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Marissa Mayer: A CEO Que Revolucionou o Yahoo!
Marissa Mayer - A CEO que revolucionou o Yahoo! é muito mais que um perfil completo (e revelador) de Marissa Mayer - uma das executivas mais reconhecidas do setor de tecnologia e internet, com passagens de sucesso pelo Google e o Yahoo!. Bem apurado, cheio de detalhes e com uma narrativa ágil, o livro traz os bastidores da ascensão e da queda do Yahoo!, uma empresa conhecida mundialmente por seu caráter pioneiro no universo virtual e com atuação longeva no mercado nacional.
336 pages, Paperback
First published January 6, 2015
84 people are currently reading
1909 people want to read
About the author
Nicholas Carlson
155 books12 followersNicholas is Editor-in-Chief of Business Insider and the author of "Marissa Mayer and the Fight To Save Yahoo!" Previously, he was Business Insider's chief correspondent.
His investigative reporting rewrote the histories of Facebook, Twitter, and Groupon. Carlson's coverage of Yahoo won Digiday's award for Best Editorial Achievement of the year in 2014.
In 2015, Carlson's New York Times Magazine cover story, "What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried to Be Steve Jobs," was a finalist for a Mirror Award for best in-depth/enterprise reporting.
Carlson is a contributor to Bloomberg Television's biography series "Game Changers" and a frequent guest on CNBC.
Previously, he reported for Gawker Media's Silicon Valley gossip blog, Valleywag.
His investigative reporting rewrote the histories of Facebook, Twitter, and Groupon. Carlson's coverage of Yahoo won Digiday's award for Best Editorial Achievement of the year in 2014.
In 2015, Carlson's New York Times Magazine cover story, "What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried to Be Steve Jobs," was a finalist for a Mirror Award for best in-depth/enterprise reporting.
Carlson is a contributor to Bloomberg Television's biography series "Game Changers" and a frequent guest on CNBC.
Previously, he reported for Gawker Media's Silicon Valley gossip blog, Valleywag.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 180 reviews
February 15, 2015
I can't tell if this was a good book or just really interesting because the story is so current. Book was published January 2015. I found it to be a page turner and couldn't stop reading. Also interesting for weaving together stories from the early days of the internet.
February 2, 2015
Mayer took over the job of C.E.O. of the troubled Yahoo Company, in a male-dominated industry while pregnant. Nicholas Carlson’s book set out to reveal the controversy about Mayer because she was upsetting the women’s issues industrial complex. Some people were upset because she took maternity leave right after accepting the job of C.E.O. and the other people upset because she only took two weeks leave.
The book is really two books in one, as a good portion of the book is the history of Yahoo. It’s history of brand neglect and mismanagement. The remainder is about Mayer. There is little documentation in the book regarding Mayer as it appears Carlson reported a lot of the gossip. I got the feeling from the book that Carlson reported a lot of the sexist gossip such as the name of the designer of the clothes Mayer wore etc.
Carlson demonstrates that Mayer is worth paying attention to for reasons that transcend gender. He states that Mayer is a complex personality who defies most stereotypes. Carlson states that Mayer early in her career understood personal branding and developed hers early in her career. She is a geek that doesn’t look the part. Carlson argues Mayer earned her shot at running Yahoo through years of innovative thinking in an industry that prides itself in novel ideas.
Mayer was born in Wisconsin and joined Google right out of Stanford University graduate Computer Science Program. She ultimately became one of Google’s most influential executives. As with any fast raising career person, she generated jealousy and resentment from some of her co-workers. Just like many others in her field she put in the hard work, long hours and creative abilities to raise though the ranks of a company.
The question isn’t whether Mayer can save Yahoo; it’s whether Yahoo can be saved at all. For the past two years Mayer has attempted to focus on making the company’s workforce more productive and on making applications for Mobil phones with some success. She has managed to prevent mass layoffs. But Yahoo is a deeply troubled company. Carlson says she is having trouble replacing a few critical key people and without doing so she will not success. Carlson states that even if Yahoo fails Mayer is a star to watch. She has an incredible work ethic, genius sense of what makes an Internet product useable and she has worldwide frame, and charisma to success in the business world. I read this as an audiobook downloaded from Audible. Kitt Vandenheuvel narrated the book.
The book is really two books in one, as a good portion of the book is the history of Yahoo. It’s history of brand neglect and mismanagement. The remainder is about Mayer. There is little documentation in the book regarding Mayer as it appears Carlson reported a lot of the gossip. I got the feeling from the book that Carlson reported a lot of the sexist gossip such as the name of the designer of the clothes Mayer wore etc.
Carlson demonstrates that Mayer is worth paying attention to for reasons that transcend gender. He states that Mayer is a complex personality who defies most stereotypes. Carlson states that Mayer early in her career understood personal branding and developed hers early in her career. She is a geek that doesn’t look the part. Carlson argues Mayer earned her shot at running Yahoo through years of innovative thinking in an industry that prides itself in novel ideas.
Mayer was born in Wisconsin and joined Google right out of Stanford University graduate Computer Science Program. She ultimately became one of Google’s most influential executives. As with any fast raising career person, she generated jealousy and resentment from some of her co-workers. Just like many others in her field she put in the hard work, long hours and creative abilities to raise though the ranks of a company.
The question isn’t whether Mayer can save Yahoo; it’s whether Yahoo can be saved at all. For the past two years Mayer has attempted to focus on making the company’s workforce more productive and on making applications for Mobil phones with some success. She has managed to prevent mass layoffs. But Yahoo is a deeply troubled company. Carlson says she is having trouble replacing a few critical key people and without doing so she will not success. Carlson states that even if Yahoo fails Mayer is a star to watch. She has an incredible work ethic, genius sense of what makes an Internet product useable and she has worldwide frame, and charisma to success in the business world. I read this as an audiobook downloaded from Audible. Kitt Vandenheuvel narrated the book.
March 12, 2017
This is the riveting tale of the rise and fall of Yahoo!. The title and cover art gives the impression that it's basically a biography of Marissa Mayer, but that wouldn't have been nearly as fascinating. This book is about the history of Yahoo! and Google, the rise of the internet era, and activist investing, as well as Marissa Mayer.
Yahoo! was never a very good company, just a very aggressive one during an era (late 90's) when everyone and their mother was discovering this thing called the "internet" but didn't know how to find anything useful on it. Unless you were using the internet 20 years ago, it's hard to picture what it was like before Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, and Facebook. Imagine discovering a new land that you know is filled with gold and riches, but you don't know where to look for it. Yahoo! was like a treasure map. Everyone used it. Then Yahoo! started building many of their own websites. You could check your stocks, check the weather, check your email, chat with your friends, pretty much everything you could do on the internet at the time, all without leaving Yahoo!. It got to the point where Yahoo! was the internet.
Then, in the 2000's, everything crashed. People got so excited about the internet that they poured billions of dollars into do-nothing .com businesses, and much of that money found its way to Yahoo! through partnerships and advertising. When the money (which had no right being there in the first place) went away, so did Yahoo!'s business model. The rest is a long, sordid history of one CEO after another fighting to save the company, and failing.
The reason this book emphasizes Marissa Mayer is because she was the only one, since the very first CEO in the 90's, who seemed to have a chance. She was young, beautiful, charismatic, famous, and intelligent. She was a product person and she understood the tech really well, unlike all the other Yahoo! CEOs. She was one of the first engineers at Google, and one of the most pivotal figures in their search business. It looked really promising, which is why her failures were so astonishing, especially since they happened so quickly. The question this book sets out to answer is, why? Another interesting question is, what happens when you put a really promising manager in charge of a company that had been rotting for years? These are important questions for anyone interested in business and management, and Yahoo! is a fascinating case study.
Even after Yahoo!'s business model went down the shitter, it still had a lot of market share, tons of cash, and was very cocky. During the 2000's the list of companies Yahoo! was inches away from acquiring reads like a who's who of today's most successful internet companies: Google, Facebook, Twitter, eBay. Yahoo! screwed every deal because they thought they could do better--they could build it better themselves, or they could get a better price for it. Sometimes it was only because one of the managers at Yahoo! was a jack ass. Particularly the Facebook deal. It was basically done, the price agreed upon. All that was left was signing the dotted line. But the Yahoo! CEO got greedy and tried to negotiate the price even more, and Zuckerberg walked away from it. This book is filled with stories like this.
I worked at Yahoo! as a software developer from 2000 to 2008, from the end of its hey day to the beginning of its long, slow transition to irrelevance. I was a big believer in the company. I loved how it made the web so accessible, and was proud to be part of that vision. But I was always frustrated by how they couldn't seem to get basic things right. Soon after I was hired I got excited about search, and yet no one else seemed to give a damn about it until long after Google had been eating our lunch. After Yahoo! did get into search, I was confused why no one seemed to care about the UI as a means of differentiating ourselves from Google. Management seemed to just rest on their laurels. I was frustrated with how little input the employees had in the business. I was flabbergasted that the company had very little central infrastructure, and each team I was on had to build everything from scratch. I was annoyed that I was always being asked to cut corners and settle on shoddy, untested, incomplete systems. And everyone I talked to didn't seem to think any of my complaints were an issue. By 2006, I knew the company--its management, employees, and technology--was rotten, and repairing the damage was a hopeless cause.
After I left in 2008, every frustration I had was slowly vindicated by each new CEO who tried to save the company. They expressed the same astonishments that I always had. Marissa Mayer seemed to be the only one that was actually trying to do something about it. Since everyone was using Yahoo! stock as a proxy for investing in Alibaba, she even had two years where the investors basically didn't care about what the management did to the core business. And yet, she still failed.
The reasons are many. She didn't have any experience running a business. She made rookie mistakes like hiring people into executive positions without vetting them, micromanaging, and pushing out unfinished products resulting in massive outages. She instituted a horrible employee performance review system that pitted employees against each other. She had personality quirks that caused a lot of problems. She ignored her employees, she was chronically late, she avoided eye contact. But the real problem, which I think is the take-away of this book, is that she was working with something that was never built to last, and spent all her time trying to repair years worth of damage left by prior CEOs.
This book's story ends in 2014, when Marissa Mayer's and Yahoo!'s future was still in question. It was a little anticlimactic, since now we know how the story ends. The company is being sold to Verizon, and then it was wracked with devastating security breaches, one after another. As a former employee, I no longer feel vindicated. I just feel sad.
Yahoo! was never a very good company, just a very aggressive one during an era (late 90's) when everyone and their mother was discovering this thing called the "internet" but didn't know how to find anything useful on it. Unless you were using the internet 20 years ago, it's hard to picture what it was like before Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, and Facebook. Imagine discovering a new land that you know is filled with gold and riches, but you don't know where to look for it. Yahoo! was like a treasure map. Everyone used it. Then Yahoo! started building many of their own websites. You could check your stocks, check the weather, check your email, chat with your friends, pretty much everything you could do on the internet at the time, all without leaving Yahoo!. It got to the point where Yahoo! was the internet.
Then, in the 2000's, everything crashed. People got so excited about the internet that they poured billions of dollars into do-nothing .com businesses, and much of that money found its way to Yahoo! through partnerships and advertising. When the money (which had no right being there in the first place) went away, so did Yahoo!'s business model. The rest is a long, sordid history of one CEO after another fighting to save the company, and failing.
The reason this book emphasizes Marissa Mayer is because she was the only one, since the very first CEO in the 90's, who seemed to have a chance. She was young, beautiful, charismatic, famous, and intelligent. She was a product person and she understood the tech really well, unlike all the other Yahoo! CEOs. She was one of the first engineers at Google, and one of the most pivotal figures in their search business. It looked really promising, which is why her failures were so astonishing, especially since they happened so quickly. The question this book sets out to answer is, why? Another interesting question is, what happens when you put a really promising manager in charge of a company that had been rotting for years? These are important questions for anyone interested in business and management, and Yahoo! is a fascinating case study.
Even after Yahoo!'s business model went down the shitter, it still had a lot of market share, tons of cash, and was very cocky. During the 2000's the list of companies Yahoo! was inches away from acquiring reads like a who's who of today's most successful internet companies: Google, Facebook, Twitter, eBay. Yahoo! screwed every deal because they thought they could do better--they could build it better themselves, or they could get a better price for it. Sometimes it was only because one of the managers at Yahoo! was a jack ass. Particularly the Facebook deal. It was basically done, the price agreed upon. All that was left was signing the dotted line. But the Yahoo! CEO got greedy and tried to negotiate the price even more, and Zuckerberg walked away from it. This book is filled with stories like this.
I worked at Yahoo! as a software developer from 2000 to 2008, from the end of its hey day to the beginning of its long, slow transition to irrelevance. I was a big believer in the company. I loved how it made the web so accessible, and was proud to be part of that vision. But I was always frustrated by how they couldn't seem to get basic things right. Soon after I was hired I got excited about search, and yet no one else seemed to give a damn about it until long after Google had been eating our lunch. After Yahoo! did get into search, I was confused why no one seemed to care about the UI as a means of differentiating ourselves from Google. Management seemed to just rest on their laurels. I was frustrated with how little input the employees had in the business. I was flabbergasted that the company had very little central infrastructure, and each team I was on had to build everything from scratch. I was annoyed that I was always being asked to cut corners and settle on shoddy, untested, incomplete systems. And everyone I talked to didn't seem to think any of my complaints were an issue. By 2006, I knew the company--its management, employees, and technology--was rotten, and repairing the damage was a hopeless cause.
After I left in 2008, every frustration I had was slowly vindicated by each new CEO who tried to save the company. They expressed the same astonishments that I always had. Marissa Mayer seemed to be the only one that was actually trying to do something about it. Since everyone was using Yahoo! stock as a proxy for investing in Alibaba, she even had two years where the investors basically didn't care about what the management did to the core business. And yet, she still failed.
The reasons are many. She didn't have any experience running a business. She made rookie mistakes like hiring people into executive positions without vetting them, micromanaging, and pushing out unfinished products resulting in massive outages. She instituted a horrible employee performance review system that pitted employees against each other. She had personality quirks that caused a lot of problems. She ignored her employees, she was chronically late, she avoided eye contact. But the real problem, which I think is the take-away of this book, is that she was working with something that was never built to last, and spent all her time trying to repair years worth of damage left by prior CEOs.
This book's story ends in 2014, when Marissa Mayer's and Yahoo!'s future was still in question. It was a little anticlimactic, since now we know how the story ends. The company is being sold to Verizon, and then it was wracked with devastating security breaches, one after another. As a former employee, I no longer feel vindicated. I just feel sad.
January 25, 2015
Most books like this are written either as success narrative or deconstruction of the failure. Yahoo has been up and down. I think it's interesting listening to where company has been and hypothesis about where it may be going. Only time will tell. Kudos to author for doing his best without cooperation from many major players in the story.
August 3, 2016
Mungkin tak seorang pun, tak peduli seberapa berbakatnya mereka, bisa menyelamatkan Yahoo.
Bahkan, jika Marissa Mayer kalah dalam pertempurannya untuk menyelamatkan Yahoo, ia bukanlah orang luar biasa pertama yang mencoba melakukannya.
Jeff Mallet menjual sebuah perusahaan pada usia dua puluhan. Lalu, ia memimpin situs web populer dan mengubahnya menjadi sebuah perusahaan internasional bernilai 128 miliar dolar dengan pendapatan miliaran dolar dan ribuan karyawan.
Terry Semel bisa saja bekerja di mana saja di Hollywood setelah ia meninggalkan Warner Bros pada Juli 1999. Mereka menempelkan cetakan tangannya di trotoar depan gedung bioskop Mann's Chinese. Ia pergi ke Yahoo dan mengubah sebuah perusahaan berharga 5 miliar dolar menjadi 50 miliar dolar.
Jerry Yang yang mewujudkan adanya Yahoo. Pada saat Yahoo hanya memiliki uang tunai 4 miliar dolar, ia mempertaruhkan 1 miliar dolar pada sebuah startup Tiongkok yang tidak terkenal bernama Alibaba.
Sue Decker adalah analis top dalam industrinya dan termasuk CFO paling terpecaya di Wall Street. Warren Buffett bahkan meminta saran darinya.
Carol Bartz tumbuh di sebuah peternakan di Wisconsin tanpa kedua orangtuanya. Ia menjalankan sebuah organisasi penjualan mayor dalam dunia yang chauvinis dan didominasi pria. Lalu, ia mengambil alih Autodesk, menendang founder kesayangannya, dan mengubahnya menjadi mesin yang tumbuh dengan cepat.- Hal 326.
Semua nama yang disebutkan diatas adalah orang terkenal di balik Yahoo dan orang penting serta sukses di perusahaan mereka sebelumnya. Namun ketika mengurus Yahoo, mereka semua gagal. Bahkan Marissa Mayer mungkin akan gagal juga, terbukti dengan belum menaiknya pendapatan Yahoo serta menurunnya kultur karyawan Yahoo sampai hampir akhir tahun 2014 saat tiba waktunya perlindungan dari Alibaba lepas. Kalaupun Marissa berhasil, Yahoo tetap saja tidak akan sejaya saat pertama kalinya populer, sekitar tahun 1997-an sampai 2000. Yahoo telah begitu ketinggalan dengan Google, Facebook, bahkan Youtube.
Bisa dikatakan penyesalan Yahoo yang terbesar adalah mereka tidak membeli Google dan Facebook saat kesepakatan jual beli itu nyaris saja terjadi. Yahoo melewatkannya. Sekarang dua perusahaan itu tumbuh dengan cepat melampaui Yahoo.
Pada Juli 1999, Google dalam keadaan mengerikan. Semuanya kacau, Google.com down. Bahkan Larry Page sang founder bersembunyi di dapur Google dan itu adalah hari kedua sejak Mayer bergabung dengan Google. Pada tahun 1997, Google berharap Yahoo mau membeli saham mereka. Hal ini karena founder dan co-founder Google kekurangan biaya untuk menyelesaikan gelar Ph.D mereka. Saat itu, Google bukanlah siapa-siapa. Pemimpin industri internet masih Yahoo. Namun, Yahoo menolak. Lalu, Yahoo sekali lagi hampir saja bisa membeli Google, namun Google yang perlahan tumbuh selalu menaikkan biayanya karena sebenarnya Google tidak mau menjualnya pada Yahoo. Kesempatan Yahoo untuk membeli Google hanya ada di tahun 1997.
Kemudian pada masa Terry Semel menjadi CEO Yahoo, Yahoo hampir saja bisa membeli Facebook. Namun, Semel masih saja menawar 850 juta dolar pada saat seharusnya 1 miliar dolar. Mark yang memang kurang antusias menjual Facebook langsung membatalkan negosiasi tersebut. Saat itu, Facebook masih hanya sebatas sosial media kampus.
Bahkan Youtube pun dulunya lebih ingin dibeli oleh Yahoo dibandingkan dengan Google. Namun Yahoo tidak tertarik dengan Youtube. Pada akhirnya Google lah yang berhasil.
Sebenarnya sampai sekarang saya tidak begitu yakin alasan saya mau membeli dan membaca buku ini. Biasanya yang saya baca adalah novel. Saat pertama kali mau membacanya, saya khawatir saya akan menyesal telah menghamburkan uang dengan membeli bacaan sejenis ini. Saya takut buku ini kelewat berat. Namun pada akhirnya tidak demikian. Justru, buku ini menyenangkan. Benar-benar menyenangkan.
Lewat buku ini saya jadi tahu bahwa ternyata Yahoo lebih dulu ada daripada Google. Padahal dulunya saya mengira Google lebih duluan populer. Perusahaan internet pertama yang sukses besar itu adalah Yahoo bukan nama-nama yang lebih kita kenal saat ini. Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn adalah perusahaan-perusahaan internet yang baru muncul saat Yahoo mulai mengalami kemunduran. Hal ini diperparah dengan munculnya smartphone, Apple dan Android. Google yang memiliki Chrome dan Android semakin melejit. Yahoo yang memang sudah kalah dalam pencarian dengan Google semakin ketinggalan, meski Yahoo memiliki Tumblr. (Ini berkat Marissa Mayer yang berhasil membeli Tumblr).
Buku ini menyajikan sebuah thriller korporat yang sukses membawa kisah dramatis Yahoo kepada publik dengan luar biasa. Menyajikan sudut pandang memukau tentang Yahoo. Membaca buku ini kita seperti dibawa pada kehidupan Yahoo itu sendiri. Saat pertama kalinya ia lahir, bagaimana jatuh bangunnya Yahoo untuk menjadi salah satu perusahaan Internet terkuat di dunia. Lewat buku ini saya jadi tahu bagaimana pemikiran orang-orang eksekutif perusahaan papan atas dan bagaimana cara kerjanya. Termasuk para pemegang saham dan dewan direksinya. Saya seperti menyaksikan bagaimana Yahoo tumbuh dan bagaimana ia melewati masalah yang tengah ia hadapi.
Seperti membaca biografi, hanya saja kali ini bukan seseorang melainkan suatu perusahaan. Ia lahir, kecil, kemudian tumbuh. Lalu ia mengalami berbagai masalah, kemunduran, dan lain-lain. Layaknya kehidupan seseorang pada umumnya.
Awalnya saya mengira buku ini menceritakan kisah Yahoo sampai awal tahun 2016, tetapi ternyata sampai tahun 2014 saja. Jadi saya tidak tahu bagaimana lagi perkembangan Yahoo saat ini, bagaimana Mayer memperbaiki kesalahannya dan mencapai tujuannya untuk menyelamatkan Yahoo. Marissa Mayer memang belum mampu menyelamatkan Yahoo dan menjadikannya populer seperti Jeff Mallet dulu, tetapi sejak kedatangannya ke Yahoo lumayan banyak perubahan terjadi di Yahoo. Banyak produk yang ia hasilkan dibawah kepemimpinannya. Tiga aplikasi Yahoo pun masuk dalam 100 aplikasi terbaik menurut Apple. Aplikasi tersebut adalah Yahoo Mail, Yahoo, dan Tumblr. Yahoo Weather pun memenangkan penghargaan sebagai salah satu aplikasi berdesain terbaik oleh Apple. Kemudian kultur Yahoos pun meningkat meskipun kemudian turun lagi semenjak adanya QPR.
Namun bagi saya sih meskipun Yahoo tidak sepopuler dulu setidaknya Yahoo belum benar-benar ditinggalkan, tidak seperti Nokia dan Blackberry.
Setelah baca buku ini saya makin penasaran dengan bacaan sejenis ini. Mungkin setelah ini saya akan membaca Apple vs Google, Stevejobs, dan tentang founder Microsoft, Bill Gates.
Bahkan, jika Marissa Mayer kalah dalam pertempurannya untuk menyelamatkan Yahoo, ia bukanlah orang luar biasa pertama yang mencoba melakukannya.
Jeff Mallet menjual sebuah perusahaan pada usia dua puluhan. Lalu, ia memimpin situs web populer dan mengubahnya menjadi sebuah perusahaan internasional bernilai 128 miliar dolar dengan pendapatan miliaran dolar dan ribuan karyawan.
Terry Semel bisa saja bekerja di mana saja di Hollywood setelah ia meninggalkan Warner Bros pada Juli 1999. Mereka menempelkan cetakan tangannya di trotoar depan gedung bioskop Mann's Chinese. Ia pergi ke Yahoo dan mengubah sebuah perusahaan berharga 5 miliar dolar menjadi 50 miliar dolar.
Jerry Yang yang mewujudkan adanya Yahoo. Pada saat Yahoo hanya memiliki uang tunai 4 miliar dolar, ia mempertaruhkan 1 miliar dolar pada sebuah startup Tiongkok yang tidak terkenal bernama Alibaba.
Sue Decker adalah analis top dalam industrinya dan termasuk CFO paling terpecaya di Wall Street. Warren Buffett bahkan meminta saran darinya.
Carol Bartz tumbuh di sebuah peternakan di Wisconsin tanpa kedua orangtuanya. Ia menjalankan sebuah organisasi penjualan mayor dalam dunia yang chauvinis dan didominasi pria. Lalu, ia mengambil alih Autodesk, menendang founder kesayangannya, dan mengubahnya menjadi mesin yang tumbuh dengan cepat.- Hal 326.
Semua nama yang disebutkan diatas adalah orang terkenal di balik Yahoo dan orang penting serta sukses di perusahaan mereka sebelumnya. Namun ketika mengurus Yahoo, mereka semua gagal. Bahkan Marissa Mayer mungkin akan gagal juga, terbukti dengan belum menaiknya pendapatan Yahoo serta menurunnya kultur karyawan Yahoo sampai hampir akhir tahun 2014 saat tiba waktunya perlindungan dari Alibaba lepas. Kalaupun Marissa berhasil, Yahoo tetap saja tidak akan sejaya saat pertama kalinya populer, sekitar tahun 1997-an sampai 2000. Yahoo telah begitu ketinggalan dengan Google, Facebook, bahkan Youtube.
Bisa dikatakan penyesalan Yahoo yang terbesar adalah mereka tidak membeli Google dan Facebook saat kesepakatan jual beli itu nyaris saja terjadi. Yahoo melewatkannya. Sekarang dua perusahaan itu tumbuh dengan cepat melampaui Yahoo.
Pada Juli 1999, Google dalam keadaan mengerikan. Semuanya kacau, Google.com down. Bahkan Larry Page sang founder bersembunyi di dapur Google dan itu adalah hari kedua sejak Mayer bergabung dengan Google. Pada tahun 1997, Google berharap Yahoo mau membeli saham mereka. Hal ini karena founder dan co-founder Google kekurangan biaya untuk menyelesaikan gelar Ph.D mereka. Saat itu, Google bukanlah siapa-siapa. Pemimpin industri internet masih Yahoo. Namun, Yahoo menolak. Lalu, Yahoo sekali lagi hampir saja bisa membeli Google, namun Google yang perlahan tumbuh selalu menaikkan biayanya karena sebenarnya Google tidak mau menjualnya pada Yahoo. Kesempatan Yahoo untuk membeli Google hanya ada di tahun 1997.
Kemudian pada masa Terry Semel menjadi CEO Yahoo, Yahoo hampir saja bisa membeli Facebook. Namun, Semel masih saja menawar 850 juta dolar pada saat seharusnya 1 miliar dolar. Mark yang memang kurang antusias menjual Facebook langsung membatalkan negosiasi tersebut. Saat itu, Facebook masih hanya sebatas sosial media kampus.
Bahkan Youtube pun dulunya lebih ingin dibeli oleh Yahoo dibandingkan dengan Google. Namun Yahoo tidak tertarik dengan Youtube. Pada akhirnya Google lah yang berhasil.
Sebenarnya sampai sekarang saya tidak begitu yakin alasan saya mau membeli dan membaca buku ini. Biasanya yang saya baca adalah novel. Saat pertama kali mau membacanya, saya khawatir saya akan menyesal telah menghamburkan uang dengan membeli bacaan sejenis ini. Saya takut buku ini kelewat berat. Namun pada akhirnya tidak demikian. Justru, buku ini menyenangkan. Benar-benar menyenangkan.
Lewat buku ini saya jadi tahu bahwa ternyata Yahoo lebih dulu ada daripada Google. Padahal dulunya saya mengira Google lebih duluan populer. Perusahaan internet pertama yang sukses besar itu adalah Yahoo bukan nama-nama yang lebih kita kenal saat ini. Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn adalah perusahaan-perusahaan internet yang baru muncul saat Yahoo mulai mengalami kemunduran. Hal ini diperparah dengan munculnya smartphone, Apple dan Android. Google yang memiliki Chrome dan Android semakin melejit. Yahoo yang memang sudah kalah dalam pencarian dengan Google semakin ketinggalan, meski Yahoo memiliki Tumblr. (Ini berkat Marissa Mayer yang berhasil membeli Tumblr).
Buku ini menyajikan sebuah thriller korporat yang sukses membawa kisah dramatis Yahoo kepada publik dengan luar biasa. Menyajikan sudut pandang memukau tentang Yahoo. Membaca buku ini kita seperti dibawa pada kehidupan Yahoo itu sendiri. Saat pertama kalinya ia lahir, bagaimana jatuh bangunnya Yahoo untuk menjadi salah satu perusahaan Internet terkuat di dunia. Lewat buku ini saya jadi tahu bagaimana pemikiran orang-orang eksekutif perusahaan papan atas dan bagaimana cara kerjanya. Termasuk para pemegang saham dan dewan direksinya. Saya seperti menyaksikan bagaimana Yahoo tumbuh dan bagaimana ia melewati masalah yang tengah ia hadapi.
Seperti membaca biografi, hanya saja kali ini bukan seseorang melainkan suatu perusahaan. Ia lahir, kecil, kemudian tumbuh. Lalu ia mengalami berbagai masalah, kemunduran, dan lain-lain. Layaknya kehidupan seseorang pada umumnya.
Awalnya saya mengira buku ini menceritakan kisah Yahoo sampai awal tahun 2016, tetapi ternyata sampai tahun 2014 saja. Jadi saya tidak tahu bagaimana lagi perkembangan Yahoo saat ini, bagaimana Mayer memperbaiki kesalahannya dan mencapai tujuannya untuk menyelamatkan Yahoo. Marissa Mayer memang belum mampu menyelamatkan Yahoo dan menjadikannya populer seperti Jeff Mallet dulu, tetapi sejak kedatangannya ke Yahoo lumayan banyak perubahan terjadi di Yahoo. Banyak produk yang ia hasilkan dibawah kepemimpinannya. Tiga aplikasi Yahoo pun masuk dalam 100 aplikasi terbaik menurut Apple. Aplikasi tersebut adalah Yahoo Mail, Yahoo, dan Tumblr. Yahoo Weather pun memenangkan penghargaan sebagai salah satu aplikasi berdesain terbaik oleh Apple. Kemudian kultur Yahoos pun meningkat meskipun kemudian turun lagi semenjak adanya QPR.
Namun bagi saya sih meskipun Yahoo tidak sepopuler dulu setidaknya Yahoo belum benar-benar ditinggalkan, tidak seperti Nokia dan Blackberry.
Setelah baca buku ini saya makin penasaran dengan bacaan sejenis ini. Mungkin setelah ini saya akan membaca Apple vs Google, Stevejobs, dan tentang founder Microsoft, Bill Gates.
September 20, 2023
...the reason it ever succeeded in the first place was because it solved a global problem that lasted only for a moment.
If someone mentions Yahoo! to you, it's likely that the first thought that comes to mind is that it was 'a thing of past'. In fact, the younger generation may not have even heard of it. But this is a 3 decade old company that believe it or not still exists and has billions of users visiting its products everyday. From being 'Jerry and David's Guide to World Wide Web' - just a directory of web links; to the most visited site on the web - that can let you just about everything you'd want on the internet; to a thing of the past, Yahoo! has had a bumpy ride. Prior to reading this book, I myself was oblivious to the many hats Yahoo has donned since its conception.
Contrary to its name, this book isn't just about Marissa Mayer. It follows Yahoo! right from its start i.e. 1994 and follows its course till 2014. It was rollercoaster ride indeed, it goes up, up & up and then falls all of a sudden. The fall is where the book ends and we're left to google (how ironic :P) on the rest.
There were a lot of personal takeaways. Not only did it changed my perspective of Yahoo! (I viewed it as a failed venture), but also highlighted how each leader can steer the org in a different direction. Its easy to say that in hindsight, but its heartbreaking to see how many things Yahoo! could've been - a leader in search, mail, media and so on. But thanks to a bunch of wrong decisions made by wrong leaders coupled with Yahoo!'s lack of focus, it is still struggling to find its ground.
Another thing that was interesting about Yahoo! was the game of stocks and acquisitions. Shareholders and activist investors played such a huge role in driving Yahoo! decisions. This was quite contrary to all most companies I'd read about, where the decisions are driven by products rather than what the shareholders want. At first, the financial jargons were annoying but towards the latter half they became intriguing. Believe it or not, it has made me eager to educate myself about this domain.
Coming to Marissa, people I talk to have such polarizing opinions - she was a genius or she was the worst. I'm yet to form an opinion (depending on what she did after 2014), but from the book it seems like she was a skilled (but imperfect) leader put in a wrong role. She did make a difference, so many practices like anonymous QnA, employee phones, etc. have stayed until today. I guess the question posed by the author is relevant - could Yahoo have been saved by anyone?
The story ends at 2014, but we know that Yahoo got acquired by Verizon and then sold to a private equity firm. We don't know yet if there is a happy ending, but the fact that it still stands ranks in the top five in global traffic is something. This brand hold so much legacy and nostalgia, that one can't help but root for its return.
In conclusion, barring the financial jargons and going back and forth in timelines, it is a fascinating tale about a fascinating company and its many CEOs :D Definitely worth reading!
If someone mentions Yahoo! to you, it's likely that the first thought that comes to mind is that it was 'a thing of past'. In fact, the younger generation may not have even heard of it. But this is a 3 decade old company that believe it or not still exists and has billions of users visiting its products everyday. From being 'Jerry and David's Guide to World Wide Web' - just a directory of web links; to the most visited site on the web - that can let you just about everything you'd want on the internet; to a thing of the past, Yahoo! has had a bumpy ride. Prior to reading this book, I myself was oblivious to the many hats Yahoo has donned since its conception.
Contrary to its name, this book isn't just about Marissa Mayer. It follows Yahoo! right from its start i.e. 1994 and follows its course till 2014. It was rollercoaster ride indeed, it goes up, up & up and then falls all of a sudden. The fall is where the book ends and we're left to google (how ironic :P) on the rest.
There were a lot of personal takeaways. Not only did it changed my perspective of Yahoo! (I viewed it as a failed venture), but also highlighted how each leader can steer the org in a different direction. Its easy to say that in hindsight, but its heartbreaking to see how many things Yahoo! could've been - a leader in search, mail, media and so on. But thanks to a bunch of wrong decisions made by wrong leaders coupled with Yahoo!'s lack of focus, it is still struggling to find its ground.
Another thing that was interesting about Yahoo! was the game of stocks and acquisitions. Shareholders and activist investors played such a huge role in driving Yahoo! decisions. This was quite contrary to all most companies I'd read about, where the decisions are driven by products rather than what the shareholders want. At first, the financial jargons were annoying but towards the latter half they became intriguing. Believe it or not, it has made me eager to educate myself about this domain.
Coming to Marissa, people I talk to have such polarizing opinions - she was a genius or she was the worst. I'm yet to form an opinion (depending on what she did after 2014), but from the book it seems like she was a skilled (but imperfect) leader put in a wrong role. She did make a difference, so many practices like anonymous QnA, employee phones, etc. have stayed until today. I guess the question posed by the author is relevant - could Yahoo have been saved by anyone?
The story ends at 2014, but we know that Yahoo got acquired by Verizon and then sold to a private equity firm. We don't know yet if there is a happy ending, but the fact that it still stands ranks in the top five in global traffic is something. This brand hold so much legacy and nostalgia, that one can't help but root for its return.
In conclusion, barring the financial jargons and going back and forth in timelines, it is a fascinating tale about a fascinating company and its many CEOs :D Definitely worth reading!
January 31, 2015
Fascinating book. We are about to begin another in the perennial and interminable battles for the presidency. Several of the candidates claim extensive experience as business leaders so it's always interesting to read the inside stories of corporate business successes, failures, and often malfeasance.
I've read many books about Enron, the HP/Compaq merger problems, the 2008 housing crisis, etc. and much of the blame for those debacles can be blamed on individuals at the top. What is it we consider success for a company? Increased stock prices?Long-term viability? Best products and services? One common factor seems to be enormous compensation regardless of success or failure.
Marissa Mayer was lucky. The initial investment in Alibabo was just paying off when she became CEO injecting huge amounts of capital into the struggling Yahoo whose founder, Yang, and Chairman of the Board Bostock had rejected a purchase of from Microsoft that would have paid stockholders a 62% premium!
One of the first things she did was to institute a management system used at Google (and at Enron, I might add.) It involves employees coming up with quantifiable goals which they are then measured against annually and get a score. "It was a forced curve. In general, only 75 percent of any group got in the top three buckets. Twenty-five percent of every team had to go into the bottom two—“ occasionally misses” and “misses.” The result: Teammates directly competed with each other to make sure that they weren’t a part of that 25 percent." Those with low scores get no raises and/or the axe. A well-intended system, it's major flaw is (as Kurt Eichenwald noted in his article in Fortune) that employees work poorly in groups because since there are usually quotas for each performance category even a good employee might rank low in a team of high performers, someone has to. That means they tend to work poorly in groups and to undermine each other since they were ranked relative to their colleagues. That's what happened at Enron as well. It tends to destroy morale.
Yahoo is currently under attack by shareholder activists who argue that Mayer has not turned Yahoo around, nor has she met any of her original goals or timetables. Whether anyone could have is another story. Yahoo got famous by providing something people needed at the right time in the evolution of the Internet. Reinventing oneself once a certain level of size is achieved is very difficult. The Yahoo saga continues and may be fun to watch.
I've read many books about Enron, the HP/Compaq merger problems, the 2008 housing crisis, etc. and much of the blame for those debacles can be blamed on individuals at the top. What is it we consider success for a company? Increased stock prices?Long-term viability? Best products and services? One common factor seems to be enormous compensation regardless of success or failure.
Marissa Mayer was lucky. The initial investment in Alibabo was just paying off when she became CEO injecting huge amounts of capital into the struggling Yahoo whose founder, Yang, and Chairman of the Board Bostock had rejected a purchase of from Microsoft that would have paid stockholders a 62% premium!
One of the first things she did was to institute a management system used at Google (and at Enron, I might add.) It involves employees coming up with quantifiable goals which they are then measured against annually and get a score. "It was a forced curve. In general, only 75 percent of any group got in the top three buckets. Twenty-five percent of every team had to go into the bottom two—“ occasionally misses” and “misses.” The result: Teammates directly competed with each other to make sure that they weren’t a part of that 25 percent." Those with low scores get no raises and/or the axe. A well-intended system, it's major flaw is (as Kurt Eichenwald noted in his article in Fortune) that employees work poorly in groups because since there are usually quotas for each performance category even a good employee might rank low in a team of high performers, someone has to. That means they tend to work poorly in groups and to undermine each other since they were ranked relative to their colleagues. That's what happened at Enron as well. It tends to destroy morale.
Yahoo is currently under attack by shareholder activists who argue that Mayer has not turned Yahoo around, nor has she met any of her original goals or timetables. Whether anyone could have is another story. Yahoo got famous by providing something people needed at the right time in the evolution of the Internet. Reinventing oneself once a certain level of size is achieved is very difficult. The Yahoo saga continues and may be fun to watch.
January 31, 2015
Fascinating book. We are about to begin another in the perennial and interminable battles for the presidency. Several of the candidates claim extensive experience as business leaders so it's always interesting to read the inside stories of corporate business successes, failures, and often malfeasance.
I've read many books about Enron, the HP/Compaq merger problems, the 2008 housing crisis, etc. and much of the blame for those debacles can be blamed on individuals at the top. What is it we consider success for a company? Increased stock prices?Long-term viability? Best products and services? One common factor seems to be enormous compensation regardless of success or failure.
Marissa Mayer was lucky. The initial investment in Alibabo was just paying off when she became CEO injecting huge amounts of capital into the struggling Yahoo whose founder, Yang, and Chairman of the Board Bostock had rejected a purchase of from Microsoft that would have paid stockholders a 62% premium!
One of the first things she did was to institute a management system used at Google (and at Enron, I might add.) It involves employees coming up with quantifiable goals which they are then measured against annually and get a score. "It was a forced curve. In general, only 75 percent of any group got in the top three buckets. Twenty-five percent of every team had to go into the bottom two—“ occasionally misses” and “misses.” The result: Teammates directly competed with each other to make sure that they weren’t a part of that 25 percent." Those with low scores get no raises and/or the axe. A well-intended system, it's major flaw is (as Kurt Eichenwald noted in his article in Fortune) that employees work poorly in groups because since there are usually quotas for each performance category even a good employee might rank low in a team of high performers, someone has to. That means they tend to work poorly in groups and to undermine each other since they were ranked relative to their colleagues. That's what happened at Enron as well. It tends to destroy morale.
Yahoo is currently under attack by shareholder activists who argue that Mayer has not turned Yahoo around, nor has she met any of her original goals or timetables. Whether anyone could have is another story. Yahoo got famous by providing something people needed at the right time in the evolution of the Internet. Reinventing oneself once a certain level of size is achieved is very difficult. The Yahoo saga continues and may be fun to watch.
I've read many books about Enron, the HP/Compaq merger problems, the 2008 housing crisis, etc. and much of the blame for those debacles can be blamed on individuals at the top. What is it we consider success for a company? Increased stock prices?Long-term viability? Best products and services? One common factor seems to be enormous compensation regardless of success or failure.
Marissa Mayer was lucky. The initial investment in Alibabo was just paying off when she became CEO injecting huge amounts of capital into the struggling Yahoo whose founder, Yang, and Chairman of the Board Bostock had rejected a purchase of from Microsoft that would have paid stockholders a 62% premium!
One of the first things she did was to institute a management system used at Google (and at Enron, I might add.) It involves employees coming up with quantifiable goals which they are then measured against annually and get a score. "It was a forced curve. In general, only 75 percent of any group got in the top three buckets. Twenty-five percent of every team had to go into the bottom two—“ occasionally misses” and “misses.” The result: Teammates directly competed with each other to make sure that they weren’t a part of that 25 percent." Those with low scores get no raises and/or the axe. A well-intended system, it's major flaw is (as Kurt Eichenwald noted in his article in Fortune) that employees work poorly in groups because since there are usually quotas for each performance category even a good employee might rank low in a team of high performers, someone has to. That means they tend to work poorly in groups and to undermine each other since they were ranked relative to their colleagues. That's what happened at Enron as well. It tends to destroy morale.
Yahoo is currently under attack by shareholder activists who argue that Mayer has not turned Yahoo around, nor has she met any of her original goals or timetables. Whether anyone could have is another story. Yahoo got famous by providing something people needed at the right time in the evolution of the Internet. Reinventing oneself once a certain level of size is achieved is very difficult. The Yahoo saga continues and may be fun to watch.
August 29, 2015
I wanted to read the book because of Marissa Mayer (not Yahoo!) I must admit. She indeed is a great example of PR that works. Being lucky to become the speaker at Google, I believe the publicity she received back then worked for her career in a great way. The book didn’t help much in understanding what is so special about Marissa, why is she cool (the only thing standing out for me personally is her passion for user experience that helped make products much better; doing things much faster and becoming more transparent company for employees (e.g. running weekly FYI meetings) are to be mentioned as positive things too), otherwise you learn how she was always late for meetings, micromanaging, making bad hires, etc. As the other reviewer says 'I was a little disappointed reading this book because I expected to like Marissa Mayer and have her emerge as a role model for me. It turned out that the opposite was true, as she was not painted in the best light in this book'.
But the book is not about Marissa Mayer at Yahoo! (maybe just 25%), the rest is the story of early Yahoo! days and Marissa’s student and Google years. It helps to see what it is like to manage a public tech company having to deal with huge money, stock price pressure, activists campaigns, etc. While from most of the books you get to learn on what to do, in this one you learn what not. Yahoo! and its numerous CEOs, CMOs, CFOs, etc made many mistakes. But if you talk in general, the question the author asks is a good one -
the question isn’t whether Mayer can save Yahoo; it’s whether Yahoo can be saved at all. It has to do with the reason the business is out there, the purpose and value it creates. This is to be remembered by all entrepreneurs to avoid risks of becoming irrelevant.
“Ultimately, Yahoo suffers from the fact that the reason it ever succeeded in the first place was because it solved a global problem that lasted for only a moment. The early Internet was hard to use, and Yahoo made it easier. Yahoo was the internet. Then the Internet was flooded with capital and infinite solution for infinite problems, and the need for Yahoo faded. The company hasn’t found its purpose since - the thing it can do that no one else can.
But the book is not about Marissa Mayer at Yahoo! (maybe just 25%), the rest is the story of early Yahoo! days and Marissa’s student and Google years. It helps to see what it is like to manage a public tech company having to deal with huge money, stock price pressure, activists campaigns, etc. While from most of the books you get to learn on what to do, in this one you learn what not. Yahoo! and its numerous CEOs, CMOs, CFOs, etc made many mistakes. But if you talk in general, the question the author asks is a good one -
the question isn’t whether Mayer can save Yahoo; it’s whether Yahoo can be saved at all. It has to do with the reason the business is out there, the purpose and value it creates. This is to be remembered by all entrepreneurs to avoid risks of becoming irrelevant.
“Ultimately, Yahoo suffers from the fact that the reason it ever succeeded in the first place was because it solved a global problem that lasted for only a moment. The early Internet was hard to use, and Yahoo made it easier. Yahoo was the internet. Then the Internet was flooded with capital and infinite solution for infinite problems, and the need for Yahoo faded. The company hasn’t found its purpose since - the thing it can do that no one else can.
July 4, 2016
I read this on the 'beach' at Camp Mather. It was somewhat of a page-turner, surprisingly enough. When I got home I googled Yahoo and Mayer to see if she'd managed to turn the company around. SPOILER ALERT: nah
Lot of good people at Yahoo. Crazy how it all just went to pieces. It happens though. Look at Kodak, United Steel. In 100 years who knows which companies will still be around, let alone what they'll be worth.
You have to discount 50% of criticisms of Mayer due to sexism, IMO. Can't be helped, she's a high level female target in a sexist society. But the other 50% is just on her. Sounds like she was unqualified for the ads side of the job and didn't do a good job of delegating or hiring. She failed to build a team of competent execs around her to shore up her weaknesses, so in the end the whole thing "tumbled" away. See what I did therE?!
At the end of the day not all companies need to exist. As for all the talented people still at Yahoo-- Yahoos, come work for [insert company I currently work at]! The water's great!
Lot of good people at Yahoo. Crazy how it all just went to pieces. It happens though. Look at Kodak, United Steel. In 100 years who knows which companies will still be around, let alone what they'll be worth.
You have to discount 50% of criticisms of Mayer due to sexism, IMO. Can't be helped, she's a high level female target in a sexist society. But the other 50% is just on her. Sounds like she was unqualified for the ads side of the job and didn't do a good job of delegating or hiring. She failed to build a team of competent execs around her to shore up her weaknesses, so in the end the whole thing "tumbled" away. See what I did therE?!
At the end of the day not all companies need to exist. As for all the talented people still at Yahoo-- Yahoos, come work for [insert company I currently work at]! The water's great!
March 28, 2021
Lama nak habiskan buku ini sebab mood malas membaca dah datang. 😝
Apa yang aku belajar mengenai Marissa Mayer ini “choose the scariest option”. Bagaimana dia pilih keputusan yang menakutkan itu membuatkan dia berjaya. Dia tahu akan erti sebuah kegagalan. Apa makna di sebalik kegagalan itu.
Separuh buku menceritakan bagaimana terjadi nya Yahoo, macam mana Yahoo boleh berkembang, siapa pencipta Yahoo. Aku nak tahu sebab dulu memang kita nak cari apa-apa akan guna Yahoo. Aku nak tahu juga macam mana Google boleh ambik alih peranan Yahoo. Baru lah aku faham sebab Yahoo ini macam tak tahu “nature” dia lagi. Tetapi bagi aku, dah terlambat kot untuk bangkit balik. Sama macam Myspace. That not bad way to grow old.
Separuh lagi buku mengenai Marissa Mayer. Macam mana dia zaman kecil dia, zaman sekolah dia, sifat yang membentuk dia menjadi seseorang CEO sebelum usia 40 tahun. Aku memang kagum giler dengan pencapaian si Marissa Mayer dia. Tak sangka betul lah.
Buku yang terbaik lah.
Apa yang aku belajar mengenai Marissa Mayer ini “choose the scariest option”. Bagaimana dia pilih keputusan yang menakutkan itu membuatkan dia berjaya. Dia tahu akan erti sebuah kegagalan. Apa makna di sebalik kegagalan itu.
Separuh buku menceritakan bagaimana terjadi nya Yahoo, macam mana Yahoo boleh berkembang, siapa pencipta Yahoo. Aku nak tahu sebab dulu memang kita nak cari apa-apa akan guna Yahoo. Aku nak tahu juga macam mana Google boleh ambik alih peranan Yahoo. Baru lah aku faham sebab Yahoo ini macam tak tahu “nature” dia lagi. Tetapi bagi aku, dah terlambat kot untuk bangkit balik. Sama macam Myspace. That not bad way to grow old.
Separuh lagi buku mengenai Marissa Mayer. Macam mana dia zaman kecil dia, zaman sekolah dia, sifat yang membentuk dia menjadi seseorang CEO sebelum usia 40 tahun. Aku memang kagum giler dengan pencapaian si Marissa Mayer dia. Tak sangka betul lah.
Buku yang terbaik lah.
June 6, 2019
This was a great book to read. Learnt alot on how top managements work, how CEO thinks.
It also showed me that CEO, Top Management or Level 1-5 Manager are still humans, humans that make mistakes. They have their own personal challenges, they may hold alot of power, but they have their set of weaknesses that would lead to their downfall if not address and fixed quickly.
It's just like what Marissa Mayer said in her 2018 interview, There’s a great children’s book called “Rosie Revere, Engineer,” about this little girl named Rosie who likes to build things. The rhyme that comes at the end is: “Life might have its failures, but this was not it. The only true failure can come if you quit.”
You’ve just got to keep at it.
It also showed me that CEO, Top Management or Level 1-5 Manager are still humans, humans that make mistakes. They have their own personal challenges, they may hold alot of power, but they have their set of weaknesses that would lead to their downfall if not address and fixed quickly.
It's just like what Marissa Mayer said in her 2018 interview, There’s a great children’s book called “Rosie Revere, Engineer,” about this little girl named Rosie who likes to build things. The rhyme that comes at the end is: “Life might have its failures, but this was not it. The only true failure can come if you quit.”
You’ve just got to keep at it.
May 21, 2018
If you’re interested enough in Yahoo or Marissa Mayer to read this now, you probably know how this story ends. Regardless, the majority of this book focusses on the fascinating history of Yahoo and I discovered just how much I did not know. I think the general structure could’ve been a little better, but apart from that, I enjoyed the read. Even though I was rooting for Marissa before she took over as CEO, being one of her direct reports sounds kind of miserable. Then again, she took away their Blackberrys and gave them iPhones so I guess she's alright. At the end of the day, it was an informative read but I think I’ve learned more about Marissa through interviews I’ve watched. I do hope that there will be some sort of “The Official and Totally Legit Authorised Yahoo! Story” sometime in the future because there are some good lessons to explore in more detail.
March 11, 2019
This is probably one of the best non-fiction/business/biography-esque books I’ver read in the last few years. The book is in-depth and will take you to a spin from the early Internet years to the modern-day “can’t live without my smartphone” years. I’ve always been fascinated by Yahoo! and Marissa Mayer and this is such an indulgent read. Learned a lot, too.
February 13, 2020
Interesting background on Yahoo as a company. I wish that I had learned something new about Marissa Mayer. Possibly because this book is about Yahoo some of that information was left out since she spent the entire beginning of her career at Google. Overall, this was a good read and I learned alot about the background of Yahoo that helps to put into perspective news reports that I remember seeing during Marissa Mayer's tenure as CEO.
August 27, 2017
It helped understand how much not only Marissa but even the previous CEOs prior to her had helped shaped Yahoo!. Also shows how difficult it is to steer a company in the right direction especially when it is big and also when it is public and there are so many other external factors.
A page turner and a good read!
A page turner and a good read!
October 27, 2020
A painful reminder of how the internet's early tech giant got sidestep by intense competition. A combination of Yahoo's history and also Marissa Meyer's short biography.
February 26, 2018
Was a fun read on Yahoo's founding story and the role key people played in its development. Doesn't cover the Verizon saga though (obviously, the book was published before that)
May 24, 2020
I found this book well written and insightful. It is more than just a book about Marissa Mayer though, it is also a book about the rise and fall of the.com industry and the politics that come into play for the big players. Three takeaways from MM’s career that the author drives home are: 1.take the scariest option 2.make yourself useful and 3. ignore the haters. I highly recommend this book.
January 24, 2015
Summary: Getting the insider perspective is like getting the secret access to a whole new world I don't think I'll ever want to be a part of. It's a book based on gossip, but still great to listen to and makes for some good popcorn time.
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The audio book starts off strong. The narrator has a deep and journalistic approach to the story, which is appropriate given that it's a journalist's account of Yahoo!, Marissa Mayer, and the many other CEOs that Yahoo! has had. Therefore, as a reader, I consciously reminded myself that though these accounts are portrayed as factual, many if not most of the perspectives in this book are very subjective - such as placing Marissa Mayer into the ISTJ Briggs Myers personality type, or the suggestion that Yahoo! is beyond saving because of it's lack of identity.
Nicholas Carlson also analyzes the different CEOs and then shares his insights in a matter-of-fact tone. That could be dangerously misleading. His appeal to logic and emotion are strong, but the credibility of his sources remains to be questionable. If anything, it's a well-constructed gossip-sourced dramatic piece on Yahoo.
I enjoyed the story telling of the book. The timelines, names, and numbers were very factual at least. I learned a lot about Google, Yahoo, AOL, Apple, and EBay. I learned about the different roles in a corporation and how they differ: CMO, CEO, COO, CFO, Chairman, Board of Directors, and many other titles. I learned that the CMO can easily be COO. I learned about the different power plays in the corporation. I learned about the importance of mergers and acquisitions (M&As). I learned about Alibaba and the significance of IPOs. I learned that interviews aren't very reliable filters of good talent and that even the board of directors can be very wrong in hiring a CEO. Or that someone as talented and educated as Marissa Mayer can be prone to bad hires. I learned about activist investors like Daniel Loeb. I learned just how powerful and stressful the CEO job could be. I realized: that's not a job I would want any time in my life.
This book also gave a very realistic picture of Marissa Mayer. She seems, as the author would suggest, to have found work that is 100% integrated with her values and purpose. This explains her high quality motivation to strive for the best interests of Yahoo. Although as I said, any single person's account of another person's personality is very subjective. But he did list her different behaviors that removes the superhero image and places a more relatable character. She has her flaws like being late, being unable to maintain eye contact, or being very professional to a fault. These perspectives make me empathize with her, and like her more, even if she isn't the best boss to have - according to unidentified sources.
So four stars for great story-telling, informative perspective of large tech companies like Google and Yahoo!, and insider gossip. But I'll subtract one star for not actually having Yahoo!'s or Marissa Mayer's own perspective taken into account, and not being able to properly footnote the facts vs. opinions.
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The audio book starts off strong. The narrator has a deep and journalistic approach to the story, which is appropriate given that it's a journalist's account of Yahoo!, Marissa Mayer, and the many other CEOs that Yahoo! has had. Therefore, as a reader, I consciously reminded myself that though these accounts are portrayed as factual, many if not most of the perspectives in this book are very subjective - such as placing Marissa Mayer into the ISTJ Briggs Myers personality type, or the suggestion that Yahoo! is beyond saving because of it's lack of identity.
Nicholas Carlson also analyzes the different CEOs and then shares his insights in a matter-of-fact tone. That could be dangerously misleading. His appeal to logic and emotion are strong, but the credibility of his sources remains to be questionable. If anything, it's a well-constructed gossip-sourced dramatic piece on Yahoo.
I enjoyed the story telling of the book. The timelines, names, and numbers were very factual at least. I learned a lot about Google, Yahoo, AOL, Apple, and EBay. I learned about the different roles in a corporation and how they differ: CMO, CEO, COO, CFO, Chairman, Board of Directors, and many other titles. I learned that the CMO can easily be COO. I learned about the different power plays in the corporation. I learned about the importance of mergers and acquisitions (M&As). I learned about Alibaba and the significance of IPOs. I learned that interviews aren't very reliable filters of good talent and that even the board of directors can be very wrong in hiring a CEO. Or that someone as talented and educated as Marissa Mayer can be prone to bad hires. I learned about activist investors like Daniel Loeb. I learned just how powerful and stressful the CEO job could be. I realized: that's not a job I would want any time in my life.
This book also gave a very realistic picture of Marissa Mayer. She seems, as the author would suggest, to have found work that is 100% integrated with her values and purpose. This explains her high quality motivation to strive for the best interests of Yahoo. Although as I said, any single person's account of another person's personality is very subjective. But he did list her different behaviors that removes the superhero image and places a more relatable character. She has her flaws like being late, being unable to maintain eye contact, or being very professional to a fault. These perspectives make me empathize with her, and like her more, even if she isn't the best boss to have - according to unidentified sources.
So four stars for great story-telling, informative perspective of large tech companies like Google and Yahoo!, and insider gossip. But I'll subtract one star for not actually having Yahoo!'s or Marissa Mayer's own perspective taken into account, and not being able to properly footnote the facts vs. opinions.
April 23, 2015
My Rating: 3.5/5
TL;DR
I recommend the book to someone who is interested in the history of consumer internet, the rise of dot com, the dot com bubble crisis and the unending struggle of the once internet monarchs Yahoo! to rise up to the challenge of their rivals. Also, if someone is interested to followup on Marissa Mayer’ career so far as the new CEO of Yahoo!.
Marissa Mayer and the Fight to save Yahoo!, never has a book title been so misleading. Also, never has a non-fiction book about a company been such a roller coaster read. One of the most compelling things about the book is how it has been the writing style. Unlike other biographic books which tend to be slightly monotonous, this one is actually written like a gripping fiction novel.
Even though it may be eligible to be classified as a business book, I see it as more of a history lesson. I belong to the generation of people who were introduced to the dimension of World Wide Web in the past few years. As a moderately informed teenager in a public school I had heard of the internet giant called Yahoo! and to my surprise when I entered college to find out it to be a subject of ridicule. Over the years I ignored the website for the lack of communal interest, until one day I read an article stating an ex-Google executive is going to to save Yahoo!. I still didn’t know what was wrong with Yahoo anyways.
The book is a a glance at the 20 year old history of Yahoo, how it started with two Stanford graduates past time hobby of curating and sending each other interesting things they discovered on the Internet and went to the zenith of $128 Billion valuation over 10 years ago(Facebook is the most valued internet company currently and it is worth $122 Billion today). How the gods of Yahoo fell from their mantles, the mistakes they made over the years, their arrogance and their ignorance which lead to Yahoo lose its footing from dominating the internet to limping to keep up.
The book has a very nice profile on Marissa Mayer, her early years the rise in Google and eventual shift of career to Yahoo!. It covers the initial years of her life as the Yahoo CEO and how the fight to save Yahoo has just begun.
The book is a very good history lesson for consumer internet and the politics involved in a publicly owned company(damn it’s scary).
TL;DR
I recommend the book to someone who is interested in the history of consumer internet, the rise of dot com, the dot com bubble crisis and the unending struggle of the once internet monarchs Yahoo! to rise up to the challenge of their rivals. Also, if someone is interested to followup on Marissa Mayer’ career so far as the new CEO of Yahoo!.
Marissa Mayer and the Fight to save Yahoo!, never has a book title been so misleading. Also, never has a non-fiction book about a company been such a roller coaster read. One of the most compelling things about the book is how it has been the writing style. Unlike other biographic books which tend to be slightly monotonous, this one is actually written like a gripping fiction novel.
Even though it may be eligible to be classified as a business book, I see it as more of a history lesson. I belong to the generation of people who were introduced to the dimension of World Wide Web in the past few years. As a moderately informed teenager in a public school I had heard of the internet giant called Yahoo! and to my surprise when I entered college to find out it to be a subject of ridicule. Over the years I ignored the website for the lack of communal interest, until one day I read an article stating an ex-Google executive is going to to save Yahoo!. I still didn’t know what was wrong with Yahoo anyways.
The book is a a glance at the 20 year old history of Yahoo, how it started with two Stanford graduates past time hobby of curating and sending each other interesting things they discovered on the Internet and went to the zenith of $128 Billion valuation over 10 years ago(Facebook is the most valued internet company currently and it is worth $122 Billion today). How the gods of Yahoo fell from their mantles, the mistakes they made over the years, their arrogance and their ignorance which lead to Yahoo lose its footing from dominating the internet to limping to keep up.
The book has a very nice profile on Marissa Mayer, her early years the rise in Google and eventual shift of career to Yahoo!. It covers the initial years of her life as the Yahoo CEO and how the fight to save Yahoo has just begun.
The book is a very good history lesson for consumer internet and the politics involved in a publicly owned company(damn it’s scary).
June 30, 2015
I was truly captivated by the history of Yahoo and it's string of CEO's. As to the premise in the book's title, the question really is can Yahoo be saved by anyone. I thought this was summed up well at the end of the book with this statement: "Yahoo suffers from the fact that the only reason it succeeded in the first place was because it solved a global problem that lasted for only a moment", continuing that "Yahoo hasn't found its purpose since - the thing it can do that no-one else can."
I am curious what Yahoo will look like in another 20 years. I have the same sort of nostalgia for Yahoo as I do for my first Apple IIe computer, and often think of the brand in the context of one of VH1's series "I love the 90's". I personally signed up for a Yahoo email account back in 1997. Given the options at the time, I choose Yahoo in part because I wanted a permanent email address I could use after college for the long term and Yahoo seemed like it had the best shot of making it and still being around years later. That turned out to be mostly true, and I used my Yahoo email as my primary personal email address all the way up until now. It is somewhat sad to say that it was during reading this book that I decided it was time to finally make the switch to Gmail, something I had been considering for a while due to the clunkiness of Yahoo's web mail and the poor iOS integration with the iPhone default mail client. Reputation wise, Yahoo certainly faired better than AOL, but as this book highlighted for me, just barely. To me, it would be an obvious source of embarrassment to be associated with AOL. If I see anyone with an AOL email address I can't help but immediately draw non-flattering conclusions about them. I didn't want anyone to make that kind of snap judgment about me with my Yahoo email. When I realized that, it was the push I needed to finally switch.
I am curious what Yahoo will look like in another 20 years. I have the same sort of nostalgia for Yahoo as I do for my first Apple IIe computer, and often think of the brand in the context of one of VH1's series "I love the 90's". I personally signed up for a Yahoo email account back in 1997. Given the options at the time, I choose Yahoo in part because I wanted a permanent email address I could use after college for the long term and Yahoo seemed like it had the best shot of making it and still being around years later. That turned out to be mostly true, and I used my Yahoo email as my primary personal email address all the way up until now. It is somewhat sad to say that it was during reading this book that I decided it was time to finally make the switch to Gmail, something I had been considering for a while due to the clunkiness of Yahoo's web mail and the poor iOS integration with the iPhone default mail client. Reputation wise, Yahoo certainly faired better than AOL, but as this book highlighted for me, just barely. To me, it would be an obvious source of embarrassment to be associated with AOL. If I see anyone with an AOL email address I can't help but immediately draw non-flattering conclusions about them. I didn't want anyone to make that kind of snap judgment about me with my Yahoo email. When I realized that, it was the push I needed to finally switch.
May 5, 2016
This was a fascinating read - no mean feat given the amount of focus dedicated to share prices. But huge credit to the author, the business speak was very readable and (crucially) interesting. In addition, there was keen focus on telling a story - I have read non-fiction business books in the past that have felt more like essays stitched together with no real direction or message. In this book, Yahoo's past, present and looming future were carefully dissected.
I would have enjoyed a bit more of a focus on gender politics. What Mayer has achieved is remarkable, regardless of her success or failure at Yahoo. It's hard not to wonder how much of the scrutiny is due to her gender. Maybe one day she'll write a tell all, no bs view of her experiences. Now there would be an interesting read.
The book ends with Mayer facing the end of her cushioning period thanks to Alibaba. Recent news coverage seems to suggest the battle has been well and truly lost, as the core Yahoo business is now up for sale. Business is invariably brutal, but it's a shame that there is no fairy tale ending for Mayer's tenure. Reading the history, one can't help but wonder if it was a poisoned chalice in the first instance.
I would have enjoyed a bit more of a focus on gender politics. What Mayer has achieved is remarkable, regardless of her success or failure at Yahoo. It's hard not to wonder how much of the scrutiny is due to her gender. Maybe one day she'll write a tell all, no bs view of her experiences. Now there would be an interesting read.
The book ends with Mayer facing the end of her cushioning period thanks to Alibaba. Recent news coverage seems to suggest the battle has been well and truly lost, as the core Yahoo business is now up for sale. Business is invariably brutal, but it's a shame that there is no fairy tale ending for Mayer's tenure. Reading the history, one can't help but wonder if it was a poisoned chalice in the first instance.
May 28, 2015
I enjoyed reading this book mainly just from a current events standpoint. It was interesting to learn Yahoo's story since I have been curious how and why they still exist. It's amazing to me that they're even still around - having been beaten out of search by Google years ago. Yahoo has yet to find their niche or real purpose in the internet world, but the fight isn't over. I was a little disappointed reading this book because I expected to like Marissa Mayer and have her emerge as a role model for me. It turned out that the opposite was true, as she was not painted in the best light in this book. I do, however, think that her background and experience could help save Yahoo better than any of the previous CEOs in recent history. It will be interesting to see what the future holds for Yahoo and Marissa Mayer as well.
April 30, 2017
A very engaging book.
It was soo hard for me to stop once I have started. The author's hard work is reflected well from the level of detail and thorough narrative. "Marissa Mayer and the fight to save Yahoo!" title precisely summarize what is the whole book about - with a right balance between Marissa's story and the fight itself.
The book starts with interesting emotional moment between Marissa and thousands of Yahoo! employees whose seek for answer. It explains in detail the series of Yahoo! effort to win the triumph from Terry Semel 1st CEO untill Marissa's era, and also often describe about Marissa personality, mimicry skill, and leadership style.
I have never been a fan of Marissa, and encouraged to remain so after the book.
It was soo hard for me to stop once I have started. The author's hard work is reflected well from the level of detail and thorough narrative. "Marissa Mayer and the fight to save Yahoo!" title precisely summarize what is the whole book about - with a right balance between Marissa's story and the fight itself.
The book starts with interesting emotional moment between Marissa and thousands of Yahoo! employees whose seek for answer. It explains in detail the series of Yahoo! effort to win the triumph from Terry Semel 1st CEO untill Marissa's era, and also often describe about Marissa personality, mimicry skill, and leadership style.
I have never been a fan of Marissa, and encouraged to remain so after the book.
July 14, 2015
One would think this book is only about Marissa but its not. This book is a detailed timeline of Yahoo! right from its inception. I found it fascinating primarily because of two reasons 1. there is a lot of information on the different CEO's who took charge of Yahoo! and the mistakes they along with the management made, so there is plenty of insight on what happens behind the curtains of a big organization, especially the parts on M&A. 2. I found the concept of activist investing to be interesting. Reading this book you learn quite a few terms in finance so this book is not restricted to just technology. Overall an engaging read.
February 6, 2015
The author presents the problem with Yahoo excellently well. But when it comes to Marissa Mayer's reign the author seems vindictive rather than critical. Agreed Ms. Mayer has made her share of mistakes while running the company, but any CEO would have made mistakes in trying to turn around Yahoo. I give her full marks just for giving it her all while trying to do so. I know I would not be so driven had I had the comfort of her wealth. But then maybe that's what sets her apart. Hope she succeeds.
November 9, 2018
5 stars for the style of writing and 4 for it's content. They are neck to neck, but the style makes the content all the more fascinating to read.
This book is not only about Marissa Mayer though the title may suggest that. It is about Yahoo, it's founding history and the succession of CEOs. I am in awe of Silicon Valley and the great stories that develop there. This book is one good read about a great Silicon Valley story.
This book is not only about Marissa Mayer though the title may suggest that. It is about Yahoo, it's founding history and the succession of CEOs. I am in awe of Silicon Valley and the great stories that develop there. This book is one good read about a great Silicon Valley story.
March 27, 2015
Bit of a misleading title, since it's about (the history of) Yahoo, instead of Mayer's dealings with it.
The book reads as a bunch of business articles wrapped together. Didn't get the feeling the author did a lot of 'field research'. The most interesting parts were the startup days, Jeff Malletts role, and also Mayers way of working.
The book reads as a bunch of business articles wrapped together. Didn't get the feeling the author did a lot of 'field research'. The most interesting parts were the startup days, Jeff Malletts role, and also Mayers way of working.
January 25, 2015
A very interesting portrait of the internet corporations' world, although made up of 70% contextualization and only 30% (at most) of Marissa Mayer, really.
The title is a little bit misleading.
Very interesting anyway.
The title is a little bit misleading.
Very interesting anyway.
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