Transformation at Yahoo Foiled by Its Leader’s Inability to Bet the Farm

&gt; Instead of making a single big bet that might have focused the company on something completely different and potentially groundbreaking, Ms. Mayer staked out a lot of small and midsize positions, rarely committing to anything early enough to make a difference. For Ms. Mayer, original programming was just one of dozens of products in a portfolio that remains too complex to understand.<p>Other sources indicate that Mayer is very much a metrics-based decision maker (a).<p>I&#x27;m wondering if that&#x27;s the result of putting a metrics-based decision maker at the head of a technology company. For sustaining innovation, carefully finding a local maximum seems fine, but in a dynamic field, you also need to be able to make a big move based on a more qualitative understanding of your surroundings.<p>As a technical contributor, I&#x27;ve been on-and-off frustrated my whole career by quantitative managers asking for promises of real profit before committing to cleaning up technical debt. There&#x27;s no honest way to come up with a good number here. You can&#x27;t solve the problem thirty times and then present a high mean and low p-value. &quot;Keep doing what we&#x27;re doing but maybe 5% better&quot; requires absolutely no proof, in contrast. You don&#x27;t have to prove that COBOL-based system XYZ <i>won&#x27;t</i> blow up in your face or that frames-in-frames webpage mycompany.com&#x2F;abc <i>won&#x27;t</i> eventually look unprofessional and affect the company&#x27;s brand.<p>I&#x27;m wondering if Mayer&#x27;s &quot;inability to bet the farm&quot; is a higher-level version of the same problem... setting the bar too high for definitive proof creates barriers to strategic moves into areas with incomplete information.<p>a) <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;how-marissa-mayer-figured-out-work-at-home-yahoos-were-slacking-off-2013-3" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;how-marissa-mayer-figured-out...</a>

I saw the writing on the wall when she cancelled the work from home policy and forced a lot of parents to either quit or start coming into the office. While, on the flip side she had an executive package that included day care right off of her office.<p>I decided I would never work for a company that hired Marissa Mayer after that. I screen my employers more carefully than they screen me, and that move showed she didn&#x27;t give one shit about any of hers.

The problem is, that Yahoo didn&#x27;t have any unique technology when she took over. Creating one almost from scratch and make success with it - in such a short time of 3 years - is quite difficult. But I tend to agree with the author&#x27;s sentiment, that she probably just didn&#x27;t have any transformation plan... she just wanted to do incremental improvements in the areas Yahoo was strong enough.<p>What I am missing is why it is called a failure after such a short time. Can&#x27;t they just let her continue?

&gt;There’s just one example everyone can think of — Apple — but that effort took nearly a decade to show results<p>It didn&#x27;t take a decade. Apple was <i>months</i> away from bankruptcy when Jobs went back.

They could have been 500px, if Flickr was addressed in time ( or just left as an incubated project instead of forcing integration, see <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gizmodo.com&#x2F;5910223&#x2F;how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost-the-internet" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gizmodo.com&#x2F;5910223&#x2F;how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost-...</a> ) - and maybe not with a sync-up-everything-on-first run android app.<p>They could have been a lot of things but they managed to smash every potential idea with the tight, corporate-wide integration.<p>They still have the Yahoo! Finance, which I believe, is without competition. Focus on that, stay ahead of competition, if all the rest if falling apart anyway. And start killing the rest of the services which are making less and less money.<p>As much as I dislike the decisions Google made with dropping the Reader, Labs, etc., I understand the reasoning, and that is what Yahoo should have done as well.

I am constantly fascinated by the hyper-polarized views of this CEO placed at the helm of a drowning company. Either she&#x27;s at fault for not risking it all taking out yahoo in a blaze of glory, or fault for risking large sums of money with tumblr, or she&#x27;s literally Jesus Christ. I think its wise of them to take the middle road, and grow but not &quot;risk the farm&quot;. Though, what do I know I&#x27;m not in the future looking back.

Quite a few armchair CEOs commenting here who would have done better, no doubt.

One thing that Yahoo highlights is the importance of why you need to take care of your share price.<p>I&#x27;ve seen a few people here ask why a company would care about their share price after they&#x27;ve gone public. It affects your company both internally and externally.<p>Having a rising share price means you can play a different game than the rest of your competitors.<p>Internaly it helps hire and retain good employees. Ask anyone who started at Microsoft in 1990 and worked their for a decade, or Google from 2004 until 2014. I&#x27;d bet most of them would have gladly given up their salary for more option grants.<p>Externally it means Facebook can pay 15 Billion for WhatsApp. I&#x27;m sure Yahoo was very interested in WhatsApp, but<p><pre><code> 1) couldn&#x27;t justify paying 15 Billion almost 1&#x2F;2 of their value for the app 2) Who in their right mind would take Yahoo stock over FB stock? </code></pre> Sadly everything is going wrong for Yahoo,<p><pre><code> - Alibaba&#x27;s shares have dropped since they went public - it now looks like they are going to have to pay around 20% of their Alibaba holdings in tax ( about 7 Billion). - Anyone who is going to buy some of their assets is going to have to pick up some money loosing businesses to get a deal done, which will make negotiations much tougher and probably mean the teams that get picked up are going to be cut down </code></pre> My new favorite theory that is floating around is that Alibaba actually acquires Yahoo&#x27;s Alibaba stake and Yahoo&#x27;s front page. Microsoft still acquires the search assets and mail. Google acquires Flickr and the fantasy sports and finance are spun out into a new company.&#x2F;

The hindsight comments are valid however it&#x27;s definite to say that yahoo had and has a lot more issues to get itself into a competitive position.<p>The comment about boring tenure definitely is big call to say the least and if one is to judge Marisa about her efforts over her career prior and during yahoo she was the CEO they needed.<p>Going into yahoo and transforming it is a big call and to draw parallels to Apple should not be compared. It&#x27;s safe to say anyone going into yahoo would know that plugging the holes in the company was the main agenda and at least keeping momentum of operations and brand was a realistic fix, which Marisa did extremely well.<p>Tech companies with the latest and greatest innovative product is what all general spectators love to grade a company. It&#x27;s sexy it gets media attention and creates a lot of noise within communities.<p>The fair way to look at her role would have been to stop the ship from sinking and if she is to be judged as a person which this article does, her career is dynamic and adaptable and it&#x27;s safe to say no matter what the outcome any will want her with open arms.

I&#x27;m not convinced betting the farm was even necessary. What would be wrong with continuing business as usual whilst attempting a larger initiative that could deliver long term growth?

Hated when they killed YUI. Spent several months learning the library and showcasing a YUI3 portal to coworkers and suddenly development was halted and Yahoo&#x27;s pages pulled. Poof.

What a silly article. Yahoo has been doomed for quite sometime, and I doubt anyone could&#x27;ve turned it around. But then I&#x27;m not a clickbaity tech journo.

I do not think author understood the challenge that turning-around Yahoo presents:<p>1. Decimation of core revenue by everyone moving to mobile. 2. Core management not suitable to face future challenges. 3. Non manager employees not pulling in the same direction.<p>It was not her job to bet the farm, it was her job to revamp the people infrastructure and management infrastructure so that some innovative solutions bubble up from the middle that might be tried..

Well, the only valuable thing that Yahoo has is the brand and multi-service portal, so what they need to do is to buy or partner with other companies to make great Yahoo! Thing services and improve their existing ones, perhaps by spinning them off while keeping the Yahoo! branding and some stock.<p>For that, they&#x27;d need a CEO with great deal-making and people skills and an intuitive grasp of what the average person cares and is going to care about.<p>Marissa Mayer doesn&#x27;t really seem a great fit, since she seems more of an introvert great at perfecting a product, as opposed to someone great at communicating and making deals, and she is also probably not very close herself to the average Yahoo user.<p>She could possibly try to innovate in advertising technology though, although I&#x27;m not sure if it&#x27;s possible to much better there.

When you bet the farm, you win, or you&#x27;re fired. Especially as a Yahoo CEO. So she&#x27;s wise not to.

Ugh, now I&#x27;m worried Yahoo will drag down Tumblr, which is a genuinely unique and useful thing.

I wonder if a big problem is that Yahoo couldn&#x27;t really plant their flag on (for example) video and completely change the company towards that rapidly. Too many people still use the current version of their site and changing that could have alienated people<p>Yahoo is still relatively popular in some Asian countries because they prefer the everything on the same site web portal.

You can make a large amount of money by successfully riding down a declining business, even in the technology sector. It&#x27;s just not true that bold moves that &quot;bet the farm&quot; are a generally winning strategy, although pundits do like that it generates a lot of drama.<p>Of course, the former isn&#x27;t really Yahoo&#x27;s approach either.

Am I the only one who thinks Yahoo is never going to get anywhere until they change the goddam stupid name?

Glad I didn&#x27;t pursue that role as apm lol. But always easy to say shoulda coulda woulda