into the richest company in history. And he didn't care about making money off it at all, or he'd have been the richest person in the world too. That's heroic.<p>Elon Musk put 100% of his personal fortune into risky world-changing startups. That's heroic.
I hope Yahoo! succeeds. My $0.02 on how to fix it:<p>- fix the navigation across all Yahoo! properties. Google does a solid job of this. It's clear what is google, what is gmail, what is google analytics, app-engine, etc. Yahoo has no such clarity.<p>- apply SEO to the Yahoo! site. If I search for "yahoo domains management", Google (or Yahoo) should take me to the correct landing page.<p>- Yahoo for "business" services are very opaque and it's not clear where to go to see a unified list of things one has access to, particularly domains. Google also does a solid job of this (though worse over time, oddly).<p>- When I see the Yahoo logo I sort of cringe. Make it smaller and less obtrusive. Purple means "visited link" on the internet.<p>- Don't let scammers use your affiliate program. The BitTorrent installer installs malware that makes Yahoo the default search in all browsers on the user's computer. This is a horrible representation of your brand.<p>- The smart TV developer portal has been down for a few days (at least). I wanted to make an app for my new TV but can't read the documentation.<p>- People inside the company probably know all these things. If they are not incentivized or rewarded for doing something about them, that is probably the root of whatever cultural problems exist there. Everyone should feel some pride and ownership, and want to fix obvious glaring issues. Someone should probably have presented you with plans to fix all these things. Promote that person.
The media's Mayer pile on is getting old. Every article is focused on her personally, as opposed to the company as a whole. I understand how echo chamber effects and memes work, but this seems a bit extreme even for the internet.<p>It's like blaming someone who dropped a last second touchdown pass for losing the game. Yes, it would have been nice if that player could have done a better job. But it would also have been nice if everyone else on the team hadn't made any mistakes either, making a last second play unnecessary.<p>She was very well compensated for failing, but that doesn't mean that she acted in bad faith. Many executives have compensation packages that are heavily based on performance. Apparently hers wasn't. Ultimately there is a lot of blame to go around for the demise of Yahoo!, not the least to other half dozen CEOs they've had in the last decade or so. You win the fight today based on the preparations and positioning you did years ago. For all her mistakes, that's not on Mayer.
I've tried several finance portals, and Yahoo's is far and away the best. With a single url, I can get a snapshot of the stocks I'm interested in, thumbnails of the day's performance, links for more detail, etc.:<p><a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/quotes/GSC,AAPL,EBAY,JPM,NOK,LLY,SPY,XLK,YHOO/view/v1" rel="nofollow">https://finance.yahoo.com/quotes/GSC,AAPL,EBAY,JPM,NOK,LLY,S...</a>
I wonder why people think Yahoo! was not fixable.<p>I have been using Yahoo! Email (from time when it was sbcglobal), Flickr, reading Yahoo! Finance, and having Yahoo! News as my home page. I do not use any of these any more.<p>Here is my list how to fix Yahoo!:<p>1) fix Yahoo! Email (MS did it with outlook.com - Yahoo! could do the same)<p>2) fix Flickr (i.e., API should work, iPhone upload, some IA, etc.)<p>3) fix Yahoo! Finance (I remember that they disabled Yahoo! groups for stocks at one point of time - after that flop they never recovered)<p>4) fix Yahoo! News<p>I'm not really sure what needs to be "fixed" but something so I can start using the above service again.<p>Or maybe to build something new.
In 2007, Jobs famously told Yahoo it had to choose a path<p><pre><code> Yahoo needed to decide whether it would focus foremost on media or technology,
Jobs told the small group of assembled executives, according to one
executive who attended the meeting. -- BusinessWeek, 2009
</code></pre>
I can't find the quote now, but one exec said they knew he was right, but they just couldn't decide. I think this conundrum continues to be at the heart of the Yahoo! problem -- they just can't decide.<p>The SpringOwl proposal essentially says Yahoo should just get with the program and be a Media company. And, I like that pitch. The playbook is essentially:<p>1) Massively cut staff, and some other one-time things like real estate<p>2) Stop trying to compete on hard tech like search, because they can't beat Google or Facebook<p>3) re-monetize the home page and create a more walled garden by creating apps that kick ass over competitors (note these are now media competitors) and are directly fed by the media channels that are working: they like finance and sports to start.<p>To me, this plan reads well, although I don't buy the austerity on top of layoffs angle -- who would continue to work there? One way or the other, you're going to have to provide a competitive comp, upside and lifestyle story unless they move to Kansas.<p>I don't know if it really gets the value creation they say it will, but if well executed, I think this is a believable way for Yahoo! to carve out its best shot at a niche and audience. If I imagine a Yahoo Finance app made by truly great devs up against any number of competitors, I think it could be a win. Same with say fantasy sports apps, team-oriented apps, all those could tie together very well.
The article brings up the important point on Yahoo's acquisitions. For the billions it spent, it got barely anything in return. The real canary in the coal mine was Summly. Mayer paid 30M for an app that licensed its core machine learning (which is why she bought the app in the first place). Unsure how anyone could have expected Tumblr to be a smart acquisition at that price.
Yahoo is the MySpace of search. She raised it's profile but ultimately there's very little Marisa could have done to change that. If NetFlix was clearly such a great investment at the time it would have been worth what it is today.
Mayer was given garbage.
She realized this very quickly.
The aim then shifted to maximal extraction of money from the corpse.
This is best accomplished with a a lot of smiles and earnest window dressing.
I am genuinely curious, Tencent (of China) looks very similar to Yahoo! esp. being portal business, why are they flourishing and why the heck can Yahoo! not copy Tencent's strategy. It looks very obvious to me, that Yahoo should be more like Tencent and probably have Hulu/Vimeo, Whatsapp/Telegraph or whole slew of mobile apps and games etc.
Not surprising, considering her policy on banning telecommuting : <a href="http://www.pcworld.com/article/2038639/why-yahoos-telecommuting-ban-is-still-bad-for-business.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.pcworld.com/article/2038639/why-yahoos-telecommut...</a>