And that’s why I say she ran it into the ground- because when Google demonstrated a MUCH MUCH MUCH better Search, Yahoo didn’t do anything differently. They kept going as a ‘start page portal site’, kept pushing their really shitty email system, and just rode that wave into irrelevance.
Yahoo HAD some properties that COULD have been immensely valuable, even post-Google, if done right.

Flickr is one that comes to mind. Google had Picasa, and Google was innovating and pushing updates while Flickr (app and website) stagnated. So with no innovation everybody eventually left Flickr. With some vision, Flickr could have become what Tumblr or Google Photos ended up being.

Yahoo Answers was another one. It was a forum sort of like AskReddit where you could post questions on any subject you wanted and others would answer it. Again, stagnated, became irrelevant.

I’ll give you that Mayer came in after much of the value had been lost. But she came into a diamond in the rough, a site that was ready to reinvent itself into something relevant again, and she just didn’t.

Look at Google as an example. Google started as a search engine and ad company, and has since reinvented itself with investment in new areas like photos, email, Android, etc.

Yahoo started as a search engine, ad company, ‘portal start page’, and email. They kept doing the same old thing and went nowhere.

But they still had products with value- Flickr for example. Managing photos was starting to become a big thing, but they let Flickr stagnate, it got no development, and eventually people stopped using it. Look at their email product as another- Gmail focused on making their email usable, clean, fast, great storage, and without lock-in. Yahoo email sucked and it was hard to get rid of them because for a long time they didn’t support IMAP (what you’d use to vacuum out your old messages) or email forwarding. People stayed not because it was a great product, but because they were stuck. But that’s a real missed opportunity- Yahoo Mail could have been what Gmail became.

When Google modernized their site with web 2.0 technologies like AJAX and updated the look and feel to match, Yahoo still felt like a Web 1.0 site with ads all over the place and messy design.

That’s why I say she ran the company into the ground. Just because Yahoo wasn’t leading the pack when she joined doesn’t mean there weren’t any wins to be had. It’s the job of CEO to recognize where the company should invest and innovate and where they should stay the course.

Another example- one of her big decisions was ending all remote work for Yahoo employees, without consideration for employees that didn’t live near a Yahoo office, or even how much office space Yahoo had. I remember reports of people working in hallways and sitting on the floor because there weren’t enough desks for everybody that was forced to come in.

To be clear- I’m NOT saying she’s stupid. She’s obviously very smart. But I am saying she wasn’t a good leader, and made many decisions that were obviously wrong both at the time and as seen historically. She does not seem to be a person with good business sense or the right kind of leadership, for a great many reasons.

I don’t understand why people are still taking this woman seriously. She is not a ‘girlboss’. She is the woman who ran Yahoo into the ground, taking it from one of the giants of the dot com era into a largely worthless and useless has-been by grossly mismanaging every single one of their formerly valuable properties.

The fact that she is involved immediately makes this company lose credibility in my eyes.

The fact that she apparently needs an AI model to come up with three compliments for her own daughter only reinforces my opinion.

Yeah exactly. What I read here is ‘if you’re vibe coding all your shit and can spout off a bunch of AI workflow buzzwords you can keep your job or get promoted if not you’re probably getting canned’