You don’t understand where I’m coming from because you’ve completely taken it for granted that of course Mayer’s every move should be publicly dissected under a microscope, not just for business soundness, but also to check if she’s setting a luminous enough example for all other women everywhere.
Which is a thing I’m refusing to do.
And that’s why I say [Mayer] ran it into the ground- because when Google demonstrated a MUCH MUCH MUCH better Search, Yahoo didn’t do anything differently.
Look, this sentence literally blames Mayer for things that happened before her tenure. You acknowledge that this doesn’t make any sense, but you can’t really deny that it’s what you’ve said. Somehow the media that’s covered Mayer has made a lot of people react this way.
Flickr is one that comes to mind. Google had Picasa…
As a response to its community’s concerns, Flickr saw a substantial engineering investment from 2014-2015 or so, under Mayer’s tenure. I’m afraid the best summary I’ve found is pretty obvious AI slop, but it’s relating some real events.
Flickr lives, Picasa was killed, Google Photos is now an extremely annoying nagware for backup services. Things could be so much worse for Flickr.
Yahoo Answers was another one…
God I hated Yahoo Answers.
Mayer’s attempts to make Yahoo relevant again may not have worked but it’s not responsible or accurate to conclude that she was necessarily inept.
It is my suspicion that if, say, Jack Dorsey had overseen the dismantling of Yahoo, the business press would have told us that he made a great effort but Yahoo’s problems went too deep. Rather than leading us to believe that he was just inept. Or that he failed because he took the wrong amount of paternity leave.
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
Yahoo was once a big recognizable brand, but there was pretty much no moment in history when anyone would have said “Oh no, Yahoo is down, now how will I get important things done?” It was never focused, it was never indispensable.
Yahoo was valued at over $100B briefly in 1999-2000, after Google had demonstrated a much, much better internet search. Yahoo cratered to as little as 5% of its all-time high, recovered for a while, then began fading away. Its market cap was just under $20B when Mayer was hired in 2012. After which the market cap trended up.
I don’t see how you get this attitude, those conclusions, from anything I wrote.
Yahoo offers a generous 16 week maternity leave
Which is just a little bit shy of two years
Do you honestly believe her offering to take only 2 weeks “leave” while working was a feminist or woman empowering decision?
No. But I think that decision was up to her and that the press should have treated it as not-newsworthy. Any amount of maternity leave that she chose was doomed to be criticized by somebody as the wrong amount. And so, it was.
You and her are the ones perpetuating “CEO mom is impossible”
No. CompactFlax posited that “A real ‘girl boss’ in a position of power and wealth and public visibility needs to use that platform to take a year or two of maternity leave,” and I’m just observing there was no realistic possibility of that happening. If this is what you demand from a CEO mom, well, you’re not getting that.
You believe she has to act like…
I don’t understand how you think you know any such thing. I comprehensively don’t think like this. I don’t think there’s any “has to,” I think those arrangements should have been her own decision and it would be better to have minimal commentary on it.
The fact that everyone feels entitled to weigh in on her work/life balance and parenting decisions is the problem. Criticize her for her business decisions, criticize her for being an AI pusher, that’s fine, that’s appropriate.
When criticism focuses on “CEO mommy” topics, that is a mode and angle of criticism that no man ever seems to face in the tech/biz news. That is sexism. Obviously. What else would that be?
“They” who?
She got press that pointed out she was a CEO who had dared to get pregnant. It seemed to me they were pointing out that 1) a CEO who took time off to give birth was bad, and 2) a woman who wouldn’t take more maternity leave was also bad.
Way too much press about her was about her personal-life decisions rather than business prospects.
A real “girl boss” …
I read “girlboss” as strictly perjorative.
needs to use that platform to take a year or two of maternity leave
This is tantamount to saying: a CEO mom is impossible.
I’ve been on Fastmail’s cheapest plan for years and I’m very happy with it.
I think this sucks but I also think the headlines have never given Mayer a fair shake at anything and that also sucks. “Marissa Mayer dared to speak and we’re here to get snarky about it” could apply to almost every headline I’ve seen that was about her. And this story charges straight to “girlboss.” Ugh. Isn’t there enough to criticize here without jumping straight to the kind of casual sexism we all laughed at in the 1980s? It’s unprofessional.
Every phone maker seems convinced that if they can be the one to make this work, they’ll be the champion of world forever, or something.
I can’t understand why a user would even want this. How many users do want this?
This is the first time you’re bringing any of this up here in this thread with me. “The meat of the argument?” You have got to be joking.
I’ve already got enough homework to keep me busy thanks
I’m not “defending” her. (“I think this [turn toward AI] sucks” was what I said.) My comment was a criticism of the headline and the tone of this story. Of the media. How could I possibly have made that any clearer?
So. There’s that judgement imperative I was talking about.
Wrap your head around this: I don’t care if she’s a perfect feminist paragon or not. I don’t care if she’s perpetuating the status quo to the approximately the same extent nearly everyone else is. I don’t care if she’s just as disconnected a parent as every other stinking-rich mom or dad in this materialist culture of ours.
And neither should the tech / biz media, or the chattering commentariat.
Unless we’re all going to consistently apply those same questions and judgements to the men who keep getting in front of cameras to flog their tech junk, too.
When was the last time you got so worked up about Altman’s work-life balance? About Zuckerberg’s parenting choices? Is anyone terribly worried that Sundar Pichai isn’t feminist enough?