As one of the few women on Hacker News, I'm going to come right out and say it: I think this is a <i>fantastic</i> idea, and Marissa Mayer would do well to take it to heart.<p>Imagine if Yahoo made a serious bid for Pinterest, and then Marissa went really crazy and made their homepage into a Pinterest-like site. Not only would it cause a great sensational uproar in the press, but it would make Yahoo a serious contender again.<p>P.S. Not offended by the fact that Dave said "pink".
My favorite success story of marketing towards the under-served gender is Dyson.<p>Before Dyson vacuums were marketed to women exclusively. If you suggested marketing a vacuum to men before Dyson, you'd be laughed out of the boardroom. Dyson threw that all out the window and entered the market with a vacuum that actually looks like a sci-fi weapon, and to great success.
"What if Marissa made it known that Yahoo would be the best tech company in the world for hiring women execs, putting women in leadership positions, and advancing the opportunities for women in the workplace (as Sheryl Sandberg is so well-known for promoting at Facebook)?"<p>Sounds discriminatory to me.
Err, Yahoo is making less profit, but it's still making $1B profit on the bottom line last year. Why is everyone acting like it's on it's beyond redemption?<p>Sure, Yahoo and Microsoft are boring, but they're still profitable.<p><a href="http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/financials/financials.asp?ticker=YHOO:US" rel="nofollow">http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/financials...</a>
Just an FYI: two of Yahoo's stronger properties are Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Finance, both of whom haven't historically had a large female audience. The other properties that might attract a female audience haven't done as well.<p>That's not to say Yahoo can't sell these and purchase the properties Dave mentions, of course. It's just that Yahoo currently doesn't have a core strength in targeting women and would need to reach out a lot to build that competency.
This is an interesting idea, but the title is dangerous. As has been pointed out a lot lately, making something "pink" doesn't mean you can sell it to women. :)<p>Edit: Just noticed that Gina Trapani helped forge the headline... It's probably OK ;)
<i>What if Yahoo went back to its vision for media and entertainment,</i><p>i.e. what a lot of people think has been wrong with Yahoo for a long, long time now.
I think this is a huge opportunity for companies in general. Let's face it, most companies are run by dudes and we're largely clueless when it comes to understanding what women want. I think there's a massive opportunity for any company that chooses to focus on women right now, whether that's Yahoo or a brand new startup.
The thing is, Yahoo is a really good portal site. Probably the best. It turns out that being a portal isn't as lucrative as people thought it would be 15 years ago, but there's definitely still a demand for them. Yahoo just need to focus on being the beat portal on the internet, IMO. It's a sound long term strategy.
IMO this isn't doing much to advance the cause of women in technology.<p>Suggesting the highest ranking woman CEO in the tech sector should concentrate on serving women, is slightly sexist.<p>Both men and women use Yahoo. Demographic splits aren't necessarily as gender specific as the author assumes. We're not living in the 1950s.
I'm not a woman, but I agree this is a great strategy to consider. I think one of the reasons that both Pinterest and Instagram caught so many of the startup & wantrepreneur crowd off-guard was that their success, to a large extent, came from a predominantly female user base, and typically feminine interests. Google, for all it's strengths, is mostly run by intelligent but geeky male nerds. Same for Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, etc. I don't think a "pink strategy" alone will save Yahoo -- I do think they need to import more of the cultural strengths of Google, Apple and Facebook -- but it can be a competitive advantage.<p>There's one potential negative to the "pink" strategy, however. Regardless of how some might like it to be, the overwhelming majority of hackers do seem to be male. If you evolve your company to be female oriented in their product suite, you may make the company less attractive when recruiting and retaining male hackers. And ultimately having talent on staff is the bottleneck. But there may be a way to pursue a balanced path which gives the advantages of a pink strategy while not being too bitten by the negative, so you come out ahead.<p>I also wish they'd drop the "!". Just "Yahoo". Much cleaner.