“CEO Marissa Mayer’s efforts to save Yahoo are almost assuredly doomed. That was as true from the start of her tenure as it is now,” Chris O’Brien reports for VentureBeat.But for the moment, it appears Mayer may have been underestimated by many of her critics on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley.”
“The pressure from external investors leading up to the earnings call yesterday seemed to be building toward an announcement of an outright sale of the company’s business. And there were apparently many on the board who felt the same, according to Re/Code,” O’Brien reports. “Instead, Mayer seems to have outflanked them, at least temporarily… the board publicly re-affirmed that it is 
“For Mayer’s part, it is admirable that she fought to stick around and take one more shot. If Mayer had just decided to walk away, to give in to the inevitable, I certainly wouldn’t have blamed her for a moment. And I don’t think most other people would, either,” O’Brien reports. “She no doubt has plenty of money in the bank. She has ample personal reasons to kick back and take a few months off. And it is quite likely that her talents may be better suited to helping an energetic new startup achieve lift-off rather than salvaging a lumbering survivor of the Internet’s paleolithic era. But she did not do that. She chose to stay put and redouble her efforts.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Marissa Mayer can be a wonderful CEO with the right company.
SEE ALSO:
Yahoo to lay off 15% of staff, close five offices, explore non-strategic asset sales – February 2, 2016
Yahoo investors running out of patience with CEO Marissa Mayer – January 4, 2016
Hedge fund manager blasts Marissa Mayer for equipping employees with 22,000 iPhones – January 4, 2016
Yahoo board to weigh future of company, Marissa Mayer, source says – December 2, 2015
Yahoo or Microsoft can terminate search deal anytime on or after October 1st – April 21, 2015
Microsoft loses exclusivity in Yahoo search deal shake up – April 17, 2015
Yahoo gains further US search share; Google falls below 75% for first time – February 3, 2015
Microsoft, Yahoo vie to become Apple Safari’s default search option – November 26, 2014
Firefox dumps Google for default U.S. search, switches to Yahoo/Bing – November 20, 2014
Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer was right to ban working from home, right? – August 12, 2014
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer wants to save Google a billion dollars – April 18, 2014
Yahoo’s strategy: Rebuild search, take share, win iOS from Google – April 17, 2014
Yahoo needed to innovate more. If Yahoo made more quality products, then they would not be in this situation. Yahoo Smart TV, for example, needs a lot of support. Crackle is fabulous though, but they really need to rethink their strategies.
Yahoo stopped being relevant about the same time people stopped going to a portal for info every day.
That photo is almost as good as the one on the ball.
Crackle is Sony, not yahoo.
“Marissa Mayer can be a wonderful CEO with the right company.”
Like who? Apple?
How about like managing a burger joint? When someone makes acquisition after acquisition, bad decision after bad decision, is it really anything more than her looks and perhaps personality that keep her on payroll? Really, how long are we going to continue to be fooled by CEOs who are…well, the facts speak for themselves.
Search was Yahoo’s main ticket…
It was strange how they gave up the only thing it had. Sold their fishing pole for one day’s meal.
I’m not sure about that last statement. Ever since Marissa took over email at Yahoo has fallen apart.
The problem at Yahoo – always searching for the next big thing instead fixing and improving what you already have. Very similar problem to Apple lately.
A great CEO would have done something besides firing people and selling off assets.
A Great CEO would have done something useful to generate some kind of revenue and salvage something.
A bad CEO would flounder uselessly as the company tanks.
Got to be a reason you don’t get promoted at Google and leave to sink another company.
She is an exgoogle loser. Failure was guaranteed. Yahoo will be but a memory in no time. Bye.
Unfortunately, she cost people’s jobs. She will be rewarded with millions. Seems fair, right?
That’s the way it is these days. No accountability for CEO’s or other highly paid executives. If they succeed they make a lot of money…fair enough. But if they fail…they still make a lot of money. No real motivation for them to succeed. Most CEO’s live in a bubble out of touch with reality. They cannot at all relate to the majority of their employees or customers.
CEO pay should be capped at a realistic multiple of the lowest paid person in the company. And no golden parachutes. It’s funny, but CEO’s work under an employment contract that gives them a golden parachute even if they fail, yet most work very hard to deny any sort of employment contract to their employees.
Yahoo! and BlackBerry should merge. Marissa would be the new CEO for the new global company for the web, software, QNX, hardware and services for the enterprise and consumers around the world.
They ruined their main page the other day by taking things away on the side bars like stocks, horoscopes, etc. Feedback alot are complaining.
A man in the some position would have been fired long ago.
CEOs and their executive buddies are never really fired. They are given infinite vacation and 10 times more cash than any sane person could ever use in a lifetime, then told to stay home.
Mayer never impressed me, ball or not.
No big red ball photo = disappointment
Bring back the big red ball
After reading Marissa Meyer related articles and MDN takes for a long time I have come to two 100% definitive conclusions:
1. MDN wants Marissa to become CEO of Apple after TC
2. One or more in MDN wants to “do her” badly 😉
Corollaries
As to your first point, if Marissa isn’t available after TC, MDN would take Angela, a proven CEO and arguably equally physically attractive as MM.
As to your second, her snigger is a buzzkill.
What Yahoo! needs to do is go back to basics. Stop trying to be a media company and go back to being an Internet Search Engine. They can get ad revenue just by selling ads and bring back some of their core services that they got rid of over the years (such as Auctions) and also innovate more like Google does. They are in a rutt.