Better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven.
Google’s Marissa Mayer Tapped as Yahoo’s Chief
231–240 of 366 posts
Re: Google’s Marissa Mayer Tapped as Yahoo’s Chief
#232I've not dealt or indeed met her so I can't realy comment much beyond from what I have read that she certainly will not be any worse than what they have had before.
One tip I will give, whoever is CEO of Yahoo, vote the board out as they seem to make alot of bad mistakes and will only end up blaming you for them.
Re: Google’s Marissa Mayer Tapped as Yahoo’s Chief
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the description, her behavior reminds me a lot of how Steve Jobs behaved. If you read the biography, Jobs would often contradict himself, he was extremely rude, he would cry at meetings, he would hear an idea and say it was shit, and then the next week propose the exact same idea as his own, etc. I'm not saying she is at all comparable to Steve Jobs, but it sounds like they both know what they want, and don't sp…
Not a good comparison. Meyer famously tested 41 shades of blue on Gmail. Optimising local maxima is hardly innovation. Jobs was more of the Henry Ford mindset that if he asked people what they wanted they'd ask for a faster horse.
Steve Jobs also had moments like this: https://plus.google.com/107117483540235115863/posts/gcSStkKx...
Re: Google’s Marissa Mayer Tapped as Yahoo’s Chief
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
Armstrong is a sales guy. Marissa is a product person. Yahoo has the budget and bandwidth to incubate great products. I wouldn't count her out based on a sales guy trying to turn around an ad sales business.
I didn't compare Armstrong to Mayer. I said the end result would be similar.
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Re: Google’s Marissa Mayer Tapped as Yahoo’s Chief
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagreed with nearly everything I ever heard Marissa say related to design, especially her over reliance on A/B testing to inform design. I think she is one of the main reasons Google products tend to feel like they are designed by engineers.
Their products are usable and uncluttered. I have reservations about the new unified look (too much padding in horizontal stripes one can't scroll, trying to displace browser chrome), but I've been very happy with the previous, “designed by engineers” Google aesthetic.
There are so many UX problems with the current crop of Google core products, it's hard for me to agree that "usable and uncluttered" can refer to anything but the Google of the past.
Re: Google’s Marissa Mayer Tapped as Yahoo’s Chief
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it not surprising that she left Google to be a CEO somewhere, it was just surprising that she picked Yahoo. Another one of those VP -> CEO jumps that was interesting to watch was Ed Zander (Sun Micro -> Motorola). What I was expecting was that she would leave and start some sort cross between 'solve a world issue' with 'easy accessibility' kinds of UI. At Google her strength was having a clear idea of how to…
I'd say the "premier digital media company" at the moment is Netflix. They have their problems and troubles, but they have enough brand recognition and enough good content (albeit produced by other people) to quality for that moniker.
What about YouTube? Or Zynga? Or Facebook for its photos?
I think when people hear the phrase "digital media", they think of it has traditional-media-delivered-digitally. But I think the internet enables entirely new variations of traditional media, tailor-made for our hypersocial, crowdsourced, and attentionless internet society.
Re: Google’s Marissa Mayer Tapped as Yahoo’s Chief
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
Corrected. Poor phrasing on my part. I was suggesting a likely alternative for her would be starting a company, not that Yahoo is anything like a startup.
No, that's exactly how I took it. Oblig car metaphor: That's like saying hey, as an alternative to a free Lamborghini Aventador, you can have an old Pontiac Fiero chassis, and a Chevy 350 with a blown head gasket. If you're really lucky and amazing you might make something worth 1/10th what the Lamborghini is.
> Oblig
Please spare us the silly abbreviations.
Re: Google’s Marissa Mayer Tapped as Yahoo’s Chief
#238I thought Yahoo! was a dying brand, why would anyone want to leave Google of all places for them at this point?
Yahoo is dying but it's not dead. All that remaining traffic has to go somewhere. Google has a clear incentive to take that traffic for themselves instead of letting fb or someone else have it.
Re: Google’s Marissa Mayer Tapped as Yahoo’s Chief
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that's exactly how I took it. Oblig car metaphor: That's like saying hey, as an alternative to a free Lamborghini Aventador, you can have an old Pontiac Fiero chassis, and a Chevy 350 with a blown head gasket. If you're really lucky and amazing you might make something worth 1/10th what the Lamborghini is.
Not really a good metaphor. Steve Jobs, Tony Fadell, Elon Musk, Max Levchin, and many more entrepreneurs chose to start a second company rather than take a C level job somewhere else. A better analogy is whether to adapt an off the shelf piece of code to scratch your itch (often a reasonable choice) or to write your own from scratch, clean slate. The latter is much more risky, but that fits a certain personality.
Exactly. With her connections, knowledge and wealth she might be able to build an amazing company from scratch.
Re: Google’s Marissa Mayer Tapped as Yahoo’s Chief
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the description, her behavior reminds me a lot of how Steve Jobs behaved. If you read the biography, Jobs would often contradict himself, he was extremely rude, he would cry at meetings, he would hear an idea and say it was shit, and then the next week propose the exact same idea as his own, etc. I'm not saying she is at all comparable to Steve Jobs, but it sounds like they both know what they want, and don't sp…
Not a good comparison. Meyer famously tested 41 shades of blue on Gmail. Optimising local maxima is hardly innovation. Jobs was more of the Henry Ford mindset that if he asked people what they wanted they'd ask for a faster horse.
I was wondering if there are any public and published research reports/papers that were written by her? At least something from her time at Stanford? So far the only thing I could find were some Google patents where she appears as a co-inventor.
Edit: Oddly enough I can not reply to the comment below. My statement wasn't meant to be critical but more on the curious side. The "41 shades of blue" story sounded always intriguing, so I was wondering if there are any other traces of her research activities.