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Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Faces Morale Challenge

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191–200 of 247 posts

Re: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Faces Morale Challenge

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP says "Fortune 5". The candidates are Walmart, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Berkshire Hathaway, and Apple. Which one of those has super bowl ads and uses Akamai? There's your answer.

and the commenter also says in another thread: "I run an entire data center of Slackware Linux on Dell servers." so, definitely not apple. which leads me to think all that is BS and they just have too much time on their hands.

doesn't that leave walmart?

Re: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Faces Morale Challenge

#192
post #73

The morale problem is a symptom of bad leadership. It's not going to be fixed with more bad leadership.

Steve Jobs could come back from the dead and he would be utterly helpless to revive the abject piece of crap that is Yahoo.

Not so sure about this. My understanding is that Steve Jobs would walk around the company and personally fire anyone he believed wasn't doing a valuable job. (EDIT: He didn't hire McKinsey to do this.) He wanted true believers who were adding value ONLY. Not sure that has happened at Yahoo!.

Second, Steve Jobs focused the company around one or two important initiatives at a time. That was probably his greatest value add. He had a phenomenal sense for which projects were the right initiatives. The original Bondi Blue iMac came out pretty quickly after his return -- not quite a year after Steve had been named interim CEO. That's FAST.

Yahoo! needs to be streamlined (remove poisonous/slack elements), focused (one or two key projects ONLY, kill the others) and fast (release the key projects in 2016). They also need to pick the RIGHT projects. To do this, like another commenter said, they need to remember why they love the Internet. Otherwise they're dead.

Re: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Faces Morale Challenge

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I object only on the grounds that Flickr is the only good photo site for people who really care about their photos. Having tried to use 500px for a few months, they cannot even manage to do album privacy correctly.

That, and I'd be disappointed that my email account would vanish, along with years worth of mail.

I lost 4 years' emails (1998-2002) because my account was inactive for a mere 6 months! Contacted Yahoo in 2002 but couldn't get my emails back.

Re: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Faces Morale Challenge

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That, and I'd be disappointed that my email account would vanish, along with years worth of mail.

I lost 4 years' emails (1998-2002) because my account was inactive for a mere 6 months! Contacted Yahoo in 2002 but couldn't get my emails back.

Ouch! Do they have any facility that I can use to back-up/archive my email externally?

Re: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Faces Morale Challenge

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lost 4 years' emails (1998-2002) because my account was inactive for a mere 6 months! Contacted Yahoo in 2002 but couldn't get my emails back.

Ouch! Do they have any facility that I can use to back-up/archive my email externally?

You can guess I haven't used their services since then, not sure if they let you do that easily now.

Re: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Faces Morale Challenge

#196
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

don't know why this is broken, but I'll file a bug. thank you! One of these days, I'm going to run a bot that crawls all pages on yahoo.com and reports non-200 responses...

Why write a bot? Doesn't yapache log such events? Just run a Hadoop job on the error logs.

I'd run it across the entire site. Sure, we do have logs, but it's not easy to access them for all *.yahoo.com. Logs from each property are ingested into different places. The infrastructure is way more complex than it should be making bare-minimum monitoring like alerts on non-200 responses on all properties difficult to maintain.

Re: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Faces Morale Challenge

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ouch! Do they have any facility that I can use to back-up/archive my email externally?

You can guess I haven't used their services since then, not sure if they let you do that easily now.

Yes, good point :)

Re: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Faces Morale Challenge

#198
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

don't know why this is broken, but I'll file a bug. thank you! One of these days, I'm going to run a bot that crawls all pages on yahoo.com and reports non-200 responses...

Shouldn't the yahoo.com servers already log when they return error responses? :)

Each property has their logs ingested, indexed, and archived differently. I only have access to my little arm of the company infrastructure. Logs should be monitored properly by the responsible owners of each property (or in a more sensible way), but unfortunately this is not the case... :)

Re: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Faces Morale Challenge

#199
post #9

"Ms. Mayer called a meeting with senior executives in August and asked them to sign a written agreement to stay with the company for at least three more years, according to two people familiar with the meeting." Is such an agreement enforceable? Or is this some meaningless pledge? If you want people to stay, give them a decent financial incentive.

I'm sure there was some sort of bonus involved. They're called retention bonuses. Similar to signing bonuses, you can be contractually obligated to pay them back if you don't stay for the term of the contract. Most companies will keep retention bonuses very hush-hush.

Aren't retention bonuses in terms of cash you have to pay back if you quit illegal ?

(Note: cash paid if you're still there after a period is very much legal)

Re: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Faces Morale Challenge

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are already bringing in outside consultants from McKinsey, but in this day and age, how about turning to the crowd for help? If they posted significant cash prices (say $1m total) and let their users vote on the best ideas, I bet they could find some fresh directions. It would be fun to watch, but the markets would rightly interpret it as "we have no idea what we're doing".

If I read the article right, it looks like the investors already think that :) Seriously though, if you use enough buzz-words, like crowd-sourced virtual incubator, or Kickstarter for Innovation, or whatever, I'm sure you could sell the idea to all the stakeholders somehow.

I see, very good. Other options for branding the idea: Yahoo Ventures, Yahoo 20% Time (for internal "ideation"). In fact I'm now convinced it's a good idea!
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