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Google’s Marissa Mayer Tapped as Yahoo’s Chief

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Re: Google’s Marissa Mayer Tapped as Yahoo’s Chief

#301

Post by Tyrannosaurs »

mjwalshe wrote: post #298
Aramgutang wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would think that at Hacker News, car analogies would not be necessary, since I imagine there is a large proportion of users like myself who have no interest in cars, and have never owned nor intend to own one. I have no idea how a Pontiac Fiero or a Chevy 350 compares to a Lamborghini Aventator without looking it up. All I know is that all three are probably luxury automobiles. I have even less of clue about what…

I thought HN had a large preponderence of "engineers" (or at least they claim to be) I would have expected almost 100% of us sould have enough knowledge to understand the analogy.

Pontiac's and Chevy's are very American cars. Speaking as a European I can guess they're not as good as a Lamborghini but not with enough detail to make it a particularly useful comparison.

Re: Google’s Marissa Mayer Tapped as Yahoo’s Chief

#302

Post by Tyrannosaurs »

cookiecaper wrote: post #300
tjmc wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't be so sure. Nokia was a sinking ship before Elop joined and now he's wearing most of the blame. Sure, he could have hitched Nokia's wagon to Android instead. But given that Google own competitor Motorola and are selling the killer Nexus 7 at no margin, they aren't exactly an ideal partner either.

Elop scrapped everything Nokia had dumped years of R&D into and turned the company into Microsoft's (Elop's former employer) puppet. Nokia could have made an instant comeback if they had just built a few semi-decent Android phones, but they are now locked in to Windows. Elop's case is atypical.

They had their own competent looking OS in the pipeline (which was available on a couple of the earlier Lumias).

I agree, I think Elop made bad decisions which were massively swayed by Elop's attachment to Microsoft.

Re: Google’s Marissa Mayer Tapped as Yahoo’s Chief

#303

Post by plinkplonk »

steve8918 wrote: post #161
tatsuke95 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "so if anyone can turn Yahoo around it's her." Do you really believe that? I mean, of all the potential candidates out there, she has the best pedigree? I think the negative commentary stems from there. You think this is a coup. To me, it's sort of a ho-hum, predictable hiring. Yahoo! needs an overhaul as a business, and to do so they hired someone with SV name power.

I 100% believe that she has the best pedigree of any person out there. Think about it, who would you have as CEO of Yahoo? John Chambers? Larry Ellison? The CEO of Hulu? Mark Hurd? Jerry Yang? Tim Cook? I think Mayer is better qualified than anyone else that is available because she is an expert on the space. When she joined Google, the mainstream Internet was less than 5 years old. Her entire career has been built o…

"I'd be willing to bet that Mayer has done more as an engineer than most engineers at Yahoo"

really? any evidence for this? (not snark, genuinely curious) I've never heard of Marissa Mayer as a top 1% engineer (vs a 'strong' manager)

Re: Google’s Marissa Mayer Tapped as Yahoo’s Chief

#304

Post by Retric »

debacle wrote: post #99
TylerE wrote: post #84

Earlier 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.

No one I've talked to who works at Yahoo would compare it favorably to a Lamborghini.

Except as CEO she would probably make enough to buy a new Lamborghini every week. People rarely talk about opportunity costs but if you can make more than 10 million a year spending 5 years building a company from scratch to see a 30 million exit is a Failure. And doing better than that is ridiculously rare.

Re: Google’s Marissa Mayer Tapped as Yahoo’s Chief

#306

Post by mjwalshe »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #103
sharkweek wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matt Cutts seems to disagree about her work -- https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/224963111222910976

To be fair, Matt Cutts is incapable of ever not being nice.

True but you know Matt is anothger posibly trophy hire at soem stage he is acting way above his pay grade if my company asked me to represnt them to congress etc I would say "cool" but I want a board seat first :-)

Re: Google’s Marissa Mayer Tapped as Yahoo’s Chief

#307

Post by rehack »

johnnybgoode wrote: post #67

Wow, years later, even after her de facto demotion at Google, people still think she's some kind of product genius? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1028615 This is a hilarious situation.

Anybody read 'I'm feeling Lucky' by Douglas Edwards? He came across as a good judge of people to me, just based on my reading of the book. And he is not negative on many people in his book.

But he was critical of her, and there were lots of hints of bad blood between them in his book. Although he always remains very subtle in whatever he says.

Reading that comment, you share, reminded me of some sections of the book.

Re: Google’s Marissa Mayer Tapped as Yahoo’s Chief

#308

Post by jpadkins »

boyter wrote: post #200
petercooper wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bit borderline on being a 'tech' company by modern standards (though historically it's about as tech as it gets), General Electric under Jack Welch. He pulled off a Jobsian effort in the 80s. GE went from $27bn revenues to $130bn under his watch and a market cap of $14bn up to $410bn.

As I recall most of that was due to the US economy turning around and picking up defense contracts. I think it would be impossible to not make money in that situation.

I think there is a big difference between "impossible to not make money in that situation" and growing revenues by 100B under your leadership. A lot of companies in that era did not grow revenues by 100 billion dollars.

Re: Google’s Marissa Mayer Tapped as Yahoo’s Chief

#310

Post by yaix »

dspeyer wrote: post #250
reneherse wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google of the past was built on A/B. The new UIs are designed by a small, closed-eared team of graphic artists.

And that is very obvious in the UI, unfortunately.
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