And if she had stayed at Google, what would be the next step for her career-wise? She went from vice president of search products to overseeing location and local services. Now she's CEO. You don't think that'll motivate her?
I think it not surprising that she left Google to be a CEO somewhere, it was just surprising that she picked Yahoo. Another one of those VP -> CEO jumps that was interesting to watch was Ed Zander (Sun Micro -> Motorola).
What I was expecting was that she would leave and start some sort cross between 'solve a world issue' with 'easy accessibility' kinds of UI. At Google her strength was having a clear idea of how to speak to users through UX, The Yahoo gig can use that, certainly, but watching the succession of failures and missteps at Yahoo the issues aren't primarily UX or users, it seems like Yahoo is in a major identity crisis about what exactly it actually is.
When one of their recruiters was trying to convince me to join the pitch was this:
"Yahoo is the premier digital media company
Yahoo! delivers amazing personalized digital content and experiences, across devices and around the globe, to vast audiences. We provide engaging and innovative canvases for advertisers to connect with their target audiences using our unique blend of Science + Art + Scale."
To which my response was "Really?", if someone were to ask me what the "Premier digital media company" was I don't think I'd respond "Yahoo!"
I'd say the "premier digital media company" at the moment is Netflix. They have their problems and troubles, but they have enough brand recognition and enough good content (albeit produced by other people) to quality for that moniker.
What about YouTube? Or Zynga? Or Facebook for its photos?
I think when people hear the phrase "digital media", they think of it has traditional-media-delivered-digitally. But I think the internet enables entirely new variations of traditional media, tailor-made for our hypersocial, crowdsourced, and attentionless internet society.
Agreed. I would think you could make an argument for NetFlix (streaming/rentals), Apple (iTunes + players), or Amazon (streaming/rental/sales/player (book)) as being 'digital media' companies.
It may be that I think 'education/entertainment' more than I think 'discovery' when I think digital media. If Yahoo claimed to be the digital media discovery company that might be the starting point for a bigger vision.
And there's no problem with that, if they took their engineers and had them create new media distribution platforms or new efficient encodings or any other of the huge amount of highly technical things that can improve media distribution and consumption.
You overestimate the downside of a reputation hit. The business world loves failures, and in fact it promotes them as people experienced with problems.
One of the biggest things she's going to probably have to do is lay off thousands of people. The business world might love that, but the folks losing their jobs probably won't. Turnaround CEOs take a lot of flak.
Look at the previous CEOs of Yahoo. Even excluding Scott Thompson (who lied on his resume) NONE of them have even held executive positions, or done anything significant in the business world. It doesn't seem like people forgave them just because Yahoo is a horrible mess.
Yeah, since leaving. My point is that Yahoo is a career destroyer for its CEOs-none of them have held a significant position afterwards. Bartz even had a great track record before (and during!) her tenure at Yahoo, but that doesn't seem to have helped.
They haven't really had that many CEOs, and Mayer is young enough to weather anything that might happen. I can't imagine she isn't going into this without an upper hand, It's not like she was looking to jump ship (maybe she was) and Yahoo was the only company who would hire her.
If she fails it will not hurt her reputation. Yahoo has already gone through so many CEOs. I think that if she can't turn around Yahoo, no one else will. After all, she is better qualified than the previous executives.
