Marissa Meyer, formerly of Google, is the next head on the CEO chopping block at Yahoo. This has inspired another round of “what should Yahoo do” posts, and I had to laugh at a few of the ones that Alexis Madrigal pulled out of his ass at the Atlantic:
Embrace its role as the preeminent media company of the Internet age
I guess you’re a preeminent media company when you outsource your search to Bing, your news division repackages AP news, you have a me-too Music and Movie offering, you acquire Flickr and don’t do shit with it, and you have pretty good fantasy sports and finance sections. Embrace that porcupine, Marissa!
Buy Twitter.
With what? Nobody wants Yahoo stock, and Yahoo’s entire bundle of cash is about $2 billion, far lower than the $7 billion that’s been thrown around as a Twitter valuation. Yahoo might be able to buy 4Chan if they started clipping coupons and moved to a lower rent district.
Actually come up with a new product.
Here’s the nut of the whole problem at Yahoo: they haven’t had a new product since I don’t know when. They’ve been milking their captive Mail/Finance/Sports audience for years and they kill everything they touch (Flickr being the best example, so I’ll repeat it). Naming a new CEO is not going to change that – you can’t just conjur up a “new product” in a culture that hasn’t produced for something like a decade. But as soon as some smart person gets put in charge of a known clusterfuck, the media pretends that this person will change everything by dint of their Galtian majesty. It’s a terrible habit that allows pundits to produce a reliable stream of “content” as Yahoo would call it, but it’s corrosive, because it is just more of the same lack of context and nuance that keeps us from understanding our world.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
Lets not forget that their comments section, especially under News, is a centimeter away from being fullblown Stormfront.
schrodinger's cat
There is no need for Yahoo to exist so it will die soon. Creative destruction.
Walker
Daaaaaaamn
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Walker:
But see, that’s horribly unfair.
4Chan is a lot more relevant and only marginally more offensive than Yahoo has been the last few years.
Scott S.
I think there’s a better chance that 4chan would be able to buy Yahoo…
Walker
On a more serious note.
Except there is one particular exception that proves the rule. Apple before and after Job’s return.
deep
Come to think of it, Yahoo! news comments and Goatse would go well together methinks.
Cermet
There you go again using facts to confuse people.
Nimm
Can’t argue with any of that, but I will always hold a soft spot for Yahoo, since it was probably the first really useful site on the net. Like, back in 1993 when there was no search bar at the top of the Mosaic browser. And unless you wanted to just blindly surf through links, Yahoo’s directory was the best resource to find stuff.
Now get off my lawn etc.
Mark B.
@Walker: Honestly, I don’t think that Apple’s product really was changed that much by Jobs, it’s just that having him improved the marketing soooo much. A lot of Apple customera are Jobs cultists. I own an iPhone, but I don’t have any illusions about it being a magical product, it’s just that Apple doesn’t overcomplicate things like Microsoft does and makes products that are relatively stable and easy to use.
Hawes
I go to Yahoo almost everyday to check fantasy teams and see what the Kardashians/TomKat/UFOs are up to.
Every once and awhile I dip into the toxic stew of their comment section.
It’s apparent that Yahoo has taken AOL’s place as the “go to” homepage for people over 65.
They should make Homer Simpson their CEO.
rlrr
I was going to suggest buying Altavista, but it turns out they already did that…
Norcross
@Mark B.: I’m pretty anti-Apple, but Jobs did save the company. Before he came back they had an aging, buggy OS and were letting companies like Motorola build machines with their name on it. He came back, shut most of that down, and brought over what he had been doing at NeXT, which was streamlined products and unmatched design. We all know how that story ended.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Fixed.
Yahoo doesn’t have the money to outdo Google in this area. Google is willing to try and fail a lot in order to come up with the next big thing.
Walker
@Mark B.:
Then you weren’t following Apple at the time. He killed the clones and immediately redesigned the product line on his return. The iMac was a radical change in their product line compared to what was shipping at the time.
But the real significance of his return was the “inverse buy-out” of NeXT. They did not just get him, they got an entire new group of senior staff as all of the NeXT people moved into senior positions.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Mark B.: The one thing I like about Jobs was his focus on UI. A lot of my programming is done on the UI side, and most people do not think think very hard about how other people will use their product. He did, and I think that really made the difference in why the iPod sold so well.
Palli
Whatever happened to the business model that says “Concentrate and do on thing better than any one else”?
Walker
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
The iPod sold so well because of iTunes. That is what the other MP3 makers did not understand for the longest time.
Dork
Yahoo is one of the best fantasy sites out there. Also, too, its free.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Walker: Except, as Jobs noted, 90+% of the music on people’s iPods did not come from iTunes. None of mine did.
NonyNony
@Walker:
THIS. This is what the myth of Steve Jobs being the lone Galtian Hero who swooped in and saved Apple misses.
Jobs was able to redefine Apple’s corporate culture because he brought NeXT’s corporate culture into Apple. Had Jobs been stuck dealing with the Apple corporate culture that kicked him out of the job in the first place he wouldn’t have been able to save the company.
Looking for messianic leaders does not work in any context. Not business and not political. It takes an entire infrastructure of support to get anything done in any organization of any size. Yahoo is going in the crapper now because the culture at Yahoo won’t let it do anything else. If you’re going to change the direction at Yahoo you need to do more than get rid of the person at the top.
El Cid
It might be just a prefix mixup: post-eminent.
ThresherK
I don’t pay attention to this stuff, largely. I mean, beyond the whole “How do any of these companies monetize use anyway?”
Is she decent at her job, or is she gonna Fiona* this up?
(*Crater this firm and then run for senate based on her bidness experience.)
Zach Pruckowski
Of course “Release a [successful and monetizable] new product” is a great way to turn around a company, but it’s the primary hard problem in the field. It requires years to grow and a lot of smart people to make it work, especially in an environment where Google or Microsoft or Facebook can probably duplicate your idea in 6 months.
Mark B – The move from OS 7/8/9 to OS X was a radical one, and entirely the doing of Jobs and NeXT. OS X quickly became a competitive OS (“user-friendly Unix” has been the goal since the 70s and OS X delivered) in a way that OS 9 simply wasn’t.
El Cid
@NonyNony:
Many people have been waiting around for the actual messiah to show up for, what, 2,000 and some years now? Still hasn’t worked.
Cassidy
If Yahoo starts to do well, Mitt retroactively takes credit. You saw it here first.
Michael J.
In the spirit of “what would the species like to learn from this situation,” perhaps the most interesting business experiment would be to fire all the MBA manager-types, promote the best engineers, and hire one-off hand-picked super-stars to head up large areas of focus. Essentially: fire the managers, go data-driven, get fresh product guys to re-deploy the assets and resources. What else is worth trying? Maybe super-focus: Drop everything except Mail/Finance/Sports, and become a super-charged monster in those three areas?
waynski
Completely OT but Pierce has a post this morning that I just felt I had to share.
jeffreyw
What the fuck is up with all the hatin’ on Flickr? It’s just like it was when I first moved in and I like it that way. Now alla you kids get the fuck offa my lawn.
Another Halocene Human
I thought Yahoo sucked since forever?
I mean, yeah, I used their directory back in the day, but then OpenDirectory came around.
I used their search after Altavista went down under the groaning, stinking, fly-buzzing weight of spam. Then one day their search stopped sucking so much. In small print it said “powered by Google”. So I went there. What a revelation. Just a blank page with a search field and an extra button that cheekily stated “I’m feeling lucky”. Like Altavista before everything went wrong and they tried to load 37 objects on the page before letting you search.
And yeah, there’s Yahoo finance. The forums there are crap but the data function is okay. (Google me-too’d, if anyone cares.)
Yahoo has Groups. (Actually email lists with a web interface.) Used to be on a lot of them. The software is absolutely horrible. I remember people defecting to Livejournal even when it was slow to load and had a … reputation. The kids these days are using Tumblr, I see.
WTF does Yahoo have to offer? Shitty code? Cutsy icons? Total contempt for the lUsers?
Roger Moore
@Scott S.:
Which leaves only the question of why anyone would want to.
polyorchnid octopunch
@rlrr: Back in the early nineties, Altavista was the place to search if you were looking for tech docs on computers.
scav
@Michael J.: Loud cheers in principle, except a total reliance on engineers taking over manager roles can be what sinks a lot of start-ups. As much as I hate the breed, there are some business management type skills that rocket-science and clever engineers don’t always have. We’ll probably need to keep a few of the suited lot, suitably (hack) deployed. But they damn well better listen to people with knowledge of content, context and the exact business involved. I say internally grown managers over MBA drop-bys.
Roger Moore
@Walker:
Jobs didn’t come by himself. He came with NeXT, which provided the underpinnings for OSX, which was an early key to the company’s turnaround.
pseudonymous in nc
@schrodinger’s cat:
There’s potentially a need for it to exist for the benefit of companies who want alternatives to the Google and Facebook behemoths — as John Gruber noted, Apple is increasingly inclined to avoid sending traffic to Google for certain kinds of discrete search data; Yahoo is already the system-level provider for weather and stocks in iOS, and will provide sports and other stuff in iOS 6.0.
It’s fairly clear that, at least for shouty tech observers, she needs to make an early call on Flickr, because it has a huge amount of symbolic value. (OTOH, all the people who have been requesting this don’t appear to have thought through the implications of her early adoption of Instagram.) A lot of the Brickhouse people who had their hearts broken by the Y! bureaucracy are now very happily working for smaller startups or as consultants, doing things that never got past the proof-of-concept stage at Y!, especially on the mobile side. But there’s no reason why Mayer can’t re-establish some kind of internal skunkworks and make sure that its work gets more rapidly escalated up the product hierarchy.
rlrr
@polyorchnid octopunch:
I remember those times…
Cassidy
People skills, the ability to go out in sunlight…
The Moar You Know
OK, since no one else has said it I will; she’s fucking hot.
Now that I’ve got that off my chest, the first and best thing she could do for that benighted shithole of a web portal she’s just signed on to run is to permanently turn off the comments.
Roger Moore
@NonyNony:
Which would be a more convincing counter-argument if NeXT hadn’t been his baby from day one. If you want to counter that it was the whole of NeXT that changed Apple, you’re already sold on the idea that a company is more than a reflection of its leader.
Amir Khalid
@ThresherK:
I think you mean Fiorina this up.
Roger Moore
@Michael J.:
I think you have the right general idea, but the wrong implementation. You don’t want to fire all the managers. Any organization the size of Yahoo needs a big administration to function effectively. What you want to do is to set up an organization where the administrators answer to the designers and engineers, not the other way around. As Fred Brooks would say, put the director in charge and have the producer answer to him.
Of course the same thing could be said of a lot of businesses in the US.
NonyNony
@Roger Moore:
I’m saying that if Jobs had come in by himself, then he would have failed. He would never have been able to “fix Apple” by himself. He was marginalized by the culture that existed there, which is how he lost his job in the first place.
What allowed him to succeed with his comeback was that he was able to to a “corporate culture transplant” on Apple by sticking his own people in at the top. That – combined with the fact that his people were good and not merely yes men to stroke Jobs’s enormous ego – allowed him to succeed.
To look to Jobs as some kind of lesson on how to turn a failing company around and not recognize that the NeXT portion was just as important as Jobs himself (if not more important, since with the NeXT portion I contend Jobs would have failed) is to wish on a star for a good set of lottery numbers instead of identifying what actually worked and why.
Mr Stagger Lee
If Google decided to create a sports media department, they should raid Yahoo, these guys have been top of their game. As a matter of fact maybe Sports Illustrated or ESPN ought to take a look at them, maybe their sports journalism may improve a bit.
seanindc
I’ll tell you what I like about this hire…it’s that they grab and know that she’s pregnant. As the husband of a (pregnant) female executive currently looking for gainful employment elsewhere, I can tell you that it is a huge factor for companies. Most companies figure “why hire a pregnant woman who is going to be off for a month and a half a couple months after she starts?”. So for them to choose her as the head of the company knowing that she will be out for a bit, is encouraging. Maybe companies are finally starting to see pregnancy as something other than a disability.
Jeffro
@The Moar You Know: I can’t believe that took 38 comments to get to, myself.
Roger Moore
@Mr Stagger Lee:
Maybe the right solution is to sell off the valuable parts of the company, shut down the rest, and give the money you make in the process as a final dividend to the stockholders. It would probably be the most sensible thing to do financially, even if it wouldn’t be the best thing for Yahoo management.
Cris (without an H)
@seanindc: Considering that a person can be CEO and sole owner of a company without having any involvement in it for three years (Glenn Kessler told me so), you’d think 3 months of parental leave wouldn’t be much of a problem.
Roger Moore
@Cris (without an H):
Sure, but he had male parts. Marissa Meyer has lady parts, which makes her judgment suspect. Taking off time to use those lady parts for their intended function just proves that she’s unfit to take a CEO job away from a more deserving man./wingnut
oogabooga
I was pissed when M$ didn’t buy this albatross for a gazillion dollars a year or two back or whenever that was.
As stupid as Balmer is he only got 99% there to the dumbest idea (buying Yahoo for 1000x their real value) since new coke.
Balmer has got to be one of the dumbest CEO’s of a multibillion dollar company in history.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@schrodinger’s cat:
SW BellAT&T uses Yahoo for their email, both for UVerse and for their traditional ISP accounts. I’ve wondered if that’s the only thing keeping them afloat.Michael J.
@scav: Yes, agree – for clarity: Didn’t mean to suggest engineers managing people/projects, just listen to them. Example: Yahoo Mail still no https, hence frequently hacked.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@deep:
Opinions and Arseholes. Together at last.
Bubblegum Tate
Yahoo even took down its iconic billboard in San Francisco. The end is nigh.
Martin
@Mark B.:
Uh, no.
Apple’s marketing changed fuckall in the first few years after Steve’s return. What changed Apple under Steve was the management and organization of the company. He cleaned house, tossed out most of the old execs, and changed the focus of the company 100% by noting that they were trying to do more things than they could afford, so he tossed out everything but the core components (after this process, Apple made a total of 4 products) and focused everything on those. It’s not the marketing that did it – yes, the marketing improved, but Apple was again making products worth being marketed. From there they focused almost exclusively on supply chain control and retail control and picked one new product segment to introduce. That was the first 4 years after his return, and at the end was the intro of the new product – the iPod, and the retail stores that would be instrumental in getting consumers interested in Apple again.
But, as for Yahoo, their best near-term bet is to be Apple’s sanctuary against Google. Yahoo offers a lot of what Google does, but has failed to be able to deliver many of their best assets. Apple can change that, and likely wants to change that. iOS can be a space where Yahoo has no competition from Google because Apple minimizes that competition from happening.
Martin
@NonyNony: I think you overstate the importance of NeXT with respect to their management. NeXT was technologically critical – and the technical talent that came along with that. But the three most important people at Apple after Steve were Ive, Cook, and Rubenstein. Ive was already at Apple but never allowed to really shine – Steve just needed to hand him the keys to the castle, cut his team down to a dozen people, and told everyone else to fuck off, he’s got this. Cook was recruited directly by Steve from Compaq. That had nothing to do with NeXT – but Apple had a role for Cook that NeXT didn’t have. And Rubenstein, Steve hired from one of the cloners PowerComputing after he shut down the cloners. Rubenstein was key to getting the iPod off the ground. The next key hire was Ron Johnson who Steve recruited from Target. Phil Shiller was already at Apple and Steve kept him on as well.
The most notable NeXT person was Avi Tevanian who oversaw the MacOS transition, who was indeed pretty critical, but hardly the sole reason for Apple’s success there. The NeXT guys led the technical teams, and almost entirely in the OS area. And the software was far from what turned Apple around – that wasn’t really realized until the iPhone in 2007 – though a hell of a lot of groundwork went into that.
I think NeXT was instrumental to Steve’s ability to turn Apple around because he learned a lot of failed lessons from it. I think the critical positive lessons for Steve came from Pixar. Pixar established that it was key to focus on one thing at a time – only one movie in the pipeline until they had the cash-flow to switch to one every two years. Pixar also established fully how key it was to control all of your assets. Apple today looks a LOT more like Pixar than NeXT in terms of how its run. I expect it’ll stay that way.
bmcchgo
I’ve had a Yahoo mail account since forever (20+ yrs), so I am reluctant to move. But the whole AP aggregate news with its rightward slant and the sheer ignorant, racist and bigoted comment posts make me wanna bail. Suggestions?
bmcchgo
I’ve had a Yahoo mail account since forever (20+ yrs), so I am reluctant to move. But the whole AP aggregate news with its rightward slant and the sheer ignorant, racist and bigoted comment posts make me wanna bail. Suggestions?
Martin
@bmcchgo: Hold onto it. Ignore that stuff for a while. See what develops. This is likely Yahoo’s final play here – they’re either going to pull this off and get on the right track, or vanish.
WereBear
Cripes, if Microsoft was all there were, ALL products would be overcomplicated, shaky, and hard to use.
The fact that any computer company made it to this point, with Microsoft dodging anti-trust (Thanks, Bush Administration!) and driving all competitors into bankruptcy, IS a form of magic.
Bill Gates is saving babies and stuff now, thanks to his wife, but he’s fine with battleships going in circles when their operating systems crash, just fine with it. His kids have to use Zune; they are probably the only kids on the planet who do.
SectarianSofa
flickr is supposed to be dead? I assume that means it’s making no money for Yahoo?
RareSanity
@Michael J.:
As an engineer, I can honestly say that doing something like this would be a disaster. Frankly, most engineers are terrible at sales and marketing.
I once held the opinion that engineers should run the company, and even worked at a company (Motorola), where for the most part, they did…I think we see how that turned out.
Here’s where I would say the happy medium is…there should always be a real-life, experienced engineer, as part of the executive management team. And I don’t mean an MBA, with a focus on “information technology” type. A real, in the trenches, actually capable of producing something, engineer.
One of the major reasons for tech companies getting into trouble, is the MBA types either think they can market their way out of everything, devalue what it is that the people that actually make stuff do, and what it means to the company, or get caught up making promises that the engineering team simply can’t keep. Or, in the parlance of the current engineering team I’m on calls it, “sellin’ shit we don’t make.”
The executive level engineer, will pose all of the questions, that get us labeled as “negative nellies”, “jerks”, “assholes”, or just general kill joys, before a stupid idea gets too far along.
A few years ago, I was telling my Dad (a retired engineer) about how in a meeting, the sales and marketing types were all excited about this new idea they had. I proceeded to leave several turds in the punch bowl, by pointing out that not only did some of the shit they were saying, violate the very laws of physics, but more specifically, it was not technically feasible given the engineering resources, and the expertise held by those resources.
His response, “Yeah, the sales and marketing types don’t like letting engineers into their meetings. We’re too prone to spontaneous outbursts of truth.”
The main problem is that the modern day “executive type”, has no respect for the discipline of engineering. They think that engineers are a dime a dozen, and what they do, “shouldn’t be all the hard”. It is more of the devaluing of the people that have skills other than being able to figure out 1,000 different ways to put lipstick on pigs, and then put those pigs in commercials.
Maude
Marissa Meyer is going to have a baby in October. Yahoo didn’t bat an eyelash.
I like Yahoo Classic Mail. They screwed up the weather and it’s hard to tell what the weather is going to be like.
The homepage is idiotic and infantile.
Yahoo needs to simplify. Everyone else is getting so overloaded on their pages.
burnspbesq
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
It’s tempting to conflate the iTunes Store and the iTunes software, but it’s fallacious. The ease of use and easily understandable organization of the software was key to acceptance of the iPod as the portable device of choice for people like you and me (I’ve bought more from HDTracks in the last two months than I’ve bought from the iTunes Store in its entire existence).
daverave
I’ve been on yahoo thru ATT for forever. I too like Classic Mail, their stock section and reading wingnut comments so I can haz lulz… or fear. Speaking as a serious amateur photographer, Flickr is a vast, vast wasteland… too big to be useful.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
I imagine that Yahoo! has been bleeding engineer talent for years now. Any Yahoo! engineer who hasn’t already defected to Google, Facebook or Twitter or the next cool startup probably isn’t the best talent out there. (Unless having Yahoo! on your resume is radioactive – I had a friend who couldn’t get hired for two years after working at Excite@home.)
On engineers running companies – OK idea when you’re on the bleeding edge of technology (like Intel or Google), but not when you’re either trying to play “fast follower” or trying to find your market niche, like Yahoo! is. The engineering method is hyper-reductionist, and most engineers have too narrow a focus to do well if the problem is wider than just a technological one. There’s plenty of failed companies built around a technological solution looking for a problem.
Our last engineer president was Herbert Hoover (Carter was sorta-kinda a nuclear engineer, but he didn’t have an engineering major). That didn’t work out well. Other not-exactly great engineer/politicians: Brezhnev, Yeltsin.
[The exception is China, where something like 7 out of 9 of the politburo members are engineers. Reason? Possibly because engineering was probably the safest subject to study during the Cultural Revolution, and that there’s been a lot of large engineering projects in China.]
Roger Moore
@Herbal Infusion Bagger:
I think it also works OK when you’re in a well established market where better products are largely going to be a result of improved engineering. My impression is that being run by a bunch of marketing and business types and ignoring their engineers is a huge part of what got Detroit into such big trouble. The Japanese companies came along with a much more engineering-centered approach, put out technically superior cars, and took over a big chunk of the market.
Of course you can swing too far in the opposite direction if the engineers refuse to listen to the marketers and accountants. You’ll wind up with technically marvelous products that nobody wants or are too expensive for the mass market.
Thatgaljill
As someone who lives within walking distance of Yahoo! HQ …
While it’s pronounced Meyer, could we please give the woman the courtesy of spelling her name, Mayer, correctly?
Does she have a tough job ahead of her? Absolutely. Don’t underestimate her, if she gets support from the board, she’s going to blow the doors off the place.
Let’s give her a week before we string her up for the errors in strategy of Yahoo’s previous 5 CEOs, m’kay?
JoeShabadoo
@Roger Moore: That isn’t what got detroitin troubleat all.
Detroit got in trouble because thevalues of the business were very different and the high endmost profitable market for them had different values than the the japanese cars that attackedfrom below in the smaller markets.
The Innovators Dillema is an excellent book that explains how businesses are ‘disrupted.’ The word has become popular recently but is used incorrectly 90% of the time.
The book also explains why transplanting ceos doesnt work and how what they try will fail.