<story><title>How Marissa Mayer Failed to Turn Yahoo Around</title><url>https://variety.com/2016/digital/features/marissa-mayer-yahoo-ceo-1201781310/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>karmajunkie</author><text>Do you fault the oncologist that doesn&amp;#x27;t cure advanced metastatic cancer? Or the patient who ignored the signs for years before quitting smoking?</text></item><item><author>ProAm</author><text>&amp;gt; I don&amp;#x27;t think the failure is on Mayer; Yahoo was a walking zombie before she arrived.&lt;p&gt;But they brought her on and paid her amply to specifically fix this problem.  As a result she shares part of the blame for Yahoo&amp;#x27;s failure to right the ship.</text></item><item><author>exelius</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think the failure is on Mayer; Yahoo was a walking zombie before she arrived. They were the last remnant of the dot-com boom -- a media company without a significant role in content, advertising, shopping or computing. They had no technological advantage, or really any foundation for a competitive advantage to set them apart from the rest of the market.&lt;p&gt;Quite simply, Yahoo was culturally never a technology company. They defined themselves as a &amp;quot;media&amp;quot; company in the mid 90s to avoid drawing Microsoft&amp;#x27;s ire, but they said it for so long they believed it. They underinvested in technology throughout the late 90s and early 2000s, and by that time Google was the behemoth that Yahoo should have been. Yahoo is only around today because they recognized the emergence of China and made a lucky investment in Alibaba. Without that investment, Yahoo would have gone bust years ago.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>linuxkerneldev</author><text>&amp;gt; Do you fault the oncologist that doesn&amp;#x27;t cure advanced metastatic cancer?&lt;p&gt;Yeah, especially if the &amp;quot;oncologist&amp;quot; told the patient to change their t-shirt to purple to cure the cancer. Eg:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nytimes.com&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;12&amp;#x2F;21&amp;#x2F;magazine&amp;#x2F;what-happened-when-marissa-mayer-tried-to-be-steve-jobs.html?_r=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nytimes.com&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;12&amp;#x2F;21&amp;#x2F;magazine&amp;#x2F;what-happened-whe...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;
For months, the team had settled on blue and gray. If users were going to read emails on their phones all day long, the thinking went, it was best to choose the most subtly contrasting hues. But now, Mayer explained, she wanted to change the colors to various shades of purple, which she believed better suited Yahoo’s brand.&lt;p&gt;ccording to one senior executive, Sharma’s body language changed the moment Mayer issued her request. He looked deflated. Altering the color of such an intricate product would require that members of his team spend all night adjusting colors in thousands of places. He slumped off and prepared to tell his staff the bad news.
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<story><title>How Marissa Mayer Failed to Turn Yahoo Around</title><url>https://variety.com/2016/digital/features/marissa-mayer-yahoo-ceo-1201781310/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>karmajunkie</author><text>Do you fault the oncologist that doesn&amp;#x27;t cure advanced metastatic cancer? Or the patient who ignored the signs for years before quitting smoking?</text></item><item><author>ProAm</author><text>&amp;gt; I don&amp;#x27;t think the failure is on Mayer; Yahoo was a walking zombie before she arrived.&lt;p&gt;But they brought her on and paid her amply to specifically fix this problem.  As a result she shares part of the blame for Yahoo&amp;#x27;s failure to right the ship.</text></item><item><author>exelius</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think the failure is on Mayer; Yahoo was a walking zombie before she arrived. They were the last remnant of the dot-com boom -- a media company without a significant role in content, advertising, shopping or computing. They had no technological advantage, or really any foundation for a competitive advantage to set them apart from the rest of the market.&lt;p&gt;Quite simply, Yahoo was culturally never a technology company. They defined themselves as a &amp;quot;media&amp;quot; company in the mid 90s to avoid drawing Microsoft&amp;#x27;s ire, but they said it for so long they believed it. They underinvested in technology throughout the late 90s and early 2000s, and by that time Google was the behemoth that Yahoo should have been. Yahoo is only around today because they recognized the emergence of China and made a lucky investment in Alibaba. Without that investment, Yahoo would have gone bust years ago.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chasing</author><text>The metaphor doesn&amp;#x27;t hold: Yahoo! didn&amp;#x27;t have a fatal disease, it had failing businesses. This oncologist literally cannot cure certain terminal ailments.&lt;p&gt;A better metaphor might be: Yahoo! was like an old rusted out car. You hire someone who tells you how they can fix this car, you pay them a lot of money, and then they leave the car in worse shape than when you hired them. How much blame do they deserve?&lt;p&gt;Which is to say: A new CEO absolutely can turn a failing business around -- that&amp;#x27;s what she was being paid tons and tons of money to do. If Meyer did feel like Yahoo! was a completely lost cause or that she would be incapable of fixing its problems, then she should not have taken their money. As an extremely wealthy person to begin with, she had that luxury.&lt;p&gt;In short: She absolutely has culpability in the failure of Yahoo!.</text></comment>