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reacweb 4 days ago

I think that Marissa Meyer had given yahoo back a bit of its lustre. That meant cutting dividends in favour of investment. Restoring a reputation takes time. I stopped taking an interest when she was ousted by impatient shareholders. I am not an insider, maybe I am wrong.

drysart 4 days ago | parent [-]

She wasn't ousted because shareholders were impatient. She was ousted because under her leadership Yahoo had collapsed to the point that the only thing left to do was to sell it.

When a new CEO is brought in to right a sinking ship (which Yahoo very much was at the time of her hiring), their number one responsibility is to have a solid core strategy based in leveraging the company's existing strengths and then execute competently on it.

She had no solid core strategy. Her strategy at Yahoo, as she described it, was "to throw lots of spaghetti at the purple walls and see what sticks"; which is exactly what she needed to not be doing. She blew a lot of money on a lot of very varied things and ended up with lots of expensive puzzle pieces with no plan for how to fit them all together into something that would stop Yahoo's bleeding.

At the end, the company as a whole had a valuation less than the company's Alibaba investment -- she drove Yahoo not just to zero, but past zero; and that's 100% due to her not understanding how to lead a shrinking company.

sfblah 3 days ago | parent [-]

This is basically correct.