Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

> They talk a lot about mobile, but don't seem to have a meaningful presence

"Several Flickr internal attempts to build and ship native mobile experiences (going back to 2006) were squashed relentlessly."

http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Flickr-miss-the-mobile-photo-op...

An ex-Yahoo here, using a throwaway account.

Yahoo's biggest problem is the creamy middle layer of managers. They are usually lifers (as in, been at Yahoo for a decade), or fresh MBAs with a Stanford degree who think that just because they sat through Management-101, they know how products should be designed.

This middle layer is like a Turkish harem. They're busy backstabbing each other, politicking and fucking things up. BUT NO ONE HOLDS THEM ACCOUNTABLE! Some dick will screw up a project, and then when the team gets laid off, happily move to another one to fuck that up too. Too often I've seen engineers just get disgusted and leave; or they'll go into a depressive "I don't care" mode. Passive-aggressive behavior is the norm.

Blake, when he joined, said that "we say 'no' to nothing, and 'no' to everything". What he meant was: in a meeting, the manager will say 'yes' to everything; but the moment he steps outside, he'll think "I'm not gonna do that!".

Innovation is also hampered by these middle morons. Someone tries to do something innovative, and a middle cockroach will crawl out, whining that his 'team' is working on it, and they'll have something ready in (some future quarter). So you're told to back off. Then you wait. In the meantime, that middle manager will use this opportunity to ask for more reqs and expand his little fiefdom. Time will pass, and nothing will get done. And you'll be waiting, agonizing, watching competitors eat Yahoo's lunch as this middle manager fucks around.

And then there will be cycles of outsourcing to Bangalore and Beijing. Some middle beancounter decided that 3 engineers in India can be hired for 1 engineer in the US. (Never mind the quality of people; it's just the 3:1 ratio that matters). So now they're busy outsourcing to Bangalore. Even critical support tasks are outsourced to Bangalore. So what used to take a couple of back-and-forth emails and get fixed in an hour, now takes 3-4 days.

The list of Yahoo's problems are long; and C-level people are not high on that list. "Vision" is also not a problem for Yahoo, if they'd just let the engineers just do their fucking jobs!

Carol's biggest mistake was pissing Jack Ma off and losing Alipay. A person at that level should never, ever, make such a blunder; and she had to go.

Another nail in the coffin for the "A successful CEO's skills can easily transfer to any company" idea! From the top of my head (other than Bratz): Zander at Motorola, Sculley at Apple, etc. You just can't graft them on like that.

This.

I used Yahoo and understood what it did for me. In 1997.

Then Google came, and my ass was a portal, and Yahoo's homepage (on the rare occasion I looked at it) was crap.

Then there were Yahoo magazines and mass-media advertising -- we're talking 1999/2000 here. The company already didn't make sense to me then.

I remember ~2009 when AOL were being accused of copying Yahoo's homepage, and thinking "gee ... I've never been on either". Both were crap.

For a while Yahoo's Finance pages were decent (Jeremy Zawodny knows his shit), but even that's passe.

At best they're sort of a Computer Associates of Web 1.0. Where mediocre technology goes to die.

The Bartz era was at least an entertaining train wreck to watch.

Well put.

There is a big difference between leadership and management. Leadership is about taking risks, while management is about mitigating them. They are thus often in direct tension.

Yahoo had a lot of management and not much leadership.