Of the accounts of Silicon Valley business adventures that I have read this year, this is without a doubt the most fascinating. I have come away with a new impression of Marissa Mayer's efforts to save Yahoo!. I had regarded Marissa's tenure to be at some level, a refutation of the Google approach--one which seems to work well in a company that already has an unprecedented first mover advantage and is wondering what to do with all of the money that it keeps accumulating, but doesn't really work in a competitive market. My new appraisal is more complex: she actually did a lot for the company, but far from enough.
More than any other company, Yahoo's history traces that of the Internet, from its early days as a "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" in 1994, it has been a company focused on bringing the Internet to middle America. In its early days, 'The Internet' constituted a focused goal in and of itself, but as middle america came to embrace the Internet and our grandparents became adept at social media, nobody really needed a Yahoo to explain it to them. After a lot of fascinating history of early Internet companies including a failed takeover by Microsoft, Nicholas Carlson sets the stage for Marissa's messiah-like entrance in 2012 and leadership until its eventual acquisition by Verizon which wrapped up earlier this year.
Marissa sought to bring Yahoo! forward into the modern Internet era. She made changes to the workplace that made Yahoo! more closely resemble a modern Silicon Valley company, including all those double-edged perks which make it so hard to stay away from work. I suppose that if Yahoo! had, in fact, come up with something totally revolutionary like an 'iPad' or a cloud computing platform, it might still be independent and we would all be singing Marissa's praises still. Steve Jobs breathed new life into Apple after his famous return in 1997, but this is because Steve's are amazing. Yahoo! did come out with impressive news, sports and entertainment services, acquired Tumblr and generally got better. However, no products were compelling enough to make Yahoo! the That! company, unless 'That!' is peanut butter, spread to thin or perhaps the world's largest data-breech company, including 500*10^6 user accounts in 2014. Without any deep insight, this appears to have been a legacy of Yahoo's continuous history from the insecure 90s, when security was not generally taken seriously, rather than any of Marissa's actions, but it does seem to have been the iceberg that struck the Titanic.
Carlson provides an engrossing cautionary tale of a company that just couldn't decide what it wanted to be and ended up as nothing in the end. He does a great job of placing you in the room:
"It was Thursday: November 7, 2013. Everyone in the company was waiting for Mayer to say something to remind them that she was the CEO who was finally going to restore Yahoo to its rightful place in the Internet industry.
Mayer took a breath. She said hello to everyone. She reminded them of the meeting’s confidentiality. She said she looked through their questions and she had something she wanted to read. It had been a book in her hands, after all. A children’s book.
She began to read.
"Bobbie had a nickel all his very own. Should he buy some candy or an ice cream cone?"
Mayer held the book up, to show the employees the illustrations.
"Should he buy a bubble pipe? Or a boat of wood?"
Another illustration.
"Maybe, though, a little truck would be the best of all!"
Employees in URLs exchanged looks. At their desks, employees in remote offices grew confused.
What was Mayer doing?
She kept reading.
"Bobbie sat and wondered, Bobbie sat and thought. What would be the NICEST thing a nickel ever bought?"
Mayer seemed to skip a few pages. She read, with a slight agitation in her voice:
"He might buy a bean bag or a top to spin. He might buy a pin-wheel to give to little Brother. Or should he buy, thought Bobbie, a little pencil box?"
Mayer seemed to be reading with real frustration now, as though all of the anger and confusion in the room would just go away if everyone would just understand the story she was reading out loud.
“Bobbie thought—and suddenly a bright idea came,” Mayer read, reaching the book’s last pages.
"He spent his nickel just like this - - - -"
Mayer held the book up to show its last illustration. It was a drawing of a little red-haired boy riding a merry-go-round pony.
Hardly anyone could see the page.
No one understood what Mayer was trying to say.
Perhaps she should have read Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing.
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