311–320 of 366 posts
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I'll take the other side of that bet. Yahoo has nothing Google needs, and won't within 3 years, even with Mayer reforming it. There's also a cost to acquisition beyond just the monetary - organizational and cultural namely. Not worth it for Google.
Yahoo has nothing Google needs Flickr+Picasa=I might actually use Google products in a social way.
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> "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…
You do know there's a world of business outside the Valley, right? I'm not implying that she wouldn't be a good fit and very capable at many jobs or positions. But Yahoo!'s days are becoming numbered. When I think about what she could have possibly experienced at Google versus what Yahoo! needs as a company (which is a corporate and strategic overhaul), I can't understand where she'd have obtained anything remotely like "turn-around" expertise. Yahoo! is going to require some outside-the-box thinking, and this hiring is about as inside-the-box as it could be (along with every other name you mentioned would have been).
But this is just one man's opinion. I hope she can pull it off; it'd be a great story.
>"You can't just stick a "turnaround expert" in the shoes of Yahoo CEO and expect a great result. You need someone that understands the space"
Why can't you? What exactly is Yahoo!'s "space"? Of all the poor decisions made by Yahoo! of late, why do you trust that this was suddenly a stroke of genius?
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"the risk for her is just stunning" What risk? She's already achieved complete financial security from here time at Google. At Yahoo! she'll be taking the reins of a company that still attracts a massive userbase but is aching for someone with a fresh viewpoint on how to transform the company. Nothing buy potential IMO.
"someone with a fresh viewpoint on how to transform the company" Prior to joining google in 1999 as employee number 20 "Mayer worked at the UBS research lab (Ubilab) in Zurich, Switzerland, and at SRI International in Menlo Park, California" (wikipedia) for what appears to be only a few years. (She graduated high school in 1993, received a B.S. and and M.S. which must have taken at least 4 or 5 years afaik). My guess…
I've had the opportunity to work with people who were very good at personal public relations, and based on that experience, I'm skeptical. Constantly selling your public image means that you can't be wrong, which always results in revisionist history and oddball situations.
Hopefully I'm wrong -- Yahoo needs help, and she does have a good story.
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Yahoo has some good niche products that are doing relatively well compared to the rest of the company (fantasy sports is one, Flickr is another). To survive they probably need to do more of those and figure out how to specialize and monetize the products that aren't stagnating.
Yep. I only go there for Flickr and March Madness. Flickr could use some innovation, but it does its core mission well enough. March Madness is a simple task done well. Used to be on a couple of private mailing lists through their groups, but those have both moved to private google groups over the years. You know what I'd honestly like to see them do? Compete with Google, head on. I think search and ads are both stag…
I thought Yahoo! was a dying brand, why would anyone want to leave Google of all places for them at this point?
Yahoo needs to be saved. Challenging.
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I'm not talking about money or reputation. The risk I see is time and opportunity. She could spend a maddening four years not moving the needle at Yahoo rather than another company or a startup of her own. Four years of punishing travel, endless meetings, unending Wall Street scrutiny. That risk.
Did you seriously just compare the CEO position at Yahoo to a _start-up_? To think the two are even in the same zip code, much less the same ballpark, is just, well it reflects a rather isolated viewpoint, put it that way. Yahoo is a $19B corporation.
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I'll take the other side of that bet. Yahoo has nothing Google needs, and won't within 3 years, even with Mayer reforming it. There's also a cost to acquisition beyond just the monetary - organizational and cultural namely. Not worth it for Google.
Yahoo has nothing Google needs Flickr+Picasa=I might actually use Google products in a social way.
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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…
Well, only the Lamborghini is a luxury car(unless you consider all cars a luxury but that would be a different discussion). Otherwise, I fully agree with your point. I like cars and had no clue what, exactly, the Pontiac Fiero or the Chevy 350 were as I'm not American and those are American cars. Around here German(Mercedes, BMW, Audi, VW) and Japanese(Mazda, Subary, Toyota, ...) cars are much much more common.
Chevy 350: Basically a commodity engine. 5.7L pushrod V-8. Used in lots of GM vehicles from the late 60s through the early 90s. Camaros, Corvettes, Cadiallacs etc. Built tough, cheap, and there are a gazillion aftermarket parts available.