<i>>So Mayer had a plan to bolster Yahoo’s mobile offerings and once again make it a top internet destination. However, a plan like this has three drawbacks: 1) Developing desirable well-trafficked mobile properties requires lots of hard-to-hire-for mobile design, engineering, and product talent. So Mayer chose to acquihire promising mobile startups instead.</i><p>Actually, when Mayer came on to Yahoo as CEO, Yahoo recruited pretty efficiently. I am a decent mobile engineer and I was <i>really</i> tempted to apply when a recruiter reached out. It was the wrong moment for me, being really happy at my job that time - a year later or before I would have likely proceeded with the interview.<p>Another strong mobile engineer friend of mine got rejected on the Yahoo interviews and was pretty disappointed at the time. The story recruiters were telling was that they are builing a bunch of greenfield mobile projects, as well as having a couple of "startups within a big startup", with the financial security of Yahoo. This was very credible at the time and I'm sure they did get a lot of engineering talent into the company.<p>I do not know what the main things were that went wrong. However I would not pinpoint it to recruitment or lack of engineering talent: they did well on that. As an outsider engineer my guess would be culture and non consistent strategy or vision. Building mobile apps for the sake of building mobile apps and getting users was never a viable vision even in 2012.
Another mis-analysis of Yahoo. The situation is and had been very clear- Yahoo has never accepted what it is: A conglomeration of useful web services and utilities. Not sexy, but used by millions and potentially very profitable with properly tiered service levels. Instead it has always called itself a "media company" and chased after the success of its competitors. When I worked there a decade ago it wanted to be Google. Now it wants to be Facebook, YouTube or god knows what. This, combined with the inexperience, ego and vanity of Mayer assured Yahoo would continue its slide to irrelevance. Very sad.
His point about Yahoo being a conglomerate the day BABA started trading I think is really important. One of the biggest issues for the CFO of any public conglomerate is that it becomes very easy to see which divisions are weak.<p>As he mentions, when the value of BABA grew it actually created a problem for Yahoo in that it made it clearer to analysts what the real value of Yahoo was. Yahoo leadership must have know this and realized this could cut down the time they had for their turnaround.<p>To show the other side of being a conglomerate there are a few other interesting companies that operate like conglomerates in Yahoo's space but do so well...<p>Look at Microsoft....They are essentailly a conglomerate now, most people coud name their revenue stream... OS, Office, Servers and tools, Azure and what ever Bing, Xbox etc are rolled into.<p>Every reporting quarter people can see with a fair bit of clarity how well their search and console efforts are doing, and people did point to the huge losses early on for that division. If Microsoft didn't have such strong leadership the entertainment division may have been shuttered.<p>Google is an example of a conglomerate that went that way for a different purpose. They were in competition with Baidu, Bing, and Facebook for search revenue and they wanted to better hilight just how well they were doing. So they form Alphabet so they can better show just how much they spend on moon shots and at the same time show just how profitable their advertising revenue is.
I figure Mayer was brought on to do one thing: sell the firm, at the best possible price.<p>The Alibaba stake serves as a barrier against hostile takeovers (21B is a lot of capital), but when the firm really does need a buyer, they don't have one. Presumably Mayer's goal is to attract a bid from either Google or Microsoft. She has contacts within Google, and should have a decent understanding of how the firm values acquisitions. Hence the layoffs, constructive dismissal of remote workers, the Firefox bid, and such.
I have a question about this article and in general about every article in the lines of<p><pre><code> -how to save X
-what was the problem of Y
-what should XY focus to fix the problem
</code></pre>
How is it possible for the poster (say a blogger or a more pro journalist) to be able to pinpoint a problem, a solution or to offer a plan to follow to get X afloat?<p>I mean if every one knows how is it that X still cannot get afloat, they could be hired to fix the solution but this is the case under which Marissa in this case were hired right?<p>Or are this articles baseless most of the time?
It is so stupid that we have this concept that managers should maximize shareholder value as if they are the only stakeholders in a company.<p>Really and truly what did the current shareholders do for YHOO on a daily ongoing basis?<p>The current shareholders did not invest any money in YHOO - they bought their shares from 3rd parties (YHOO did not get any of that money )<p>The current shareholders are not helping make YHOO better in anyway - arguably shareholders in any public company are just making management's job harder to think long-term and strategically.<p>This concept of "maximize share price" as the true role of management has lead to financial engineering of fiscal reporting, and then subsequent earnings restatements.
Build something people want. When was the last time Yahoo did that?<p>I briefly used Yahoo Weather until they introduced huge ads and then deleted it. Prior to that I used Flickr and Yahoo Mail in 2004/2005.