131–138 of 138 posts
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I wish too that fixing those bugs last week had the same impact as turning around a struggling multi billion dollar business.
Yeah, because she hasn't had enough time already. Or made decisions that have made things worse at Yahoo.
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I think you put it very elegantly in the first paragraph but I disagree with the rest. The problem is much worse. The owners of Yahoo don't even want a tech giant. They don't even want a company, they want to sell it as scrap. That's a tough environment to work in when you are hired to run a company.
I think that is pretty true, and since most think Yahoo! has negative value relative to their Alibaba stake, it would be interesting if they simply sold their Alibaba stake and used the proceeds to buyout the stock holders and took the remains of Yahoo! private. That would give them the breathing room to re-imagine what they could be, just as Dell has.
Among common users I don't know, but I suspect it's something like AOL.
re-imagining what yahoo could be would probably be a waste of resources, because I think the name has basically negative connotations as being either old, not useful, or just malignant in relation to its users.
I wish I could tell my customers, I just need 3 more years to solve these bugs.
I wish too that fixing those bugs last week had the same impact as turning around a struggling multi billion dollar business.
You make it sound like solving a complex problem in concurrency or memory management or compiler optimization or power management (that may directly and layer-indirectly affect millions of users, if not billions of devices) is "less impact" then a human-goal management problem of a company like Yahoo.
Perhaps you believe Mayer's difficult task of specifying the right color of purple for the Yahoo Mail was somehow high impact?
""one day before Yahoo Mail was set to release, she convened a meeting at Phish Food, a conference room in the executive building of Yahoo’s campus, to talk about the product’s color. For months, the team had settled on blue and gray. If users were going to read emails on their phones all day long, the thinking went, it was best to choose the most subtly contrasting hues. But now, Mayer explained, she wanted to change the colors to various shades of purple, which she believed better suited Yahoo’s brand.
According to one senior executive, Sharma’s body language changed the moment Mayer issued her request. He looked deflated. Altering the color of such an intricate product would require that members of his team spend all night adjusting colors in thousands of places. He slumped off and prepared to tell his staff the bad news.
""
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-whe...
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I think "their belt" is now accepted as the gender neutral way of saying this (I for one wish we just invented another word rather than make grammar more confusing and less logical, but I guess the people who can influence languages don't think the I do).
"His belt" was the historical gender inclusive phase.
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HN likes it when overpaid, over-hyped leaders fail in general, especially after doing massively unpopular and short-sighted things like killing work from home policies. If Mayer had actually done a good job at Yahoo and turned things around, HN would be propping her up as a hero. Instead, she proved her inexperience, inflexibility, and narrow focus make her a poor CEO for a company like Yahoo, and the board and media…
Yes - I think this comment sums it up well. Remember how the media celebrated her appointment, focussing on her gender, as if the silver bullet of "gender diversity" will resolve the many problems we have in tech management. The media did this before she'd demonstrated any leadership or success. For some who hold more interest in identity politics than technology, the mere appointment of a female CEO was success enou…
In my mind, to think of the corresponding female CEO to Steve Jobs, Holmes immediately comes to my mind, who leads a company with smoke and mirrors...
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I think you put it very elegantly in the first paragraph but I disagree with the rest. The problem is much worse. The owners of Yahoo don't even want a tech giant. They don't even want a company, they want to sell it as scrap. That's a tough environment to work in when you are hired to run a company.
I think that is pretty true, and since most think Yahoo! has negative value relative to their Alibaba stake, it would be interesting if they simply sold their Alibaba stake and used the proceeds to buyout the stock holders and took the remains of Yahoo! private. That would give them the breathing room to re-imagine what they could be, just as Dell has.
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I encourage you to read the book 'First Rate Madness' to get an understanding of the link between crisis leaders and mental illness. Meyer appears to be a peacetime leader, not a crisis leader. Yahoo honestly needs a nutjob the likes of Steve Ballmer to survive.
I would really enjoy seeing Steve Ballmer take a break from his basketball career to be the CEO of Yahoo! Great idea! A part of me thinks he could actually turn the place around, and a part of me just thinks it would be hilarious.
It would be a fantastic and endearing final act for a truly larger-than-life character.