| There's a scene in COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER where the producer halts the recording session after Loretta Lynn starts singing and says "We need to get some more pickers." "What do you mean more?" her husband says. "I can't afford more." "I mean more better," the producer replies. The problem isn't so much WHAT Mayer did, but how badly she did it. She wanted to boost Yahoo's video division, for example, so she (a) paid Katie Couric (someone my Mom really liked) more money than God, (b) licensed the streaming rights to SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE (which needs to be put out of its misery) and (c) decided to fund a season of COMMUNITY (which nobody ever watched). Now THERE'S a compelling product offering. WhoTF would watch that? She redesigned the site to make it mobile-friendly-- which made it almost unreadable for desktop users. Apparently no one told her that browsers send information about what type of device is reading the site. I liked the tech news, but it became so painful that I just gave up. (She also killed a lot of the personalization features, which is what had attracted people.) She bought a lot of tiny companies, most of which made products that were never integrated-- and whose employees left as soon as their employment agreements expired. She bought Tumblr... then had absolutely no idea what to do with it, and ended up not doing anything. Shut down their sales force to integrate it with the Yahoo sales force (which didn't want to sell Tumblr)-- and then realized they'd have to restart the Tumblr sales force to monetize at all. She inherited an email system that was a hot mess and made it a different type of hot mess-- with enough glitches that people couldn't rely on it for their email. A lot of the ideas were reasonable, but the execution was so horrific that there was never any value-add. |