Not smart just ruthless describes nearly every CEO. Uncaring and lacking empathy should be screened for from a early age. Those kids should be identified to everyone so you know to avoid their schemes and thus preventing the harm they cause. That this woman is unable to see her daughters talents and positive attributes is just in line with their missing piece of humanity.
“Also, find out whatever she’s into and add a reminder to my calendar to send her some of whatever it is on her birthday whenever that is. It’s a ‘she’, right?”
Wtf is a girlboss? Sounds incredibly sexist and condescending. She just better wear something cute and not bump her head on that glass ceiling.
2014-2018 it was used unironically to connotate women creating spaces for themselves in business - from a popular, well-meaning book of the same name
2019 onwards it has been used sarcastically to reference performative, ineffectual feminism.
You’d think she could at least use the term ‘woman’ to avoid coming across as a specialized dominatrix for people with an unfortunate brat fetish.
She didn’t call herself girlboss, the writer of the article did
Because he’s got an unfortunate brat fetish.
We forget sometimes that part of women’s liberation is that a woman is free to be just as big an asshole as a man.
Geesus christ.
Opposition is the easiest fucking job in the world
She sounds like a loser, I feel bad for her kid.
Somebody get that kid outta there!
Fuckin half wit, no wonder CEO’s love AI, dumb as bricks
I don’t understand why people are still taking this woman seriously. She is not a ‘girlboss’. She is the woman who ran Yahoo into the ground, taking it from one of the giants of the dot com era into a largely worthless and useless has-been by grossly mismanaging every single one of their formerly valuable properties.
The fact that she is involved immediately makes this company lose credibility in my eyes.
The fact that she apparently needs an AI model to come up with three compliments for her own daughter only reinforces my opinion.
What about that doesn’t sound like a “girlboss” to you?
Before google, yes. God, otherwise you would have to try to use a search engine, and those were shit.
So yeah, if Yahoo! was down around 1997, I would be pissed. However, I would just jump on mIRC.
She is the woman who ran Yahoo into the ground, taking it from one of the giants of the dot com era into a largely worthless and useless has-been
Yahoo was once a big recognizable brand, but there was pretty much no moment in history when anyone would have said “Oh no, Yahoo is down, now how will I get important things done?” It was never focused, it was never indispensable.
Yahoo was valued at over $100B briefly in 1999-2000, after Google had demonstrated a much, much better internet search. Yahoo cratered to as little as 5% of its all-time high, recovered for a while, then began fading away. Its market cap was just under $20B when Mayer was hired in 2012. After which the market cap trended up.
And that’s why I say she ran it into the ground- because when Google demonstrated a MUCH MUCH MUCH better Search, Yahoo didn’t do anything differently. They kept going as a ‘start page portal site’, kept pushing their really shitty email system, and just rode that wave into irrelevance.
Yahoo HAD some properties that COULD have been immensely valuable, even post-Google, if done right.Flickr is one that comes to mind. Google had Picasa, and Google was innovating and pushing updates while Flickr (app and website) stagnated. So with no innovation everybody eventually left Flickr. With some vision, Flickr could have become what Tumblr or Google Photos ended up being.
Yahoo Answers was another one. It was a forum sort of like AskReddit where you could post questions on any subject you wanted and others would answer it. Again, stagnated, became irrelevant.
I’ll give you that Mayer came in after much of the value had been lost. But she came into a diamond in the rough, a site that was ready to reinvent itself into something relevant again, and she just didn’t.
And that’s why I say she ran it into the ground- because when Google demonstrated a MUCH MUCH MUCH better Search, Yahoo didn’t do anything differently.
Look, this sentence literally blames Mayer for things that happened before her tenure. You acknowledge that this doesn’t make any sense, but you can’t really deny that it’s what you’ve said. Somehow the media that’s covered Mayer has made a lot of people react this way.
Flickr is one that comes to mind. Google had Picasa…
As a response to its community’s concerns, Flickr saw a substantial engineering investment from 2014-2015 or so, under Mayer’s tenure. I’m afraid the best summary I’ve found is pretty obvious AI slop, but it’s relating some real events.
Flickr lives, Picasa was killed, Google Photos is now an extremely annoying nagware for backup services. Things could be so much worse for Flickr.
Yahoo Answers was another one…
God I hated Yahoo Answers.
Mayer’s attempts to make Yahoo relevant again may not have worked but it’s not responsible or accurate to conclude that she was necessarily inept.
It is my suspicion that if, say, Jack Dorsey had overseen the dismantling of Yahoo, the business press would have told us that he made a great effort but Yahoo’s problems went too deep. Rather than leading us to believe that he was just inept. Or that he failed because he took the wrong amount of paternity leave.
She is the woman who ran Yahoo into the ground
Was Yahoo doing that well in 2012? At the time people were saying that she would never have gotten the job if Yahoo wasn’t a sinking ship
Look at Google as an example. Google started as a search engine and ad company, and has since reinvented itself with investment in new areas like photos, email, Android, etc.
Yahoo started as a search engine, ad company, ‘portal start page’, and email. They kept doing the same old thing and went nowhere.
But they still had products with value- Flickr for example. Managing photos was starting to become a big thing, but they let Flickr stagnate, it got no development, and eventually people stopped using it. Look at their email product as another- Gmail focused on making their email usable, clean, fast, great storage, and without lock-in. Yahoo email sucked and it was hard to get rid of them because for a long time they didn’t support IMAP (what you’d use to vacuum out your old messages) or email forwarding. People stayed not because it was a great product, but because they were stuck. But that’s a real missed opportunity- Yahoo Mail could have been what Gmail became.
When Google modernized their site with web 2.0 technologies like AJAX and updated the look and feel to match, Yahoo still felt like a Web 1.0 site with ads all over the place and messy design.
That’s why I say she ran the company into the ground. Just because Yahoo wasn’t leading the pack when she joined doesn’t mean there weren’t any wins to be had. It’s the job of CEO to recognize where the company should invest and innovate and where they should stay the course.
Another example- one of her big decisions was ending all remote work for Yahoo employees, without consideration for employees that didn’t live near a Yahoo office, or even how much office space Yahoo had. I remember reports of people working in hallways and sitting on the floor because there weren’t enough desks for everybody that was forced to come in.
To be clear- I’m NOT saying she’s stupid. She’s obviously very smart. But I am saying she wasn’t a good leader, and made many decisions that were obviously wrong both at the time and as seen historically. She does not seem to be a person with good business sense or the right kind of leadership, for a great many reasons.
She was one among a string of bad CEOs for Yahoo. I worked there for a couple of years under another of them. In each case, people thought that this was the one who’d turn the company around. When I joined, I was pretty excited because they owned things like Flickr (still my favorite photo sharing site, long since detached from yahoo), del.icio.us (my favorite bookmark sharing site), and a bunch of neat stuff at Yahoo Developer Network (YQL and Pipes come to mind). Those all seemed pretty significant, but the company never really figured out how to turn those things into business success.
The interesting thing here, though, is that IMO Yahoo has been successful in its own way over the past few years, probably since Verizon sold it. It just doesn’t exhibit the “infinite growth forever” characteristics that make it appealing to investors. Its sports and finance sites remain very popular. It seems to have reached a point of stability as a business. But the current private equity owned company bears little resemblance to the original Yahoo and I certainly wouldn’t consider it a “tech company” in any meaningful way.
I largely agree with you, though by the time she took the reigns at yahoo, it was already pretty dead.
But this pattern of executives proudly offloading ‘pesky personal connection’ to AI just works to confirm that their stratum of society are almost exclusively sociopaths.
She probably “extracted value” for shareholders of a dying company. This usually means picking the company apart, selling things, firing people, and offshoring labor.
IMO, every time a CEO, bigshot capitalist, or industrialist is cited as a “hero”, I try to keep in mind they are not our hero.
Yahoo owned so many interesting services at some point or another over the years it’s absolutely insane.
Some Yahoo-branded services that spring to mind (really just off the top of my head) are things like the Yahoo Directory (larger than DMOZ at some point), Search (more popular than Google at some point), GeoCities, Maps, Mail, Messenger, Groups, Games (online boardgames) and Answers.
And then there’s all the stuff that wasn’t Yahoo-branded, which includes some absolute bangers like del.icio.us, Flickr, Tumblr, AIM, MapQuest, RYOT, or fucking AOL and Netscape(!)
It boggles my damn mind that anybody could own and squander that much stuff. Properly managed they should have been an internet service giant today.
This feels a bit like an ad for dazzle.
Because it is. She’s fully capable of coming up with three superlatives about her child, but she’d rather use her kid as a prop in a sales pitch.
She’s fully capable of coming up with three superlatives about her child
You may underestimate how much of a sociopath these people are…
Sociopaths are usually great at superlatives; flattering people is one of the easiest ways to manipulate them
This woman’s bad decisions brought down an Internet giant and yet she’s still treated as if she is someone worth listening to.
Dhe was paid to do a job and, since shes stilñ there, i guews she is doing the job well
The job simply wasn’t “make yahoo something big and successful”
hey now, she was paid quite well for that work, over $200m.
I genuinely don’t understand people like this who are so averse to thinking that they go out of their way to prompt a language model to get an answer that they should’ve known already.
People in my life say I think to much despite the fact I’m naturally a deep thinker, quick is disappointing to hear from them because I know they use LLMs for “research”, which really means to ask tops 3 questions and think you’re informed.
Well hey, at least the rich can be unthinking dumbasses too
Had to input what the nanny told her about her kid.
I think this sucks but I also think the headlines have never given Mayer a fair shake at anything and that also sucks. “Marissa Mayer dared to speak and we’re here to get snarky about it” could apply to almost every headline I’ve seen that was about her. And this story charges straight to “girlboss.” Ugh.
I remember that she was getting a lot of positive press because she was public about pregnancy or something but returned to full time work like 5 days after she gave birth which is dystopian as hell.
A real “girl boss” in a position of power and wealth and public visibility needs to use that platform to take a year or two of maternity leave and spend that time caring for the child and fighting to get those rights to everyone.
Didn’t they put a nursery in her office or something? The average worker isn’t getting the accommodations she had.
Exactly! And they held her up as some kind of symbol of women’s liberation.
She got press that pointed out she was a CEO who had dared to get pregnant. It seemed to me they were pointing out that 1) a CEO who took time off to give birth was bad, and 2) a woman who wouldn’t take more maternity leave was also bad.
Way too much press about her was about her personal-life decisions rather than business prospects.
A real “girl boss” …
I read “girlboss” as strictly perjorative.
needs to use that platform to take a year or two of maternity leave
This is tantamount to saying: a CEO mom is impossible.
This is tantamount to saying: a CEO mom is impossible.
Uhhh… No, it is not.
Yahoo offers a generous 16 week maternity leave, and she took 2 and worked from home during. She said it wasn’t part of the consideration of giving her the job when she was six months pregnant, do you honestly believe that?
Do you honestly believe her offering to take only 2 weeks “leave” while working was a feminist or woman empowering decision? Not a compromise to land the job that wouldn’t have been offered if she wanted to take time to be with her child instead?
You and her are the ones perpetuating “CEO mom is impossible”, unless they take barely any time off to be a mom and still work remotely while being “off”.
I believe a mom can be CEO AND take the full maternity leave while knowing how to delegate and have minimal need to check-in for those 16 weeks. You believe she has to act like she didn’t just have a baby and return to work as soon as humanly possible in order to be a CEO.
I don’t see how you get this attitude, those conclusions, from anything I wrote.
Yahoo offers a generous 16 week maternity leave
Which is just a little bit shy of two years
Do you honestly believe her offering to take only 2 weeks “leave” while working was a feminist or woman empowering decision?
No. But I think that decision was up to her and that the press should have treated it as not-newsworthy. Any amount of maternity leave that she chose was doomed to be criticized by somebody as the wrong amount. And so, it was.
You and her are the ones perpetuating “CEO mom is impossible”
No. CompactFlax posited that “A real ‘girl boss’ in a position of power and wealth and public visibility needs to use that platform to take a year or two of maternity leave,” and I’m just observing there was no realistic possibility of that happening. If this is what you demand from a CEO mom, well, you’re not getting that.
You believe she has to act like…
I don’t understand how you think you know any such thing. I comprehensively don’t think like this. I don’t think there’s any “has to,” I think those arrangements should have been her own decision and it would be better to have minimal commentary on it.
The fact that everyone feels entitled to weigh in on her work/life balance and parenting decisions is the problem. Criticize her for her business decisions, criticize her for being an AI pusher, that’s fine, that’s appropriate.
When criticism focuses on “CEO mommy” topics, that is a mode and angle of criticism that no man ever seems to face in the tech/biz news. That is sexism. Obviously. What else would that be?
I was reacting to your wild conclusion.
“Choosing” your career over time with your newborn despite having the means to do so it’s not “feminism” or “woman empowerment”, it’s capitalism and shitty parenting. I didn’t like that you are conflating them.
At best I could accept the argument that she calculated the wealthy she could accumulate will serve her children long term better than spending time parenting them and leaving them with financial instability… But then that’s not a choice, that’s a difficult position forced on her but capitalism.
The idea that she “chose” to work through the two weeks and then return back to full time work and that choice being empowering is ridiculous. The idea that pointing that out is the equivalent of saying women can’t be CEOs is sexist.
I took less than 2 weeks of paternity leave, but I would never suggest I chose that. I chose not to lose my job and keep a roof over my newborn’s head, but that wasn’t much of a choice.
You don’t understand where I’m coming from because you’ve completely taken it for granted that of course Mayer’s every move should be publicly dissected under a microscope, not just for business soundness, but also to check if she’s setting a luminous enough example for all other women everywhere.
Which is a thing I’m refusing to do.
