“Dynamic and wildly profitable Internet companies like Facebook and Google may get most of the attention, but Silicon Valley is littered with firms that just get by doing roughly the same thing year after year — has-beens like Ask.com, a search engine that no longer innovates but happily takes in $400 million in annual revenue, turning a profit in the process,” Nicholas Carlson reports for The New York Times.
“Mayer, who is 39, was hired to keep Yahoo from suffering this sort of fate. She believed it could again become a top-tier tech firm that enjoyed enormous growth and competed for top talent,” Carlson reports. “And two years in, Mayer, who has a tendency to compare herself with Steve Jobs, wasn’t about to abandon her turnaround plan. On the afternoon of Oct. 21, she entered a web TV studio on Yahoo’s garrisonlike campus to present the company’s latest quarterly results. Even though Yahoo’s revenue had decreased in five of the past six quarters, Mayer attested that she had ‘great confidence in the strength of our business.'”
“Aswath Damodaran, a professor at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, has long argued about the danger of companies that try to return to the growth stage of their life cycle. These technology companies, he said, are run by people afflicted with something he calls the Steve Jobs syndrome,” Carlson reports. “‘We have created an incentive structure where C.E.O.s want to be stars,’ Damodaran explained. ‘To be a star, you’ve got to be the next Steve Jobs — somebody who has actually grown a company to be a massive, large-market cap company.’ But, he went on, ‘it’s extremely dangerous at companies when you focus on the exception rather than the rule.’ He pointed out that ‘for every Apple, there are a hundred companies that tried to do what Apple did and fell flat on their faces.'”
Tons more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: There was only one Steve Jobs and only he accomplished the unprecedented routinely.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “David G.” for the heads up.]
Related article:
Steve Jobs’ revenge – April 12, 2013
I thought you were gonna talk about her attempt at redesigning the logo. 😉
To a big red ball? 😉
MDN, that’s true, but there is only one picture of Marisa Mayer on a big red ball and it is unprecedented in its own way.
I didn’t even look at the article 🙂
Just clicked for the pic and the comments.
Keep up the good work MDN.
What is MDN gonna do when Marissa is history and they can no longer perv on her photo whenever she is mentioned?
Big deal. We got to see The Pic. 🙂
In real life she looks nothing like that. Google some pictures.
That is why top professional photographers make good money.
So, MDN, to balance things out, where’s the photo of Eric Schmidt sitting on a large pink ball?
Sorry MDN but you’re wrong on this one. Elon Musk has already surpassed S Jobs accomplishments.
Musk is the closest thing we have to Jobs, but it’s silly to say he has surpassed him.
Agreed I love Musk’s efforts but such a claim is delusional by any standards.
True, but his accomplishments are out of this world. 😉
Musk is nothing but a government rent seeker. The absolute antithesis of S. Jobs.
Musk is a “carnie” selling snake oil electric cars to people who have more money than economic sense. When he is selling more cars than one of the “big three”, then I’ll concede. However, I’ll likely be 6 feet under by then.
“Mayer, who has a tendency to compare herself with Steve Jobs, ”
Except for that little bit that Jobs was responsible for creating the personal computer revolution in addition to music and how we use the web. His and Woz’s patents speak to that.
She really is not that hot. Have you heard her speak?
If she worked for me, I’d fire her.
She should go home and bake some cookies.
As compared to whom? Steve Baldy Ballmer? Meg Whitman? Mayer still gets the highest marks for a fetching female CEO. A fine roll in the hay she no doubt be. 🙂
Just don’t make her laugh
So you’re suggesting the more quieter Bill Cosby approach to brief one-off romantic encounters?
No of course not but her laugh is a repulsive snigger. That’s buzzkill.. like that woman on Seinfeld who was desirable in every way except.. her laughter.. which was awful
I know whut you mean. Just a terrible joke. Beauty + horrendous laff don’t mix. SNL did something similar like this with an over-sexy Kristen Wiig character who suddenly loudly farted and did repugnant things in front of 4 turned on then turned off guys, despite her overtly sexy desirability.
You really need to google some other pictures before you say that.
I did. Most female CEO’s were dogs next to the Yahoo CEO Marissa. Obviously you didn’t or you might have unearthed another high ranking temptress. I’m sure these other women though have “wonderful personalities” and equally irritating laugh.
And just for the sake of balance, male CEOs are largely repellant braggarts compensating for puerile phyical assets, incompetent as Caligula, exhibiting symptoms of dementia and megalomania, and relying on an entrenched ol’-boy network drenched in misogyny to prop them up until shareholders revolt and force them out.
Maybe she thinks she has a Reality Distortion Field just because no one can focus of the topics when she’s in the room?
it all starts with that red ball pic. rather unprofessional for the CEO of any company . She’s not star material, Another Steve she never was
That red ball pic was taken in 2009 when she was featured as Glamour Magazine’s Woman of the Year. She was a VP at Google at the time.
http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/06/marissa-mayer-gets-a-little-love-from-glamour-magazine/
She wasn’t made CEO of Yahoo until 2012, 3 years later.
If you have a problem with how “professional” the photo of a CEO is, take it up with MDN for choosing to keep using it. It’s not like MDN chooses the most professional photos available when Ballmer and Gates are featured here.
Do you want a stuffed shirt or a creative thinker?
Come to think of it, just how professional is a black turtleneck and blue jeans?
I have a tendency to compare myself to Peter North. Yeah, I am pretty good.
I like you
You like me long time!
it’s extremely dangerous at companies when you focus on the exception rather than the rule
If the point if being a CEO is to play SAVIOR STAR! then I understand and agree. But what this odd philosophy of Aswath Damodaran, professor at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, is skirting around and avoiding is a VERY old tenant of business: Stay entrepreneurial or die.
I never miss a chance to point out the big fat sign of a company in its death throws: Marketing-As-Management. When that happens, its off to the 6 foot deep plot with your company. (A special hello to Sony! A single rose on the grave of what was once Kodak).
Therefore, if the ever-idiotic ‘LOOK AT ME, I’M A STAR!’ bullshit isn’t part of the equation, being the exceptionally entrepreneurial aspect of Steve Jobs is an excellent idea! 😀
Just amazing what red balls can do eh.
Full disclosure: I clicked on this link hoping you’d have the red ball picture up.
Oh, I absolutely did the same thing. That pic always brightens my day a little.
Ha ha. I forgot that Mayer bought Tumblr and in the process made a high school dropout barely in his 20s very rich.
Oh yes, you should add Google to this list of companies that reinvented themselves. Google was initially just another search company like Yahoo, and smaller and less influential than Yahoo at that. When Yahoo merged with AOL and Time Warner, it was SUPPOSED to make this huge new media conglomerate that was going to crush all competitors, including Google.
But Google reinvented themselves first by adding services to search starting with Gmail (giving them their first victory over Microsoft by crushing Hotmail which Microsoft bought, and also over Yahoo by quickly becoming more significant than Yahoo’s email service) and then becoming a leader in the cloud by offering Google Docs, the first widely used cloud based application (and cloud storage service) and to achieve practical integration with the cloud by tying Google Docs right into Gmail. (A bunch of other Internet and cloud services followed.) Then, of course, came Android, which surpassed Windows to become the most widely used operating system in the world (and also crushed any chance of Windows Mobile had of succeeding).
They get no credit for it, but Google is far removed from merely being one of the many Yahoo wannabees when they lauchned.
There was a reason she stalled out at Google.
We are seeing why as she rides Yahoo! into the ground.
… but nobody can deny she looks extremely well in that red dress…
Looks like she’s having a ball.
Day after day, the headlines on the Yahoo home page look like the front page of The National Enquirer. As far as I’m concerned, Yahoo’s true condition is graphically revealed by this shabby display. Marissa Mayer should have her mouth taped shut for even imagining herself worthy of comparison with Steve Jobs.
Thank you Steve. We miss you Steve.
Yahoo’s stock price is up 25% for the year. I would call that a success
Marissa had a baby.
Steve has done a lot but he never pushed a baby out his uterus.
My Aunt Esther used to say to me, I understand that you like your father, but consider that he only contributed five minutes to creating you, and your mother contributed nine months.
Like so many leaders in the tech industry MM has made the mistake of thinking that the average users’ life revolves around their product. Jobs’ greatest products appealed to so many primarily because of their simplicity. I haven’t the time or inclination to keep up with all the changes to Yahoo mail which has become yet another over engineered technology. The whole experience reminds Microsoft’s never ending quest to add yet another shade of taupe to the color palate in my word processor. Maybe the 56 engineers tweaking the product are all aglow in their genius but Please don’t assume that Im happy to spend twenty minutes of a given day to come up to speed on your accomplishments. There are too many geniuses working on a product which has turned out to be more of hassle then useful tool. I wonder if 100 years ago there was a proud mail man posing on a proverbial Red Ball. We know how that turned out when a far more user friendly product (email) came along…
All she has done is continue wasting hoards of cash overpaying for crappy startups that are eventually cast away as empty husks. The founders (only) get rich get rich and move on. She has never lead a company before and is a terrible CEO.
OK, so I took a second to google her pictures out there, since some here seem to imply that the famous “red ball” picture is not quite representative of how Mayer really looks.
Vast majority of images that came up when googling “Marissa Mayer images” are candid shots from various events. In other words, no special lights, make-up, no professional photographer, stylist, hair/make-up artist, to guide her into a best, most flattering pose. Most pictures are from presentations, keynotes, lectures, on-the-spot interviews. And in most of them, she looks like a well-above-average, attractive young woman (at least to me, a middle-aged heterosexual man). And, as already mentioned, we shouldn’t forget that she has a young child that she gave birth to. Can’t think of many young mothers who had so successfully shed their pregnancy pounds…
I used to have Yahoo as my homepage but over the years it just sucked the life out of me.
Full screen pop up ads drove me nuts. At one point you logged into mail only to be thrown back onto the homepage before you then had to click mail. The rejigging of Mail was such a letdown replete with confusing controls. And not to mention that it’s news deteriorated to nothing but dumb gossip celebrity pieces.
I could say more but that’s enough to sink any company. I’m not at all surprised that they’re losing money. And you know that when someone says, ”…we have great confidence in the strength of the business” that means that they don’t. It sounds like something Blackberry has said many times over the past few years.
Vale Yahoo.