Article on Marissa Mayer of Yahoo

[Edd]

Recent piece on Business Insider, if you find this kind of thing interesting: http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-biography-2013-8

I devoured it but its pretty long. I have this weird soft spot for Yahoo. Important side note: she's kinda hot.

 

[Geoff]

I'd like to read the updated article 5 years from now. Micro-manager control freaks typically have a very poor history retaining their key staff.

 

[Edd]

Yahoo needs something. You're not going to get brought in to turn a multi-billion dollar company around without pissing off some people. I'm curious, too, about the 5 year outlook. She seems like an amazing person, regardless.

 

[Geoff]

I don't know about "amazing person". She's obviously smart. Undergrad and grad degrees at Sanford and years as a lead at Google show that. I don't think "parking lot full at 8am and still full at 6:30pm" is a metric for success in a high tech company. She cancelled telecommuting at a company located in some of the worst traffic congestion in the world. The economy is soft so employees have no option but to cave in to the reign of terror. Of course the parking lots are full.

<-------- Telecommuter

In my experience, control freak micromanagers don't last long. That management approach doesn't scale. When you don't delegate and empower your competent people, all decisions go single threaded through the CEO. That works fine in an early stage startup where you have tens or maybe hundreds of employees. It falls over when you are the size of Yahoo. Decisions simply don't get made.

I just went to the Yahoo home page for the first time in many years. Purple? Really?

The home page is basically an online USA Today. It knows my location so it gives me local weather but nothing else is location-sensitive. I get Anywhere, USA fluff news. I get a few sports scores for teams that don't matter. I use Yahoo's Flickr for photos but they really don't have any other cloud services I care about.

 

[Edd]

The recent news about Yahoo having "more web traffic" than Google in July was surprising....and then you look at what they're talking about. Yahoo hot areas were mail (natch), games (huh?), and real estate(?). The numbers did not include Tumblr (Yahoo owned), and mobile (and maybe even search) wasn't factored in. After you look at the specifics, the news story kinda seems like BS, but I'm sure Mayer isn't complaining.

 

[ScottySkis]

I still think Google is much better search engine then Yahoo. But I like my Yahoo email better then my Gmail.

 

[Geoff]

I think that in my email community, gmail outnumbers yahoo mail by about 10 to 1. Personally, I only use those funky microsoft, yahoo, and google email accounts as fill-ins for when I don't want to give out my real email address or if I'm required to create one to use some other service from that company.

 

[Edd]

Just looked for user numbers between the two and there seems to be some disagreement. Anecdotally, I know way more Gmail than Yahoo users. I've used Yahoo as my primary email since 1998. I'm always surprised when someone gives me Yahoo as their email address.

 

[Nick]

I am also. They are mostly holdouts who don't know much about technology and / or are simply just using the same address they have been using forever. My primary (personal) email address is gmail.

It's sort of like seeing someone with an AOL account

 

[Edd]

It's sort of like seeing someone with an AOL account

People still pay for AOL. This article is a year old but an older guy at work told me this year he couldn't figure out how to cancel his account.

http://gizmodo.com/5929710/3-million-suckers-still-pay-for-aol-dial+up


Edit: the comments point out that some have no choice and have to pay for dial-up but the guy I work with is basically paying for an email account. When he's on his computer I occasionally hear the "You've got mail!" Awesome!

 

[Geoff]

People still pay for AOL. This article is a year old but an older guy at work told me this year he couldn't figure out how to cancel his account.

http://gizmodo.com/5929710/3-million-suckers-still-pay-for-aol-dial+up


Edit: the comments point out that some have no choice and have to pay for dial-up but the guy I work with is basically paying for an email account. When he's on his computer I occasionally hear the "You've got mail!" Awesome!

I pay a fair chunk of money every 3 years to a hosting company to host my domain name, a trivial vanity web site, and provide SMTP/POP email service for me. I don't want Google or Yahoo reading my personal email and I'd get laughed at professionally if I had an aol.com account. I could do it on a Linux host at home and use a DNS redirector service to point my domain name at my IP address but it's just not worth saving the money to me.

 

[Nick]

People still pay for AOL. This article is a year old but an older guy at work told me this year he couldn't figure out how to cancel his account.

http://gizmodo.com/5929710/3-million-suckers-still-pay-for-aol-dial+up


Edit: the comments point out that some have no choice and have to pay for dial-up but the guy I work with is basically paying for an email account. When he's on his computer I occasionally hear the "You've got mail!" Awesome!

Yeah exactly I read that article earlier, basically they live in areas with no other options.

I remember my dad had changed the sound effects on his computer. When he shut it down it used to be the Terminator saying, "I'll be back".