However, just like the fail fast & learn, I dont think she will, nor should, pay a permanent price for this as she is actually a much smarter executive from that experience.
The problem with yahoo has always been well understood, no one knows what the fuck it is. It provides some value to a lot of different groups of people. It came out of Mayer's tenure looking the same way, a big company with a lot of pretty good things centralized in a disjointed way which was a missed opportunity.
Yahoo finance should have been broken into a stand alone site and become an investing portal selling side services to people and market data to others.
Yahoo should have restructured as a news organization and retooled the UI to look like bloomberg.
Fantasy sports should have been split out into a business and either sold to, or transformed into draft kings, etc.
Search engine actually quite valuable if it isnt someone elses results rebranded.
Correct. This is just a job. If she gave it her best and more and they fail, then that is just outside her hands.
Edit. no one knows what the fuck it is
Correct again. Apple:iPhone/Mobile. Google:Search. Microsoft:Windows/Software/PC. Facebook: Connection/Address Book. Wikipedia:Encyclopedia. Yahoo and Twitter, while very useful to millions, suffer the same problem.
The thing about twitter is that it has 1/2 of the problems of yahoo, it is pretty well defined as a communication channel and more specifically it is a one to many broadcast channel. It doesn't know how to financially capture value.
Twitter is pretty interesting in that the arbitrary SMS length of 140ish char is pretty interesting from a data standpoint as it ends up playing sort of like XML. Pretty much the way to use data online is that we use 1960s IBM doc authoring language, it got a few tags and some sugar in the late 80s/90s but in reality we add meta tags to meta tags and then read this data. Twitter, due to the char limit actually provides dynamic labels to realtime information flows in a way that is comprehensible programatically.
e.g. <p>Some info</p> is not particularly helpful as the entire <article> and accompanying data needs to be parsed and looked at, and always varies from site to site.
However: In #election2016, I voted for #Trump. Data labels can mirror trends in human readable form and computer processed form. So in the above example, from @example you could state:
Public Opinion of Trump +1
@example is a complete moron.
So it actually ends up playing like a paradigm shift from sql to nosql data in terms of data streams.
1. She was worth less than they thought when they brought her in. They paid for someone they thought could solve their problems, and she could not.
2. She's worth more now than she was when they hired her, because she does have more experience (this point I agree on).
This means, to me that she's worth somewhere between "what she was really worth when they hired her" and "that amount plus the value she gained by learning".
Given the decisions I saw her make (no remote work, basically firing anyone that wanted to continue their remote work), I'd say she was worth a lot less than they thought she was when she started... and worth a lot less now, even with new experiences.
So IMO Yahoo's problem isn't that no one knows what the fuck it is, but that it's really a Big Media conglomerate that happens to specialise in the Internet, rather than an Internet search company that happens to do media but isn't really sure why.
Mayer half understood this, but her Google experience didn't give her the background, the experience, or the insight to make it work. She seems to have tackled it as a top-down engineering (mobile!) and people management problem, instead of leaving the various divisions to invent their own best profitability strategies.
I don't know - maybe the board would have done better with a former Viacom exec, or someone with a similar background.
True in a sense. I would frame it that the media world is the internet and there are many channels on it.
Larger organizations have fared quite poorly in this environment, especially in a non specialized space reaching consumers.
Bloomberg is a data & tech company with a fairly specialized clientele for their media. Without viewing there financials I would assume cap iq and the terminal data feed dwarf the media arm.
So my poiny above was that adapting Yahoo finance to serve as a consumerized version of Bloomberg, and cross sell data to finance companies viaban APO would have been helpful.
The sports media and application ecosystem looks like fanduel & sbnatition.
The mail service not sure what to do with maybe keep it in the yahoo ecosystem on main.
So viacom not phenomenal vs tech executive
Nice job if you can get it. You don't even need to be accountable!