Mayer will be walking away with a $158M golden parachute[0], and will undoubtedly have another nice executive position lined up in no time.
It's amazing how much respect she's garnered in the tech community. From all the public info on her, she doesn't seem to have much product vision - rather, she's just a manager who's good at making data-driven decisions (the infamous "41 shades of blue"[1]) to incrementally optimize products that already have their flywheels spinning, and got insanely lucky by betting on the right horse back in 1999.
I agree and disagree with your point. It's incredibly hard to determine how much good a new CEO has done, and how much is inertia. I think that's a strong argument against the incredibly high CEO pay in contemporary companies, it dramatically underestimates the importance of the work of the rank and file.
That being said, if you ARE going to judge her by contemporary CEO standards, the question is, would anyone else have done better? And of the set of people who could have done better, how many would take an offer to fix yahoo contingent on performance? I think the answer is probably zero.
The whole system is rigged, companies feel like they have to pick someone out of a relatively narrow talent pool, and since they are (wrongly) in such demand, they can all command extremely high salaries.
If no one could have gotten better results, I can think of many capable people who could have gotten similar results for a lot cheap. Yahoo! is almost paying MM $400 million and the $110 million exec who stayed about 11 months she fired. For all the Meritocracy talk about general foot soldiers, the SV execs seem to get a lot of "Participation Trophies".
Steve Jobs took no pay at all for years. If he had played hardball with the board, he could've become the richest man in the world. Tim Cook is not doing it for the money either.
But would the have take such a high risk job? its noticeable that risky senior jobs have more Women and BME in post - as under represented groups they feel that they have to take more risks to break thorough the glass ceiling.
I don't know if you are trolling, but it is high risk because yahoo is a company that is incredibly difficult to turn around. Meanwhile, Apple is already very successful, so you "just" need to keep it moving.
It is not high risk in the sense that you might go broke working as the ceo.
On the contrary he had huge shoes to fill, expectations to match and momentum to carry. Success is not an accident. You can always lose momentum, you can always make the wrong decisions, you can always fail, especially in a company as keenly watched as Apple, holding on to leadership in categories it created, with the pressure of innovation in a hyper competitive industry. Look at Nokia.
> That being said, if you ARE going to judge her by contemporary CEO standards, the question is, would anyone else have done better?
The first mistake the Yahoo board made was to decide that product innovation would save them. In reality, they should've brought in an ex-consultant or ex-banker who could chop off pieces of the business and sell them to the highest bidder (essentially, what's going to happen now).
The second mistake they made was that they decided the right person to execute on a product strategy was Marissa Mayer, when in reality that isn't her strong suit.
The biggest mistake was to shutdown their own search engine, and pay for Bing search results. And their Ads-deal with MSFT wasn't that long-term successful. Yahoo had the biggest Hadoop cluster back in 2009, the were at the forefront of big data and contributed to many open source projects. Then everything went downhill.
Now Yahoo has what? Flickr, Tumblr, Mail, ...? Right, they own a stack of Alibaba (China), and now close or sell everything else. Sad, hopefully Flickr, Tumblr and some other good services survive.
CNBC infiltrated everything financial, esp. since Fox Business came into existence. Nightly Business Report and Yahoo! finance, used to have separate coverage, but now NBR is pretty much CNBC and Yahoo! has pretty heavy CNBC presence. But still Yahoo! finance is the only Yahoo portal that has some semblance of quality. I want to like Yahoo! Tech esp. with Pogue in the ranks, but the UI of Yahoo! tech is a bit cluttered to me. Yahoo! sports, MM's refresh killed that thing.
You've got a bunch of, not quite AOL-level users, but they're 45-65 and set in their ways. That means the XP and IE6. OK, not quite that bad, but close.
What they should have done was upgrade the tech - sure, use real frameworks. But the full-on AJAX UI "upgrade" was never perceived as an upgrade. Let's look into why:
Problem #1: The highest-ranking feature request since the day it went live has been "to make ignore mean ignore."
Old behavior: I ignore userXXX, I never see anything.
Current behavior: I ignore userXXX, I see exactly the same screen space for a post from userXXX, but it's greyed out. I still have to scroll by it. If I have two trolls arguing with each other or flooding the board with spam, all the content is pushed out of visibility at a rate of 20 posts per page click. The vertical page consists of 80% navigation elements and "Post hidden because you ignored this user."
#2 feature request has been to deal with the spam problem. Now that I can no longer effectively ignore users, I have userXXX1234 spamming for PennyStocksWeekly and in the unlikely event that the spammer's account is terminated, I then have userXXX1235 signing up and spamming about "Penny Stock 101 org" or "Ultimate Stock Alerts."
So Yahoo's filtered out URLs but it has yet to implement even the most trivial Bayesian filtering against these spammers. The exact same text strings are used - but because there's only a URL filter and no Bayesian filtering for obvious spam indicators, there is effectively no spam filtering on the message boards. https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/207809-finance-gs/categor... demonstrates the presence of long-term spammers on every board.
And these spammers - see Problem #1 - cannot be ignored; users can ignore the words they use, but must still scroll past the large AJAX/mobile-friendly UI around the string "Post hidden because you ignored this user,"
Old Ignore Infrastructure Fail: There (prior to the big redesign) used to be a silent 1000-user limit (500? I forget what the number was) to the length of the ignore list. When the cap was hit, the user's account was effectively useless, unless the user wanted to manually (!) un-ignore a hundred spammer accounts in order to free up space on this list.
Current Infrastructure Fail: Ignore or message rating or abuse-reporting just doesn't work. First off, the results for https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/207809-finance-gs/categor... continue to demonstrate the abuse reporting (and upvote/downvote) mechanism does not work consistently. This has been the case for years.
A once-dedicated core of high-value eyeballs has been driven away from the site. Most of them wound up at InvestorHub - http://investorshub.advfn.com/ has a site design straight out of the 90s. To these eyeballs, that was a feature, not a bug. Limits on account creation and posting quantity mostly solved the spam problem. They didn't want to leave; most left only because they realized their feedback to Yahoo was being ignored.
tl;dr: Classic Agilista Fail mechanism. (edit: I apologize to people who are actually being agile, rather than Doing Agile(TM))) The finance message board teams got one or two sprints to make a new UI. They succeeded. The feedback was sufficiently negative and the unresolved issues large (i.e., making the ignore functionality work without breaking some underlying design assumption. Implementing a working spam filter, not just a simple URL filter. Moderators to deal with abuse reports) that they couldn't be done in one sprint.
Yahoo has delivered some great tech APIs and products. YUI, Pipes, Grids, a lot of the big data projects now at Apache, etc.
I have such respect for the dev teams that put out these products. Similar to a lot of companies with great engineering, it's such a shame that all their great work wasn't able to be better leveraged due to the short-sighted MBA culture that can't see past next quarter's stock price and bonus.
> The first mistake the Yahoo board made was to decide that product innovation would save them.
If they had given some proper direction to their innovation, perhaps that could have saved them. One stupid decision they made back in 2006 was to shutdown geo-cities. The data hype hadn't even begun at that time and with some vision they could have turned geo-cities into a thing similar to what cloud-hosted services like aws are doing today.
Again, yui and yii were (and to some extent still are) great frameworks created by Yahoo. They should have tried to capitalize on that front, maybe offered paid support or created CMSs on top of them like eCommerce and/or web-based CRM systems. I know there is competition in this field, but a high quality web-based product coming from Yahoo Inc. would have been very well-received by the industry.
I think the brand and portal "product" could have been saved, but I agree the brand and portal could not save the current corporate entity.
The brand and portal is a much smaller company than Yahoo of today and probably the current spin off should have been the original model along with some very heavy layoffs.
My thoughts on saving the portal product, personally were always
- Buy tumblr for ad sales potential
- Buy digg.com and some smaller facebook page style properties to drive traffic and seo to news
- Buy inside.com and essentially make that yahoo news.
- Produce high quality streaming video news content, particularly finance.
- Buy libsyn or podbay. With existing ad data yahoo could do targeted in-audio ads for streaming and download.
- Double down on fantasy sports as a driver of daily visits.
- Rebuild mail. Use it as a daily visits driver / cross promotion opportunity with minimal or no ads.
- Spin flickr off to employees or sell it.
Hmm, I would think salary would be one of the smaller considerations when choosing a CEO at that level. It's generally going to be a drop in the budget compared to annual revenue. A negotiation point for sure, but more of a side show to other concerns.
Then it's even less important. When you need Superman to save the world, you don't quibble over his price. Okay, maybe a little, but everybody's a professional here.
Just because a company is worth billions doesn't mean they are willing to throw away millions. There are still lawyers out there looking to bring derivative actions.
The corporate boards members tend to be CEOs of other companies so they have a tendency to give each other raises because it is in their best interest.
It was explained to me this way: in the US executive boards are unevenly weighted toward CO interests. In countries where wage experts and workers are more likely to sit on boards the ratio isn't absurd because boards are less likely to vote for higher executive wages (Japan and Europe have reasonable CEO wages).
In Japan at least a large fraction of the compensation comes in non-monetary "perks". Ex: Company car, use of company plane, etc. Similar things happen in Europe.
Though I'm sure it isn't as insane as it is in the US.
She was also an outstanding student at Stanford and one of the first employees at google, which might have also helped. And this isn't hearsay but a well established fact.
She's clearly unusually talented as a developer, a researcher, and a teacher.
Unfortunately those aren't the skills needed to be a good CEO. It takes a certain kind of political and strategic insight, and she doesn't seem to have an unusual amount of that.
To be fair not many people, including many other CEOs, do. But it's easier to hide that when you're running a sort-of ok corp.
It's hard to hide it when you're in charge of a patchwork of milliproducts, some of which are strong on their own, but which together are worth less than the sum of their parts - and you need a plan, and can't think of good one.
> she doesn't seem to have much product vision - rather, she's just a manager who's good at making data-driven decisions (the infamous "41 shades of blue"[1]) to incrementally optimize products that already have their flywheels spinning
I could easily imagine that putting someone in the top 20% of managers.
I don't want to hijack by focusing on your second footnote, but:
> I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that.
Can any designers explain why it's unreasonable to provide data for a decision when you operate at Google's scale, and presumably can come up with that data very quickly?
It's one thing to override design based on data, and that's something that can be argued on its merits. But when the design answer is "one of these three," why not run the experiment and pick the best?
Yeah, all the "wealth creators" at the top will do fine. It's only the people who did the work and made the stuff who will be laid off. Their fault for not cultivating the right connections.
I'm surprised by the support you're getting, because the HN hivemind fully supports it when founders exit with 50-10000x what rank and file gets. I wonder if HN doesn't see a problem with founders because they all hope to be a billionaire founder themselves one day, but they don't personally relate to hired or big-company CEOs.
I think HN has grown large enough that there appears to be several competing hiveminds. I remember once commenting about people using their free time to contribute to open source and a ton of people sarcastically asked where they could find it. Then on another thread the next day, I saw ton of people extolling the benefits of contributing to open source in your free time. HN's all grown up to have multiple personalities.
> I'm surprised by the support you're getting, because the HN hivemind fully supports it when founders exit with 50-10000x what rank and file gets.
The HN Hivemind that I've witnessed as of the last 18 months or so is decidedly supportive of founders giving up much much more equity to employees, owing to ease of fundraising and low capital startup costs, combining to derisk the once very personally risky endeavor of starting a company.
In that sense the hivemind currently loosely follows the words of Sam Altman who is the present overmind of YC, so it is rather apt.
Except when a startup founder fails at their job the company is usually shut down or the acquihire leaves them with a small payout. When a startup makes it big, many of the rank and file have large payouts as well.
American CEOs get paid obscenely cartoonishly evil amounts of money for running companies into the ground. Even when the company does really well and they get massive stock grants, the rank and file get nothing.
The founders are given the benefit of the doubt for actually having put in some hard work for little reward back when the success of the business was unclear.
As you say, anyone can found a business. Getting hired as a CEO is entirely to do with contacts; it's not usually a job that's advertised and you can apply for.
It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade
Dug the mines and built the workshops - endless miles of railroad laid
Now we stand, outcast and starving, 'mid the wonders we have made
But the union makes us strong
If you could create jobs and had the right motivation and ability to do so, you wouldn't be filling a job.
Haha...
I'm happy you believe this. No sarcasm; it just made me wish that I still did.
In this world, merit is judged by more than ability. Motive, if not aimed perfectly, is a burden that will decrease your chances, not increase them.
Background is so important. My family was totally broken, like one hundred percent shattered. There is no chance I'll be a job creator, no matter how driven.
Why can't I meet the right people? Because of what I say when given an initial opportunity. And why am I not able to say the right things? Because of the background and context I grew up in.
And I'm not talking about appealing to some rich person and asking for an opportunity. I'm talking about meeting peers, or building a team, or any of the things that really matter.
One could argue that this situation is mutable, and that it's mostly my fault for what I say. Obviously, yes, it's my fault for the things I say.
But when your whole life has been spent being trained in a certain way, by being in the river of society that pushes us all along, the slipstream that you end up in as a child pretty much makes or breaks your ability to learn how to do anything close to what you're suggesting. To play that game you mention.
Enjoy being a job creator. It's an opportunity that you should make the most of, in the stead of all the people who can't.
There is no chance I'll be a job creator, no matter how driven.
If you're a software developer, at least you could be a job creator for yourself. And perhaps for many developers this is more enjoyable than managing other people, since most job creators are more busy managing or finding customers than actually creating fun stuff like software.
Can totally understand where you're coming from, but finding and recognizing your agency amidst all the mess and noise is kinda the beautiful thing about life.
The journey sucks a lot, but at the end of the day that's all we got, not the different destinations we traverse to and from.
It's totally survivor bias for sure, but falling into (and surviving) years of depression and coming from third world conditions to the US help shape and contextualize a lot of meaning. It's easy because the path now is plated gold, and for sure, some people their entire path is broken. :/
But when it's broken you think about just walking and not smelling any of the shit... Just left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot...
Anything I can do for you you know where to find me. And please do keep caring, don't worry about 'social errors'. And note my change of email address (jacques@mattheij.com).
Resonance. I can see / understand this. I hope to not limit serendipity though, and the same for your case too. In the end, it's all a chasing of the wind.
There are many counter examples to your anecdote. Larry Ellison comes to mind, but there are others (in fact, most of our most successful people come from very broken backgrounds).
It's what you do with that drive/anger/passion/frustration/motivation/defiance that counts.
It takes a lot of risk, and guts to strike out and create jobs - and more often than not it doesn't work out... but that's all part of the game.
It's one thing to be really good at what you do... to even be the best. It's another thing entirely to convince other really good and sometimes the best people to work for you, your company, and your ideas.
Correlation: Look up Sam's comments about his parents. Think of pg's background. Of the successful people from broken backgrounds, they were usually successful by moving on to affluent universities where they recovered.
It's one thing to be really good at what you do... to even be the best. It's another thing entirely to convince other really good and sometimes the best people to work for you, your company, and your ideas.
This is in fact the central argument of my original comment: Merit is mostly communication, and your ability to communicate is defined by the context you grow up in. Not in spite of it.
When the world shapes you, reshaping yourself is not the only thing that matters. Your old mistakes can brand you for life.
Your ability to communicate is actually quite exceptional. Whatever has led you to lose faith in yourself, I assure you it should not be because you fear you lack intrinsic merit.
Thank you. I have far less hope than it seems, due to something recent that closed some doors forever. But you made me feel a bit better, if only for a fleeting moment.
The 'broken background' anecdote sounds nice, but the majority (>50%) of the forbes 400 these days comes from upper middle class backgrounds. These kids are the majority at elite schools which are feeders for the best career opportunities.
Another person that is a counter-example and outlier: Franklin Story Musgrave.
A modern-day polymath, he was a NASA astronaut, Disney Imagineer, and physician among other things. He holds six academic degrees.
He, too, had an extremely troubled upbringing.[1]
In his own words, "I came from an extraordinarily dysfunctional family, full of abuse and alcoholism. And eventually everyone within the family had committed suicide."
You are just like more to drown in self pity then do something for yourself. It's much more convenient. Much easier. I grew up same as you. Probably much worse. Hard work, perseverance and a lot of reflection helped me overcome the shortcomings you deem insurmountable.
Fuck off. You don't know anything about me or the horrors I grew up with, how hard I've worked, or a single thing about me. You and your kind are why it's so hard to go through life. You can't relate because you were not so unlucky.
This is the first and last time I have ever spoken to an HN member like this, and I say that not out of pretense, but to illustrate both the gravity and the finality of my background that no one will believe.
I sincerely hope it was all a fluke, and that I was really the only one in the world to go through all of that. It's not even worth trying to understand.
I'm glad you were able to have a happy life. Please enjoy it, and hug whoever makes it all worthwhile.
Or perhaps you shouldn't be so arrogant and dismiss everyone else's problems so readily. "I have suffered infinitely more than you could ever comprehend". Vanity is definitely Devil's favorite sin, and it lurks in the strangest of places.
I didn't say you didn't go through harsh things. I apologize if that's how it felt. I'd probably have reacted the same way; sorry. I'm glad you got through it, honestly.
The world can make you feel so worn. There's sometimes just no chance left.
> You're either the job creator or the job filler.
That's a very simplistic view. Doing the work and making the stuff also create jobs. How many right here have jobs because developers - not execs, not investors - created the technology we use? Yes, even at Yahoo. Like Hadoop. The idea that the people who contribute money create jobs and the people who contribute labor (in our case via code) don't is utterly, obviously, dangerously wrong. It's self-serving claptrap from those who have no ability to participate in acts of creation instead of arbitrage. No hacker for which this site is named should accept it.
I remember seeing a 1970s video from the Soviet Union about a piece of software some soviet scientists developed that could automatically retouch and restore photographs. Like at Adobe Photoshop CC level.
What impact did it have? Zero. Because some technocrat apparatchik decided it wasn't worth it developing and promoting the thing further.
One can have insane ability to create things, but it will be ultimately futile, if the things created can't sustainably reach consumers.
One can have the ability to play middleman, but it will be ultimately futile, if there's nothing to play middleman for. Getting things to consumers first requires that there be a thing, which requires a creative act. Investors and executives can certainly help to facilitate those creative acts, but why should that give them first claim to 99% of the proceeds? It's certainly not a risk premium when those people glide away while the creators get screwed. It's pure rent, in the economics sense.
> Please explain to me which one of those labels best applies to the executive team at Yahoo
Clearly the former. In 2012 Yahoo had 11,700 employees, and by 2014 they had 12,500 employees.[1] The 10% layoff is going to be around the difference there (so net zero), but I don't think any reasonable person could argue not cutting jobs in this situation would result in a net gain for Yahoo.
It's a company in trouble, and it's a reasonable course of action.
Yahoo needs to kill off half of their products and just focus on four things:
* news (finance & sports)
* Search & Portal (that's where they make $$$)
* YMail (because there are still millions of users)
* fantasy sports and extend it.
Spin off Tumblr and Flickr into a startup focus on content and high-quality photo source (TBH there is very little quality content on Tumblr and the attraction / hype is gone - speaking from user after five years of using Tumblr), and other applications should be killed, including their article reading mobile app, Developer network, and the newly resurrected Y! Messenger.
BTW, Yahoo is one of the most generous companies out there paying security bounty (good and bad for too many submissions :] )
Fastest doesn't mean actually making tons of money. Sure vaulation on # of user, but a business can't live forever with # of users. How many of these users are making original contents? I keep seeing posts from years ago getting liked over and over by the people I follow on Tumblr.
A fellow had just been hired as the new CEO of a large high tech corporation. The CEO who was stepping down met with him privately and presented him with three numbered envelopes. "Open these if you run up against a problem you don't think you can solve," he said.
Well, things went along pretty smoothly, but six months later, sales took a downturn and he was really catching a lot of heat. About at his wit's end, he remembered the envelopes. He went to his drawer and took out the first envelope. The message read, "Blame your predecessor."
The new CEO called a press conference and tactfully laid the blame at the feet of the previous CEO. Satisfied with his comments, the press -- and Wall Street - responded positively, sales began to pick up and the problem was soon behind him.
About a year later, the company was again experiencing a slight dip in sales, combined with serious product problems. Having learned from his previous experience, the CEO quickly opened the second envelope. The message read, "Reorganize." This he did, and the company quickly rebounded.
After several consecutive profitable quarters, the company once again fell on difficult times. The CEO went to his office, closed the door and opened the third envelope.
Why? It's a network of Web sites with fairly generic functionality, like a content publishing system (frontpage, news, sports, tech, health), a search engine querying Bing API, Web-based email and a few other projects.
If you were building such a project from scratch, would you just not get anything off the ground without hiring 12,500 full-timers first? Most likely you would.
There are several structural inefficiencies to Yahoo!, most of them rely on 1990 processes in areas such as ad sales (which are still strongly salespeople-driven, try to buy a premium ad with your credit card, for example), low investment in automation and tooling, low amount of shared code across the Web properties (no common UI element library, for example, just guidelines), and structure that lends itself to hiring as many product managers as possible to coordinate all those inefficiencies across various products.
I've been preparing to try to make an offer for Flickr in the event it goes up for sale (separate from the rest of the web business), organizing it as a benefit corp to be a long term business not to be put up for sale. It shouldn't be an Instagram. Its not a social network. Its a photo site that helps you organize/keep your photos, as well as share them (there's a difference).
I don't plan on making it profitable. I plan on just making it break even. It was previously profitable for Yahoo on Pro accounts alone (disclaimer: I am a pro account holder).
Indeed. It's the job of a good regulatory environment to make the two coincide as much as possible. (Including a tax system that internalizes externalities. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax)
I wonder if 10% is enough of a cut to make the business viable again, or if this is just pandering to the market. Seems likely that someone picked this number out of the air to make a statement.
investors who bought YHOO just to wait the Ali baba sale would love the company cut 500mi/year over year in salaries (or disinvest on products?) so when the dismantling finally comes the pie slices are bigger.
Been a yahoo mail premium member for so many years (along with its calendar) it's something I care daily. From about 2 years ago the new mail became a hit or miss randomly, overall a much worse experience than what I used to have, and I am unhappy about that.
To me since Mayer came to power, yahoo email became less reliable, a big negative.
I have accounts on the 3 main providers Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail. Which gives me the most trouble? Yahoo Mail.
When Mayer became CEO she told employees to start using Yahoo Mail. I wonder how many are actually doing so. I would think if they were actually using it the product would now have less glitches.
That was likely part of a carefully planned PR move. Microsoft was in a position to be able to weather a massive layoff, especially if it was spun as reducing duplication after picking up a new division. Nokia, on the other hand, would have looked far worse selling off half the company after a huge layoff.
Nokia, in many ways, was the pioneer of SaaS. They developed a globally recognized product that would become both the iconic application associated with early cellphone applications and paved the way for a globally distributed market for mobile gaming.
However, as time went on while using the product, it became increasingly difficult to find room to move horizontally as well as vertically within the space. Ultimately, continually completing objectives made it more difficult to pivot.
Inevitably, their SaaS product became frustrating and deprecated and the marginal utility diminished. With a lack of new offerings Nokia was forced out of the market it created (Snake as a Service) and we were forced to go back to playing the helicopter game on the bewest RIM blackberry.
I never saw them involved in the service business at all, to me they were a hardware company and nothing else. That's how I look at my phone (and computers too), as pieces of hardware not tied to any particular service or eco-system unless I decide they should be. I don't buy subsidized phones with a 'plan' and what software comes with the computer I buy is wiped out before it even gets run once.
I've thought for some time that Yahoo! should have moved into the streaming video business, including emulating Netflix and producing original content on a subscription basis. In the very least it would have been a way to lure people to their website and get them to spend a lot more time within/adjacent to the Yahoo! ecosystem.
Come to think of it, I'm not even sure if Yahoo! has ever done anything video related. I wonder why?
10% for Yahoo, given the current suite of products is low. for long time yahoo hasn't streamlined their product offerings. Just streamlining them alone will help them become more leaner. as far as CEO is concerned, yes, she is very much covered.
They could have been serious contender in semantic search. I remember trying to reach out to some yahoos regarding an ambitious, yet serious proposal on semantic search using ThatNeedle.com. we could have made an impact. I could not get to the right audience even for a demo or a proposal. I guess they have too many silos built on top of an ivory tower.
Nonetheless, it would be sad to see them fade away.
You mean you tried to peddle your startup (for acquisition likely) to them and you couldn't get your foot in the door? And that could have made them a "contender"? Please
A society that has no saftey net except for the lucky and rather dumb 1%ers is one that will fall apart, sooner or later. Or experience radical disruption.
