I do as well. As outlined in The Halo Effect, people want very tidy, clean, and rational reasons why a company failed. Blame must be specifically laid somewhere. However, there's a pretty good chance no one available could have saved the demise of Yahoo. Variance is a thing.
I do think there's something wrong with someone earning massive amounts of money to fail and then everyone saying, "Oh well, anyone would have failed in that role."
Why pay someone huge sums of money if failure is the expected outcome?
> Why pay someone huge sums of money if failure is the expected outcome?
Because the people making executive compensation decisions are from a narrow elite class and are the people benefiting from executive
compensation decisions.
Well-said. Major example: interlocking boards of directors. They clearly demonstrate cartel-like behavior where it's "us vs them" at one level protecting their personal profits and "them vs them" at another level competing for good positions, policy preferences, or market share. Unsurprisingly, it's one of ideal moves a capitalist can make in an environment like the U.S. given it gains the personal benefits of capitalism while minimizing the risk that real competition or cost minimization of labor would bring them. They must operate collectively to defeat what threatens their wealth.
EDIT: The answers all around yours are screenshot-worthy. Perfect example of what the elites bought with all those donations/visits to universities, textbooks, biased media, and so on. Many still believe they have to earn it in a way that's about merit as an employee of the company. Thousands of years of human history showed nepotism, classism, and other rigging were main ways people got ahead. Then it suddenly is out of the equation for many analyzing success of modern elites. ;)
The "failure" is subjective. What's objective is the stock price, which has grown from $15 to $41 under her management.
As bulk of her compensation is locked in stock (negotiated at 2012 prices), it's increasingly hard for her to get compensated less while the stock has tripled in value.
That may be, and you seem to have a better scoop on the internals.
I was just pointing out that there are very few YHOO investors unhappy with the stock moves 2012-2017 (when benchmarked against S&P 500 or whatever else is commonly accepted metric) compared with, for example, Eric Jackson's war against Terry Semel's (and some directors') compensation package while the stock was in consistent decline https://www.law360.com/articles/26456/advisors-oust-yahoo-di...
>Why pay someone huge sums of money if failure is the expected outcome?
Because all big C-level positions work this way? Doesn't make it a good idea, or even rational. But humans are of the rationalizing type, not actual rational beings.
I suppose, there's a huge responsibility coming with that role, and you also know your name will be stained forever. But it's something somebody has to do.
their names are never stained. she will resurface in some other high profile position in no time. these C*O's live in their own universe, where common sense and peasants' logic do not apply.
Because it wasn't the expected outcome. Or, at least, there was a chance that things could be saved. The high risk is even more reason to offer huge compensation.
We can only see in retrospect that it was doomed to failure.
The risk of her future income being depressed. The risk her compensation package mitigated by paying her millions even in the face of a perceived failure.
One reason I heard for the demise of Yahoo, from someone who worked there, was tech was totally anarchic. They didn't build up the vast amounts of shared software infrastructure that Google, Facebook and Amazon did. Apparently, each separate business unit did a lot of reinventing the wheel. That might have been something someone with a background in big company software architecture could have focused on, but that wasn't Marissa.
if only they had a chance to rewrite their web site in angular 2, things would have been so much different.
jokes aside, they rewrote their yahoo finance site in some JavaScript framework, so it became plain unusable. they moved ticker box to the right side (congratulation, Marissa, deeply strategic decision! how many millions did you get for this one?) and hooked it up to shitload of JS, so entering ticker and pressing enter just don't work - I have to slowly press keys and patiently wait for some unwanted intellisense magic to wake up and help me to understand that when I type JNK I really mean JNK.
I'm not 100% sure but I am guessing based on few thing I see in the current code browser side. Finance probably copied a lot of what sports was doing. Sports was ahead of the game a little because it was not as old as Finance.
I know that Angular 1 was not allowed back when it first started to catch on. I am not sure if it was because of the CLA or the license, but I do think there was something legal around patents. Yahoo still has a ton of patents.
Sports was already working on a new framework that I believe predates Angular. Some of that crazy JS was there to support precog, a preloading interface and some other things. Some of it was based on the horrid work of an architect that did not last long after MM started. Still I can't say he did that or she did this. There was a period of trying to get modern that failed before MM showed up. I do know of several folks that did what they could do and made that framework the best they could.
Now to get back to finance. When I was leaving, finance was still in many languages. In 2015 some parts of finance pages where still rendered in C. Yes think sprintf and friends. When you have something like 5 languages rendering a page doing the whole, "we are going to rending in Angular" isn't really an option.
This is the very definition of technical debt. Does it suck? Yes. Is this something a CEO can fix? No. Can we blame one little framework on the demise? That would just be stupid. Technology does not work in a bubble. It works on the shoulders of it's creators and has to overcome the faults of those creators. This is much as is life, we evolve when need be, but until then we live on.
yahoo finance was fast, old fashioned site used and scraped by lot of people. kudos to them for being one of the few sources of free EOD data and options chains. the decision to fuck it up (meticulously executed) must have come from the top. i am not blaming Marissa for choosing the wrong JS framework, but for being completely clueless while one of the pillars of yahoo online business was being destroyed.
It was both and more. I started there back when Bartz was CEO. Bartz continued down the media company path that was already established. Thompson doubled down and cut huge amount of tech talent to focus on media. Like he literally almost completely killed labs the PhD wing that did research. There are other things that elaborate on that really hurt and created the outcome we see today.
When MM started she had no idea of the technical debt she was going to inherit. Something to keep in mind is that Yahoo invented web at scale. It started on FreeBSD and had kernel contributors even when I started. I think they all work for Apple these days. To help handle scale Yahoo would create Yahoo versions of software via things like kernel extensions or software patches. Nobody was doing these things back in the late 90s, but it was needed. Back then nobody knew what we know now and they literally where making it up as they went along.
The thing is when you are the first to the table it sometimes creates technical issues. Sometime before I started there was a decision to shift from BSD to Linux. That was probably a good decision, not because of the merits of FreeBSD, but because Linux was getting a lot more headway with extra contributors. When you have code that was dependent on kernel extensions and you change kernels you get some pain points. Some are manageable others are not. I don't think anybody knew how painful that transition would be, well maybe Filo did because he was crazy aware of everything. As a side note when I started Filo was maybe a L3 but I think a L4 because tech was just that that devalued. So if he did know he probably didn't have much say in the matter. Even as a major stock holder he is not the kind of guy that throws that around, I really think he cares more about the tech then his bank account. If I had his bank account I probably would be in the same place.
Yahoo also made a somewhat fatal accounting issue prior to me getting there and probably early on. This was probably the right thing at that time, but it morphed into a bigger issue later down the road. They wanted to isolate "properties" or business units financially. To do that each property, such as news, sports or mail had their own hardware and justification for the hardware. This unfortunately creates a hoarding of assets since you never know when you can get more compute or storage. Keep in mind we are are talking pre-VM tech for you young folks and buying a server cost some big bucks. This created a culture or inertia that made to switch to VM very difficult. That wasn't the only thing. If the sports "product" is separate from the news "product" and assets, both physical and talent wise are isolated, then where is the incentive to share? This doesn't mean there was no sharing, there was, but it created a culture of do it your own way to get things done.
When MM started she focused internally at first. If you where in the building you got that. If you where in IT then well you knew there was a laser on you. It was all about getting the simple things first, upgrade outdated laptops etc. Then it moved to getting infrastructure in place. She was trying to shift the culture from mediocrity for developers to a developer and product first standpoint. It then became about reducing technical debt and lifting the barriers between groups. That ship does not correct overnight. There was some point in this that she did have to embrace the media focus and did a few big deals to get media talent, just is just a guess, but the timing is right.
Probably the final nail in the coffin was delivered unknowingly by co-founder Jerry Yang. With all best intentions Yang helped his friend Jack Ma with the Alibaba venture. Instead of a personal investment Yang opted for a joint venture where Alibaba got Yahoo China and some cash and Yahoo got some shares in Alibaba. Well as we all know Alibaba took off and the deal is just epic in terms of ROI. That created a big issue though. When MM took the reigns she would grow the stock price marginally which should have bought time, but Alibaba took over. The stock price became a proxy to Alibaba and the hedge funds took notice. Enter Jeffery Smith and his hedge fund. He did his job, as unpleasant as some of us might think, and went to work on maximizing return. Most of that return is in tax savings so he started working that angle which is ultimately why this sale is going to happen. When a company goes from $15 per share to $40 per share because of a holding, you are and investment company. There is nothing that can be done you are tied to the holding.
When Yahoo hired MM they had fired 2 CEOs in the past year, had two interim CEOs, and was probably looking to just get somebody that had a chance of righting the ship.
This is true, and what Yahoo did in its early days was definitely impressive, but the talent that did it moved on, and was never replaced.
When I joined in 2013, I encountered a lot of systems/processes/whatever that would have been impressive in 2003, but hadn't been updated or replaced in 10 years, and the culture inside Yahoo was still stuck in a weird not-invented-here bubble where a lot of people thought their 2003 tech was still impressive.
Turns out, if you gut the engineering organization over a decade, you end up with a B team, and you're completely unable to attract the A players necessary to keep innovating.
There's a lot of criticism in this thread that Marissa didn't do anything worthwhile, but she sure as hell tried. All those acquisitions? Almost all of them were acquihires, in a desperate attempt to get A players. Most of those didn't stick around very long though, because there's only so much shit and technical debt you can stand, and then the company is out the money, and has very little to show for it. It could have worked, but it didn't.
I believe we fought many of the same battles then. I think every Yahoo engineer at that time can curse ylock. If you where good though you looked at it with the WTH ylock did and thought hell it wasn't that bad for 20th century or early 21st, unfortunately there we where in early twenty tens constained and just trying to get a 64-bit kernel.
It's worth note that Facebook also had some similar challenges. They had so much in PHP and if you are an idiot and think just rewrite well then you would be doomed to failure. The advantage that Facebook had a few years back was that the didn't go through a period of removing tech talent in the same fashion that Yahoo did. They also had cash, a lot of cash. They could afford to pay for things like HipHop. By the time Yahoo needed a tech refresh they had already burned the cash and caused the talent to leave.
I know that sounds bleak, but at the same time while I was there after MM I did find really great talent. Some of that existed before she was there. I can think of several folks on tech47 project and they know who they are. They don't really need to be told they are talent. At the same time I can think of many new guys that brought it on. I still think one of the better talks I had was a with the new guy that wrote some of the Android network stack. Without telling names, he was describing the issues between dropping WiFi and dropping cell. One is easier then the other, if I drop WiFi and still have cell I can continue. If I drop cell I can only hope for WiFi. Either case is hard because the stack needs to understand an IP address shift and adjust accordingly. When you have that talent that understands and can code it, then you get things done. Unfortunately with everything else in the valley getting a quick hit and retaining are two different things.
Facebook also has one single product, whereas Yahoo has I don't know how many products, and they're all completely different, on sort of different stacks, in different silos and budget orgs, and all slightly different such that unifying them is an enormous task.
If they had had the engineering talent and budgets to build the kind of shared infrastructure and fundamentals that for example Google did, they would have been in a very different spot.
The alibaba investment was probably Jerry Yang's best ROI decision aside from being a part of starting the company in the first place...
Unfortunately for Yahoo itself that decision was SOOO good that it would eventually consume the company.
Because there was basically no way for the company to overcome how valuable it was as an Alibaba proxy and wall street started to look at all of its other endeavors as just high risk low chance of return gambling with the Alibaba money.
