[bane]

My problem with her all along is that before Yahoo she literally has only ever had one job. And that job was part of the management structure with a successful company. While there she developed a reputation as a data-driven iterator, not a visionary leader who can create direction and focus. She inherited what others had already started, and figured out things to measure, then analyzed the measures very competently.

If you look at her tenure at Yahoo so far, this has all essentially played out and her lack of qualitative acumen has been the source of most of the news about yahoo since she's taken over. This is an incredibly expensive experiment and learning ground for her. At best she's gone through the ceremony of "bold and decisive leader", made some big acquisitions and started some big changes on key properties. But that's like adding ships to a fleet and telling others to change out their sails. She still hasn't pointed Yahoo to a distinct vector and it's just kept adrift since then.

I agree with many others that she would be much more effective as a COO type but lacks pretty much all the kinds of skills needed as the captain of a corporate ship.

[lisper]

> She inherited what others had already started

I am not Marissa Meyers' biggest fan, but I feel I have to come to her defense here. She was employee #20 at Google. She didn't inherit anything, she helped build Google from the ground up.

There are a lot of reasons why Marissa is not a good CEO, but a history of riding on other people's coattails is not one of them.

[bane]

I can clarify what I mean, and it's not that she's simply ridden on other's coattails. She operated on her own and fantastically competently in what she did there. However, AFAIK, she did not originate or lead the early direction or kickoff of any of the products she worked on at Google. These were all products with directions and ideas that others put in place.

She lead efforts to broaden the appeal and usability of all of these things once they already existed. This was not easy effort, or easy work. It has challenges and requires smart thinking like the other parts of product development. Simply figuring out what to measure can often require enormous creativity.

These are very different skillsets and very few people have the skills to cross the boundaries from initiate to grow to sustain. She seems to have good skills in the grow and sustain areas, but I'm not aware of her having ever started any major product from scratch.

If you look at what she's been doing at Yahoo this has carried through. She's tried to initiate changes to grow and change direction of existing products, and she's tried acquiring other existing products. But she hasn't kicked off a whole new class of "thing" at Yahoo from scratch.

I know comparisons to Jobs is being thrown around here, but I don't think that's fair. He was such an outlier that I don't think it's very instructive to make those comparisons. Mayer needs to be compared to other more "prosaic" CEOs. Even her Yahoo predecessors. Even her former Google bosses.

I'm pretty sure at this point that she hasn't been doing what's needed as a CEO of a large company. I'm not even sure she's brought much more to the table than her Yahoo predecessors.

Think about this, the biggest Yahoo news since she's taken over has been the possibility of a sale and revelation that the corporate portfolio is essentially worthless minus its investment stakes in other companies. This was true before she started and remains true today. She has had no effective change in Yahoo despite being there for a while.

What is Yahoo? It's a holding company that holds stakes in other companies and has a legacy media and internet arm that could be shut down tomorrow with almost no bottom-line impact to the company.

Here's an example strategy that she should be undertaking:

0) Yahoo! changes names to Y!

1) All Y! products are to be spun out as individual businesses with Y! as the majority shareholder. 49% of each company should be offered up in a near-term IPO.

2) Y! will spend raised cash on purchasing stakes in other companies a la Alibaba.

3) Y! will form a both a Startup investment arm with significant seed capital and a Startup accelerator called Y!-Combine. To help enable success, these companies (and other acquisitions) get access to Y!'s existing technology portfolio, server/compute infrastructure and advertising network.

4) Y! will start a technology R&D arm called Y!-Research that will research technologies it can add it its portfolio of startup and acquisition enabling technologies. Any technology reaching a significant enough maturity level will be evaluated for sale, spin-out or open sourced.

There. 4 steps that convert Yahoo from a whatever it is into a technology holding company with 4 continuous growth options and almost no headline grabbing layoffs needed. In fact she can start hiring all the people to make this possible today.

[lisper]

> AFAIK, she did not originate or lead the early direction or kickoff of any of the products she worked on at Google.

And how would you know that?

[bane]

>And how would you know that?

short answer: By using google

long answer: It's pretty well known outside of Google what product groups she lead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer

"In 2005 she became Vice President of Search Products and User Experience. Mayer held key roles in Google Search, Google Images, Google News, Google Maps, Google Books, Google Product Search, Google Toolbar, iGoogle, and Gmail"

We know she didn't originate any of those things because the folks who started those products are either well known, or they predate her role over them:

- Search has a pretty well known history.

- Maps was started by Lars and Jens Rasmussen in a different company that google acquired in 2004.

- Books was started by Brin and Page

- Images was started because of an analysis of search data under Schmidt

- Google News was started by Krishna Bharat

- Google Product Search was by Craig Nevill-Manning

- Gmail was started by Rajen Sheth and Paul Buchheit

- No idea who started toolbar or iGoogle, but I'd bet an American dollar that it also wasn't Mayer.

Here's her Linkedin profile if that changes anything for you https://www.linkedin.com/in/marissamayer

Let me know if you can think of any she did have founding interest in.

This is made extra hard because she's only ever held one job in her career pre-Yahoo!

[trimbo]

> Let me know if you can think of any she did have founding interest in.

A good manager doesn't have to come up with the idea. Most of the great ideas come from the trenches -- or competitors, frankly (Adwords, meet Overture, Keyhole meet Terraserver and so on). A PM's job is to be an advocate and grow the best ones by finding the resources, trying and discarding ideas that don't work.

The PMs that suck are the ones who obsess over pushing their ideas above all others.