I don’t understand why people are still taking this woman seriously. She is not a ‘girlboss’. She is the woman who ran Yahoo into the ground, taking it from one of the giants of the dot com era into a largely worthless and useless has-been by grossly mismanaging every single one of their formerly valuable properties.
The fact that she is involved immediately makes this company lose credibility in my eyes.
The fact that she apparently needs an AI model to come up with three compliments for her own daughter only reinforces my opinion.
She is the woman who ran Yahoo into the ground, taking it from one of the giants of the dot com era into a largely worthless and useless has-been
Yahoo was once a big recognizable brand, but there was pretty much no moment in history when anyone would have said “Oh no, Yahoo is down, now how will I get important things done?” It was never focused, it was never indispensable.
Yahoo was valued at over $100B briefly in 1999-2000, after Google had demonstrated a much, much better internet search. Yahoo cratered to as little as 5% of its all-time high, recovered for a while, then began fading away. Its market cap was just under $20B when Mayer was hired in 2012. After which the market cap trended up.
She probably “extracted value” for shareholders of a dying company. This usually means picking the company apart, selling things, firing people, and offshoring labor.
IMO, every time a CEO, bigshot capitalist, or industrialist is cited as a “hero”, I try to keep in mind they are not our hero.
Look at Google as an example. Google started as a search engine and ad company, and has since reinvented itself with investment in new areas like photos, email, Android, etc.
Yahoo started as a search engine, ad company, ‘portal start page’, and email. They kept doing the same old thing and went nowhere.
But they still had products with value- Flickr for example. Managing photos was starting to become a big thing, but they let Flickr stagnate, it got no development, and eventually people stopped using it. Look at their email product as another- Gmail focused on making their email usable, clean, fast, great storage, and without lock-in. Yahoo email sucked and it was hard to get rid of them because for a long time they didn’t support IMAP (what you’d use to vacuum out your old messages) or email forwarding. People stayed not because it was a great product, but because they were stuck. But that’s a real missed opportunity- Yahoo Mail could have been what Gmail became.
When Google modernized their site with web 2.0 technologies like AJAX and updated the look and feel to match, Yahoo still felt like a Web 1.0 site with ads all over the place and messy design.
That’s why I say she ran the company into the ground. Just because Yahoo wasn’t leading the pack when she joined doesn’t mean there weren’t any wins to be had. It’s the job of CEO to recognize where the company should invest and innovate and where they should stay the course.
Another example- one of her big decisions was ending all remote work for Yahoo employees, without consideration for employees that didn’t live near a Yahoo office, or even how much office space Yahoo had. I remember reports of people working in hallways and sitting on the floor because there weren’t enough desks for everybody that was forced to come in.
To be clear- I’m NOT saying she’s stupid. She’s obviously very smart. But I am saying she wasn’t a good leader, and made many decisions that were obviously wrong both at the time and as seen historically. She does not seem to be a person with good business sense or the right kind of leadership, for a great many reasons.
I largely agree with you, though by the time she took the reigns at yahoo, it was already pretty dead.
But this pattern of executives proudly offloading ‘pesky personal connection’ to AI just works to confirm that their stratum of society are almost exclusively sociopaths.
I don’t understand why people are still taking this woman seriously. She is not a ‘girlboss’. She is the woman who ran Yahoo into the ground, taking it from one of the giants of the dot com era into a largely worthless and useless has-been by grossly mismanaging every single one of their formerly valuable properties.
The fact that she is involved immediately makes this company lose credibility in my eyes.
The fact that she apparently needs an AI model to come up with three compliments for her own daughter only reinforces my opinion.
Yahoo was once a big recognizable brand, but there was pretty much no moment in history when anyone would have said “Oh no, Yahoo is down, now how will I get important things done?” It was never focused, it was never indispensable.
Yahoo was valued at over $100B briefly in 1999-2000, after Google had demonstrated a much, much better internet search. Yahoo cratered to as little as 5% of its all-time high, recovered for a while, then began fading away. Its market cap was just under $20B when Mayer was hired in 2012. After which the market cap trended up.
https://companiesmarketcap.com/yahoo/marketcap/
She probably “extracted value” for shareholders of a dying company. This usually means picking the company apart, selling things, firing people, and offshoring labor.
IMO, every time a CEO, bigshot capitalist, or industrialist is cited as a “hero”, I try to keep in mind they are not our hero.
Was Yahoo doing that well in 2012? At the time people were saying that she would never have gotten the job if Yahoo wasn’t a sinking ship
Look at Google as an example. Google started as a search engine and ad company, and has since reinvented itself with investment in new areas like photos, email, Android, etc.
Yahoo started as a search engine, ad company, ‘portal start page’, and email. They kept doing the same old thing and went nowhere.
But they still had products with value- Flickr for example. Managing photos was starting to become a big thing, but they let Flickr stagnate, it got no development, and eventually people stopped using it. Look at their email product as another- Gmail focused on making their email usable, clean, fast, great storage, and without lock-in. Yahoo email sucked and it was hard to get rid of them because for a long time they didn’t support IMAP (what you’d use to vacuum out your old messages) or email forwarding. People stayed not because it was a great product, but because they were stuck. But that’s a real missed opportunity- Yahoo Mail could have been what Gmail became.
When Google modernized their site with web 2.0 technologies like AJAX and updated the look and feel to match, Yahoo still felt like a Web 1.0 site with ads all over the place and messy design.
That’s why I say she ran the company into the ground. Just because Yahoo wasn’t leading the pack when she joined doesn’t mean there weren’t any wins to be had. It’s the job of CEO to recognize where the company should invest and innovate and where they should stay the course.
Another example- one of her big decisions was ending all remote work for Yahoo employees, without consideration for employees that didn’t live near a Yahoo office, or even how much office space Yahoo had. I remember reports of people working in hallways and sitting on the floor because there weren’t enough desks for everybody that was forced to come in.
To be clear- I’m NOT saying she’s stupid. She’s obviously very smart. But I am saying she wasn’t a good leader, and made many decisions that were obviously wrong both at the time and as seen historically. She does not seem to be a person with good business sense or the right kind of leadership, for a great many reasons.
I largely agree with you, though by the time she took the reigns at yahoo, it was already pretty dead.
But this pattern of executives proudly offloading ‘pesky personal connection’ to AI just works to confirm that their stratum of society are almost exclusively sociopaths.