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What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

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Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#261

Post by ex-yahoo »

Bartweiss wrote: post #54
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that was the only way at that point to bring in fresh creative talent. No creative person probably wanted to quit their existing job and leave for Yahoo at that point. And why would they? If you're really talented, you could either go work for Google/Facebook/etc. (if you want a stable life), or start your own company (if you're adventurous). Yahoo was stuck in the purgatory somewhere in between.

I don't really buy this argument. There are reasons for acqui-hires, but it's usually to bring on board a strong existing team, a world-class domain expert, or a tech base with employee support. Summly was none of those. They got one 17 year old dev, and a fairly-decent product they made basically no use of. I don't know how good D'Aloisio is, but he's not that good. Especially without the kind of status and support…

I'm one of two ex yahoo engs who integrated Summply summarization algo into Yahoo home page. More specifically it was (is?) a large personalization platform that would carefully pick which news to show you and in what order. It only took us a couple of days. It was mostly invisible for an outsider because Yahoo already had a decent summarization algorithm, but was a clear improvement.

While I don't know if all these dictionaries and calibrated weights of parameters were really worth $15M, I'm positive that such an IP was major reason of the acquisition.

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#262

Post by caycep »

The problem with this is: this means MM is a very good executive regarding technical details, daily operations and the like. However, she wasn't hired to be HR or COO. She was hired to be CEO, in a company that faced deep existential challenges in a market that was rapidly making its products irrelevant. When she took over, I wasn't sure what value Yahoo really provided other than a "yet another portal and email provider" type of thing, far from being a peer of FB and Google that it aspired to be. The company needed to execute a pivot of epic proportions and in this, we have heard very little. And maybe there were some projects in their skunk works that may yet get written about, which never saw the light of day.

Morale of the troops? great. Making employees' lives better? great. But it doesn't mean squat if your company still doesn't have a viable product at the end of the day...

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#263

Post by smhost »

freyir wrote: post #243
smhost wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've brought neither value judgment nor morality. I merely said that it's legit to think about perspectives as having degrees of correctness, just as it's legit to think about moral philosophies as having degrees of correctness. It's fine if you want say, "I don't believe you," and that would be a valid interpretation on your part. But it is politics in the true sense, and you're participating in it with this convers…

> What I believe the OP wants to correct is the framing or the tone of the anecdotes Fair enough. One person frames it as "Meyer was motivated by empathy," and the other frames it as "She was motivated by self-interest." Neither person can prove their claim conclusively, but I assume there's some evidence that led Core1024 to contradict the blogger. The best we can hope for is to hear evidence from both sides, and co…

> The best we can hope for is to hear evidence from both sides, and come to our own conclusion.

I don't think the principle of evidence-based decision-making applies to most social situations. For one, there usually is no evidence. With the Mayer situation, while everyone might agree that the turnstiles are no longer there, we have no video footage or recorded conversations to examine. So in a real sense, narratives and hearsay are all we have. For another, we care about other people's opinions. Like with online reviews, people find value even in reviews that don't give any explanations, or for food product reviews that amount to nothing more than, "Five stars, because it tastes good."

If someone makes an accusatory statement about another person, I agree that there's definitely a burden of proof. But Core1024's comment doesn't seem to me to be accusatory or an attempt to frame Mayer as a selfish person. I think the comment reframes Mayer's actions as being motivated by efficiency as opposed to empathy, which I think is a much more neutral view.

> Can you provide an example where one perspective on a person is correct (or more correct), another perspective on that person is incorrect (or less correct), and the relative correctness is not based on objective truth or an appeal to moral authority?

Any interpretation you have of a social situation. Any opinion you have of your work environment or social circle. Your beliefs about what defines a certain culture. We understand intellectually that these are all opinions and that opinions are subjective, but there's no sense in which we would ever behave as if our beliefs are not true. Otherwise why would we believe them in the first place? I think it's disingenuous to look for objectivity in social interpretations. And anyway this isn't a criminal trial, or something like that. It's pure gossip.

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#264

Post by scholia »

stinkytaco wrote: post #251
scholia wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yahoo is a publicly traded company. Selling Yahoo went very well for the shareholders and the first rule for any publicly traded company is to maximize shareholder value. No, it went badly. If she'd been able to increase sales, and if she'd launched one or more successful apps, Yahoo would have been more valuable. In fact, they might even have sold Yahoo for more before she spent loads of money buying lots of compa…

The stock price on July 1, 2012 was 15.84. Today it's 38.30. So over the last 4 years she's more than doubled the stock price. And her compensation is tied to that stock price, which to me points to a "sell me" strategy by the Yahoo board. Add to that the fact that revenue hasn't even close to doubled in that time (though net income has been fairly healthy due to some cost cutting), it seems to that the market has be…

True, but the rise had nothing to do with Mayer or the core Yahoo. It was the Alibaba stock in particular that drove the share price. Which is why if you removed the value of Yahoo's shareholdings, the core Yahoo (nominally, at least) had a negative value.

> the market has been anticipating this acquisition

Yes, it has, but Mayer fought against that until she had no choice. She lost that battle when activist investor Starboard Value -- which had been pushing for the break-up -- got its CEO named to Yahoo’s board of directors. See

http://www.ibtimes.com/yahoo-yhoo-shareholders-meeting-2016-...

Starboard has been pushing the break up for a couple of years. It wrote several interesting letters, like this from January 2015: http://fortune.com/2015/01/08/starboards-latest-letter-to-ya...

You'll see that Starboard had already been pushing the break up of Yahoo and the sale to AOL's parent.

Further, we continue to believe that Yahoo must significantly reduce costs to improve profitability in its core business and should be considering a combination with AOL. A combination with AOL, structured properly, could accomplish all of these goals by allowing for: (i) a tax-efficient separation of the non-core minority equity investments; (ii) tremendous cost synergies of between $1 billion and $1.5 billion; and (iii) a strong growth platform given AOL’s progress in mobile and video advertising.

The investors were scared because Mayer had, in effect, a bottomless supply of cash (in Yahoo Japan and Alibaba) and she had already wasted $2 billion. They wanted the break-up before she could splash out on something bigger and even more useless than Tumblr.

That's one of the reasons why she was such a failure.

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#265

Post by Lagged2Death »

fizx wrote: post #149
Lagged2Death wrote: post #38

I'm no biz-geek, I probably can't name a dozen CEOs. But for years, MM's name was called put in every critical mainstream headline about Yahoo, of which there were many. I do not believe that's an accident. I do not believe a man would have been treated the same way.

> I'm no biz-geek, I probably can't name a dozen CEOs. But for years, MM's name was called put in every critical mainstream headline about Yahoo, of which there were many. I do not believe that's an accident. I do not believe a man would have been treated the same way. "Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey. Will It Work?" "Twitter, Grappling with Anemic Growth, Tries to Bolster Its Advertising Business. Jack…

Fair enough to look for a counterexample, I guess, but here's the thing: I've never heard of Jack Dorsey.

That's not surprising to me. I'm not a Twitter user and I don't read the biz-interest publications.

Meyer's name (always the obviously-feminine "Melissa," never just "Meyer", just like "Hillary" rather than simply "Clinton") in contrast, was plastered all over the NYT and other mainstream outlets from the start.

It's a subtle way of making the headline function as "lady CEO" without coming out and saying it.

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#266

Post by woliveirajr »

yuhong wrote: post #238
jessaustin wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody I knew who used it said it was better than Windows, but that's sort of a self-selecting crowd. More to the point, OS/2 wasn't a M$ product, so that sort of success for it would have been bad for M$.

It was a MS product (even the early OS/2 2.0 SDKs from the 1990 period). The entire OS/2 2.0 fiasco is one of my favorite topics, partly because of how horrible and unethical it was.

Could you point some reading about it?

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#267

Post by Bartweiss »

discardorama wrote: post #240
Bartweiss wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really buy this argument. There are reasons for acqui-hires, but it's usually to bring on board a strong existing team, a world-class domain expert, or a tech base with employee support. Summly was none of those. They got one 17 year old dev, and a fairly-decent product they made basically no use of. I don't know how good D'Aloisio is, but he's not that good. Especially without the kind of status and support…

> Summly was none of those. They got one 17 year old dev, and a fairly-decent product they made basically no use of. I don't know how good D'Aloisio is, but he's not that good. Especially without the kind of status and support that could turn out a bold new product within Yahoo. Summly was not D'Aloiso's product in terms of development. He may have had the idea, but the technology was SRI's (the same guys who develop…

I'm... not sure where I was demeaning it that way? I certainly never said the quoted thing, and I didn't intend it.

I don't think that Summly was a bad product, and I don't think D'Aloisio is a bad dev. I specified him alone because as far as I know he's the only one Yahoo acquired - SRI is great but Yahoo didn't acquire their devs or exclusive rights to their tech.

The question at hand is whether Yahoo got their money's worth, and I'm claiming that they didn't bring on enough relevant tech or expertise to justify the expense. That holds even if Summly, SRI, and D'Aloisio are all fantastic.

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#268

Post by yuhong »

woliveirajr wrote: post #266
yuhong wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a MS product (even the early OS/2 2.0 SDKs from the 1990 period). The entire OS/2 2.0 fiasco is one of my favorite topics, partly because of how horrible and unethical it was.

Could you point some reading about it?

One of my favorite readings is http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011.... Notice that they did not mention the problems with the "32-bit Windows extenders" for example. On the later attacks, look up "Microsoft Munchkins" and "Steve Barkto" for one example of them.
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