Some time ago Marissa Mayer's CV was hunting the interwebs and for some it's rather impressive.
Here's a snapshot of it listed by Business Insider:
When should you let go?
She's been with Google for 13 years and now with Yahoo for the past 4 years. This makes me think about something: I've been working with the current company (not Google league, or even Yahoo) for over 6 years and next time a recruiter looks at my CV they'll likely ask and position this 2 ways:
- Why would you leave a company after spending 6-7 years there?
- You seem to have a lot of experience, you are overqualified for this job.
So, when is it really the time to let go as either way you do it it's either too early (One year on the job, that's too low, you change jobs too often, can't you settle, we need more experience!) or too late (* You're overqualified, why would you leave a company after 6 years?*).
In Marissa's case it was kind of a different story as Google is quite a different type of company, a whale in its industry if you may, and she's taken the time to mature herself while growing from Product Engineer to a VP role. That might have made her a fit for Yahoo back in 2012, or maybe she was the best out of all applicants.
What was the problem with Y!?
Even her CV says she had the courage to "take a sinking ship and make it float" yet the main problem is that it isn't floating. It hasn't sunk yet but it isn't really floating, the status is more like drifting.
Yahoo had some great products back in the day: mail, messenger, news, movies, GeoCities (Pepperidge Farm Remembers) and Groups. I'm still on some Yahoo Groups that are very active (I'm a hipster, I know eyeroll).
They should have pulled a Stevie
What I was expecting to see when MM came on board as CEO was a complete cutoff of all the things Yahoo never had a shot at (like Search) and focus on some of the most important ones consumer wise (mail, messenger on all platforms and mobiles) etc. and business wise like News, Media (to take on Facebook/Twitter) and Finance ( to have a chance at competing with Bloomberg). Then they may have had a shot and still be able to maintain a momentum from those million YM! users and keep them from flocking to the forced Facebook Messenger migration or Microsoft's new Outlook.com face-lift or SnapChat or whatever's new nowadays among teens like Meerkat Reloaded except in eightsomes.
Instead mom' Mayer exchanged Yahoo employees phones with iPhones and piled up the kitchens with free food. Yes, that gave a moral boost but it was barely scratching the surface of the issues and as it turns out, it was a hoax.
Now they sold
So Verizon steps in and wants to buy Yahoo for 4.8$ billion. As much as that sounds, it isn't. Back in '99 Yahoo was worth over 100$ billion. Heck, Microsoft tried to buy it in '08 for 10x what Verizon is paying for it right now.
Keep in mind that Yahoo owns about 15% of Alibaba and 36% of Yahoo Japan. That's almost $35 billion right there!
Why Verizon wants a piece?
TL;DR - Mobile content and advertisement. Yahoo is an established name in the media industry already with news, finance, etc. and it will be very easy for Verizon (who also bought AOL last year) to ramp up their content exposure given it has some popularity among millennials.
"By acquiring Yahoo, we are scaling up to be a major competitor in mobile media,"
Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam said
But does Verizon play it fair? Ha, nope. The HACK. Yahoo acknowledged last week, on Sept. 22nd, a hack that happened 2 years ago. Two years ago! Now i'm not saying this was re-surfaced on purpose but could there be a better moment if Yahoo had a change of hearts and might want to back out of the deal or Verizon was looking for an even lower valuation?
The 500 million entries on the hacked accounts contained names, e-mails etc. and was on the darknet for 3BTC last week. 3 friggin BTC for 500 million accounts. Who asks that little for such a large db?
Conclusion - In the end who wins?
You think Steemit and Dan being bashed on forums for the pre-mine that wasn't a pre-mine is a big thing for Steemit? Yahoo has a bid of 4.6 effin billion dollars from Verison who is now couching a bag of popcorn watching said company (Yahoo) be walled for some hack 2 years ago that Marissa didn't put out to the public. Which isn't even a big deal after all as the hackers didn't get the real passwords, just the hashed ones and that's why the list was selling on the dark webs for a mere 3 BTC a pop.
At the end of the day, Yahoo loses. Actually, they lost about 10 years ago when they spread their wings further than they could fly trying to bury Google and got burned.
So who wins? Well, Marissa off course. She may have got her candy crushed but on her next interview she'll just shrug her shoulders and say she did all she could and be taken for granted, when in fact there was a lot more that could be done. Maybe she hit some walls while trying to do it yet I do believe she was given a free hand somewhere down the line. She can now add a stunning : kept Yahoo surviving and sold it for more than it was worth CV entry, which is bullcrap, because she had a great thing going but it went over her head. Flickr is gone, YM!, Ymail is barely used, news, groups etc. all valuable items are now close to ending into the hands of a hungry for media celullar service provider. Don't get me started on the net neutrality thing once the buy gets approved. It will be a shit fest of you either use Yahoo or die waiting for other videos to load.
