“Yahoo’s $7 million end-of-the-year bash at San Francisco’s Pier 48 was one for the books. Aerialists swung among chandeliers, pouring Champagne, while a burlesque troupe tantalized the Silicon Valley crowd,” Dana Schuster reports for The New York Post. “here was a white Rolls-Royce parked inside and cigarette girls peddling candy. In a roped-off corner, Marissa Mayer, the company’s president and CEO, perched like a queen — nine months pregnant and wearing a floor-length gown — on a white armchair while posing for photos with her loyal subjects.”
“Too bad her kingdom’s crumbling,” Schuster reports. “Since taking the reins of Yahoo in 2012, Mayer’s come under fire for failing to revive the struggling company. Executives are fleeing, stock is plummeting — down 32 percent year-to-date — and Mayer’s spending like Marie Antoinette.”
“She threw down $3 million to sponsor the May 2015 Met Gala and $2 million to sponsor the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last January. Hedge fund manager and Yahoo shareholder Eric Jackson submitted a 99-page presentation to the company’s board calling for Mayer’s ousting, lambasting the CEO for unnecessary expenditures like 22,000 iPhones and some $108 million per year in free food for employees,” Schuster reports. “And critics are grumbling about Mayer’s lavish spending on bold-face contributors like Katie Couric (whose contract recently got renewed for a reported $10 million per year) and companies like Tumblr, for which Mayer paid $1.1 billion in 2013. It’s currently valued at $0.”
Schuster reports, “Those who know Mayer, 40, say she doesn’t understand how to behave when a company’s flailing, since she’s never experienced failure.”
MacDailyNews Take: This one comes across as a hit piece generated by the hedge funds and a couple of grudge-carrying former colleagues. BTW, photos from Yahoo’s party are here via The Daily Mail.
The iPhones are for employees to do their jobs as Yahoo’s world goes (went) mobile.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)Obviously, the knives are out for Mayer at the dawn of 2016.
Once again, Mayer’s been hamstrung with the STUPID deal her predecessor Carol Bartz inked with Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer (two very confused former CEOs) to use Bing as the search component of Yahoo.
Yahoo needed to develop and promote its own technology. If they had their own search, Yahoo would be in a position today to make a serious play to replace Google as the default search engine on the world’s most coveted platform and reap multiple billions of dollars from such a deal. Alas, they are not and, as a result, Mayer has been forced to tinker around the edges while trying to extricate Yahoo from the straightjacket into which her predecessor shackled the company.
The Bing deal has since been amended under Mayer and, reportedly, either party can now terminate the deal at any point in time as of October 1, 2016. Mayer should be given some more time to fully execute her plans in which a deal with Apple should — if she has any hope to be a long-term CEO — be the centerpiece, the engine that drives Yahoo back to major prominence.
All Yahoo should be focusing on now is displacing Google as Apple’s default Safari search engine on iOS devices.
