Marissa Mayer Shuffles Yahoo Leadership Team

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/10/marissa-mayer-shuffles-yahoo-leadership-team/?_r=0

by lando2319 • 11 years ago

68 80 11 years ago

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

staunch2• 11 years ago

Apple was saved through the creation of a series of world-changing products. Yahoo doesn't even seem to have creating breakthrough products as a goal. They have no excuse for not making something people want.

yeukhon• 11 years ago

I think Yahoo is simply too quiet. To be honest the only thing that keeps popping up these couple years about Yahoo were

* email

* Fantasy Sport

* Flickr

* Yahoo Finance

* Mayer

* Tumblr

* Alibaba sale

The first four have existed for years. I bet a lot of Tumblr users don't even know Yahoo owns Tumblr now. Yahoo search is probably getting more notice given now Yahoo search is Firefox's default search engine (at least that's the case in North America).

Yahoo has some great ideas like the Digest app and doing some great mobile and streaming products, but I don't use them, and I don't always hear my coworkers and my friends talking about Yahoo (well except my friends who are working for them, but they are still pretty quiet about what they are working on).

Maybe their Yahoo Original series will catch on some fire.

kleer0012• 11 years ago

I liked Yahoo pipes, but they're super limited compared to IFTTT

mlvljr• 11 years ago

And Community Season 6!

stickfigure• 11 years ago

To confirm your point - my blog has been on Tumblr for years and I just now discovered the Yahoo connection by reading this article.

tobylane• 11 years ago

Yahoo has services not products, with invisible and constant improvements. Not comparable.

staunch2• 11 years ago

Google used to be a simple search service.

sjg007• 11 years ago

Ahh but what do people want?

rdtsc• 11 years ago

Is there a good track record of Yahoo-sized companies that got back on top of their industry by shuffling executives around? Seems like more often than not failing companies are always characterized by lot of shuffling in an attempt to "do something" and in the end stay the same or get worse.

Natsu• 11 years ago

Something about deck chairs on the Titanic comes to mind. To be fair, there wasn't much there when she joined and I don't honestly expect anyone to make Yahoo relevant again.

AnkhMorporkian• 11 years ago

I'm not sure that's the specific goal of this move. It's very doubtful any company has suddenly reversed their market position by switching two executives' positions. However, it's likely this move is more intended to send a message to the other executives that whatever their position, even the leader of Tumblr, that maintaining a narrow market for a platform is unacceptable. I doubt Marissa thinks that the switch will actually expand Tumblr's market share, but that it's a future-looking move that will encourage other execs to engage a broad audience.

I don't know how effective it will be, but I'd bet dollars to dimes that's the motivation.

jaredsohn• 11 years ago

Isn't it really hard for Yahoo-sized companies to get back on top of their industry in general? A list of such companies and theories as to how they managed to recover would be interesting.

venomsnake• 11 years ago

Apple, IBM ... and in a few years we will see what will become of Dell. That is all I can think of ...

MicroBerto• 11 years ago

I think the whole point is that this Khalaf gentleman is a total rock star and gets/deserves more power.

gajeam• 11 years ago

It's true. He did a great job at Yahoo's mobile developer conference this year.

volaski• 11 years ago

Apple

pcunite• 11 years ago

Give her time. She did not start with a lot in my opinion.

rgbrenner4• 11 years ago

I agree... but it has been 3 years since she took over. At some point people are going to want to see actual results. And so far Yahoo has gone from $5b in revenue in 2012 to $4.68b (2013) to $4.62b last year. (Even by quarter: Q4-2014 is 10m in revenue less than Q4-2013... and net profit dropped by more than half)

I understand there's a lot to fix at Yahoo.. but how much more time is she really going to have without posting real results?

Edit: link: https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:YHOO&fstype=ii

shawndumas6• 11 years ago

She should have as long as Yahoo is in the black. It's appetant stockholders greedy for short term gain that are screaming to lay-off gainfully employed people. People that are producing real and substantial profit quarter after quarter.

She should pull a Dell and drop the pack of vultures hoping for a takeover. Then she could continue to do the awesome surgery to rid Yahoo of its cancer.

shawndumas6• 11 years ago

I agree; and that's coming from someone that just resigned from Yahoo. Here is an excerpt from my resignation post:

The transformation that I’ve experienced over the last two years of being in Sunnyvale has been inspiring. There is a palatable sense that we are on the verge of a momentous turnabout. No internet company of that size has ever lost monthly active users in those numbers without nose-diving into oblivion. I am rooting for Yahoo; a turnaround would be glorious. In the minds of the employees that I’ve spoken to, given the time needed, it is an all but forgone conclusion that Yahoo will soar to new heights on the internet.

http://blog.shawndumas.com/post/115979867433/im-leaving-yaho...

praneshp• 11 years ago

I don't know if you remember me; We had a conversation in the bus on route 26 in mid-2013 when I had newly moved to Sunnyvale. I remember you mentioning your kid and his love for coding; best of luck to both of you!

funkyy2• 11 years ago

Few more decades and surely she will do something breakthrough! She is given way to much credit imo. Any male CEO by now would be cursed but most stockholders in this situation.

mikeryan• 11 years ago

The phrase "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic" comes to mind.

WalterSear• 11 years ago

I'm going to be calling useless executives working in corporate lichdoms 'deck chairs' from now on.

oh_sigh• 11 years ago

Superficially, any time anyone reshuffles or rearranges anything, that could come to mind. Please provide a more fleshed out post unless you're interested in quipping and moving on.

G00d1• 11 years ago

Should have skipped tumbler, saved $1billion and spent it on people and given them some freedom to fix yahoo products.

deftnerd• 11 years ago

What I don't understand is that there is the impression that that Tumblr isn't doing well because it hasn't broken out of the teenage and 20's demographic. By forcing changes to try to extend to more age demographics, they risk alienating the ones they already have. They could simply just focus on the teen and 20's demographic and wait it out until they get older and are entrenched in the platform.

xasos• 11 years ago

I agree. This is kinda how Facebook has lost the attention of an important early demographic - high schoolers. It was probably due to the fact the everyone they knew was on FB, and it wasn't the "cool" place to be anymore.

dhimes• 11 years ago

I think facebook made the choice to lose the kids and keep the middle class/middle age moms. Middle class/age moms buy stuff.

tptacek• 11 years ago

It's not totally that simple. When they acquired Tumblr, the valuation was dominated by goodwill --- 750MM of it --- which was explained in part by the value to Yahoo of exposing Tumblr's users to Yahoo's monetization systems, and of integrating Yahoo technology directly into Tumblr. If that plan goes out the window, they may need to formally account for that, which can hurt their numbers.

pkaye• 11 years ago

They will eventually need to do that like with the rest of the acquisitions.

funkyy2• 11 years ago

IMO Yahoo is dinosaur that cannot see easier ways to monetize Tumblr. The site has so many potential, yet Yahoo decides to go the usual - advertising and data sales.

mpdehaan22• 11 years ago

I'm using Tumblr as a blogging platform mainly because the interface is a lot simpler than Wordpress, I don't think most people reading my blog (which is hardly anyone) would even know it's on Tumblr at first glance. Tumblr is also pretty easy to customize.

All being said, they could do somethings better to make writing long-form content easier (like a larger text entry area).

jacquesm• 11 years ago

I'm not a tumbler user but you could simply edit your text off-line and then cut-and-paste it into the tumbler text entry area when you're done. Much easier to re-arrange text and do things like spell checking and keeping an overview as well.

aswanson4• 11 years ago

She needs to shuffle her idiotic mobile team by firing all of them, at least the ones who made the mobile email app. Who the hell designs, in this day and age, an email app that does not let you log out; your only choice is to delete the app if you don't want someone who picks up your phone to look at your yahoo mail. I used to be skeptical of snapchat, but I'm coming around to new startups that understand how humans use things and don't want everything open to everyone.

raverbashing• 11 years ago

Heh this is the least of the problems with the mobile app (and Y mail in general)

detaro• 11 years ago

And parts of the mail team, too. A mail provider of their size that manages to regularly get blacklisted is in a bad position (United Internet and others right now are not taking mail from at least parts of yahoo groups, and yahoo claims all is fine and all mail delivered. Cue furious users that can't leave lists and are missing mails)

morgante• 11 years ago

Apple...

aswanson4• 11 years ago

Part of the reason I have never owned an apple phone in my 5 years of smartphone usage.

aswanson4• 11 years ago

Must be some yahoo mobile email devs here...listen, sorry to threaten your livelihood with my statements...but the fact of the matter is, the product is a pos and not aligned with what it should be in terms of human needs. Nobody wants their goddamn email available at all times to anyone. That's why they've been password protected, since like, the 80s. Fix it and you might save your company/jobs. Basic logic.

selimthegrim• 11 years ago

Uh, Gmail on Android doesn't let you sign out without delinking the account from your device...

aswanson4• 11 years ago

Uh, they should fix that. That's fucking stupid. And doesn't give yahoo an out. It's dumb to treat users like that.

Animats2• 11 years ago

No mention of search at all. A year ago, Mayer was going to put Yahoo back in the search business.[1] Yahoo resells Bing search, for which Bing pays Yahoo. Yahoo's own search engine was discontinued in 2010. The deal with Microsoft/Bing is up for review, and Yahoo has the opportunity to exit. Yahoo hired a new head of search last year, but his area of expertise was negotiating with Microsoft. The Yahoo search announcement seems to have been a bluff to get a better deal from Microsoft/Bing.

This year, search doesn't even get a mention.

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/11/technology/yahoo-mayer/

bane3• 11 years ago

Honestly, search is not a market I'd ever want to get in. Even if you build a strong ad network for it, ads are paying less and less and unless you have a new approach that give results that are a quantum leap better than google, you're going to fight a losing battle.

I mean, after Google, Baidu has ~11% of the market (and actually gives passable results for English), Bing has ~10% (after spending billions), Yahoo has about 9%, but is basically just Bing (so maybe Bing has 19%?) and after that there's AOL, Ask, Lycos, Excite there's also Yandex, Naver, Exalead, Gigablast, Munax, Qwant, Sogou, Soso, Youdao.

There's also Metasearch engines: Blingo, Yippy, DeeperWeb, Dogpile, HotBot, and a dozen more.

There's tons of language or geographic specific specific ones: Biglobe, Accoona, Goo, Miner.hu, Walla!, etc.

And then there's all the specific engines like Yelp, CareerBuilder, Glassdoor, and hell, Reddit's search even counts given how much content is on Reddit these days.

This is not a space I'd want to fight in, search is fracturing, the monetization story doesn't look good long-term, and nobody seems to have figured out a way to search that's fantastically better than keyword + some graph weight + heuristics

If I were Mayer, I'd be looking for a way out of search as fast as possible.

joelrunyon4• 11 years ago

ads are paying less and less

Do you have proof of this on a search level? On a display level, I'd agree with you, but anecdotal, things seems as competitive as ever in search.

Animats2• 11 years ago

Search with ads is a profitable business, even if you're small. All those little guys, such as Lycos, InfoSeek, and DuckDuckGo are modestly profitable. Search ads are inherently more valuable than most other ads, because they're displayed when the user is actively looking to buy something. Most other forms of advertising are annoyances.

The economics of the search industry are strange. Google pays Apple to be on the iPhone. Yahoo pays Mozilla to be on Firefox. Microsoft has their own browser, which comes with Bing as the default. Search as a service thus has negative value. Google is like the Jewelry Channel, which pays cable companies to get a channel. On the other hand, ESPN and HBO charge cable channels; the money flows the other way.

gyardley• 11 years ago

The smartest thing I ever did was to sell my startup to Simon Khalaf's. Marissa's made a good move here.

AndrewHart• 11 years ago

Why do we still care?

clusterbits• 11 years ago

I wonder if Yahoo will get back on track. Marissa is doing an extraordinary good job. I would say that if all measures Marissa is doing don`t help Yahoo, nothing can help Yahoo.

Bootvis2• 11 years ago

Why would you say that? Not that I disagree but I don't have any information that causes me to agree with you.

mtrimpe• 11 years ago

The simple fact that you're talking about this now is already a rather mighty feat.

Before Marissa took over Yahoo wasn't even worth mentioning anymore outside of sentences containing the word 'downhill' or equivalent.

aikah2• 11 years ago

Marissa is doing an extraordinary good job

No she isn't. She has done anything but spend money, fire and recruit executives, but she has no plan.

gcb0• 11 years ago

Me thinks the board is moving against marisa (yahoo board trying to change ceo, oh my)

the only change this time, instead of shoping around and turning the company upside down they shopped and put the CEO-to-be as SVP first.

ChuckMcM• 11 years ago

Second envelope.

Marissa Mayer Shuffles Yahoo Leadership Team

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