Search results for: “Marissa Mayer”

Tumblr + more news

Tumblr

‘Nobody at Yahoo understood Tumblr’: Why Marissa Mayer’s big bet on Tumblr never panned out – this all sounded eerily familiar. I was at Yahoo! when it put together really interesting pieces of web 2.0 and social services. The piece on Tumblr was so reminiscent of Flickr, del.icio.us experience in many respects. Flickr was breaking even by the time it went to Yahoo!. Del.icio.us was a service that was run out of home server room in Joshua Schacter’s apartment that was really his coat cupboard. Like Tumblr, both had their finger on something. Yahoo! did early work on mobile; and the fumbled opportunity again looked like Tumblr. In all of these cases, the problem at Yahoo! seems to be process and senior management mindset rather than technology. Tumblr was just on a bigger scale in terms of cost; if not opportunity cost. – Despite Yahoo! growing through strategic acquisitions, it surfed a lot of waves a little too early; yet had a very late wave mentality (boring heavily from an analogy in Bob Cringely’s Accidental Empires). I hope that there is a better future for Tumblr. More related content here.

Business

Common Sense: Did the Jack Welch Model Sow Seeds of G.E.’s Decline? | New York Times – interesting read, I wonder whether this will discredit other parts of ‘Neutron’ Jack’s legacy

How to prevent the UK’s self-destruction | HKEJ Insights – Jim O’Neill on the state of Britain

In Pakistan, China presses built-in advantage for ‘Silk Road’ contracts – Reuters – China’s advantage isn’t IP, price or product but willingness to deploy cheap capital fast. Huawei isn’t bought because its better, but because its cheaper. A lot of the discount comes down to negative interest vendor loans provided by Chinese state banks to mobile networks rolling out Huawei equipment and services

FMCG

Nestle mulling sale of its nearly US$1 bn confectionary business in the US | SCMP – really interesting move that shows Nestle following a trend that PepsiCo tried to go down a number of years ago

Aldi fires $3.4 billion shot in US supermarket wars | RTE – really interesting move with huge potential impact for FMCG brands

Gadget

Tech Fix: New iPad Pro Inches Toward Replacing PC, but Falls Short | New York Times – I still think of the iPad as predominantly a content consumption device. Whilst it can be great with apps for specific work, it isn’t a general purpose device like a Mac

Luxury

Women have no idea what to wear to work today — Quartz – ironically they are too illiberal for men’s clothing

Media

Dentsu Aegis Second Big Shop To Downgrade 2017 Ad Expansion | Mediapost

Security

Busting Thieves One Dyetonator At A Time | ogilvy.com

London Bridge attack: how a crippling shortage of analysts let the London attackers through | UK news | The Guardian

US intelligence agencies are beginning to build AI spies | Quartz – not surprising they would want to hand off first line analysis on data to machines. Machine learning works really well on things like counting the number of cats in a photo, so it would work really well for agencies like the NRA – national reconnaissance office

Software

The blockchain paradox: Why distributed ledger technologies may do little to transform the economy — Oxford Internet Institute

WWDC 2017 — Some Thoughts – Learning By Shipping – interesting analysis – Steven Sinofsky was a senior executive at Microsoft

Telecoms

Nokia Touts NPU for Internet’s Next Chapter | EE Times

Web of no web

Indoor GPS could stop us getting lost – and make us spend more money | CityMetric – indoor navigation still feels clunky

Wireless

7 of the top 10 smartphone suppliers headquartered in China | Electroniq

Q&A with Connie Chan | Techinasia – Connie works at A16z and really gets the Chinese eco-system better than anyone else on Sandhill Road

June 17, 2017
Leatherman + more news

Leatherman

Origin Of Leatherman: The Road From Start-Up To Mega-Brand – great interview with Tim Leatherman. The development of Leatherman cam out of an unmet need. But what was of particular interest was how Gerber Knives went from Leatherman supplier to competitor by looking at the Leatherman production orders. There’s a lesson from Leatherman for globalised brands using ODM firms in places like China.

Business

Samsung Targeted by U.S. Activist Elliott Urging Separation – Bloomberg – interesting move, launched just as the Lee family transitions a leadership handover. Basically, break things up, and allow American activist investors to tear your business to pieces. Part of wider trend where technology is now viewed as value rather than growth stocks

Consumer behaviour

Loving Our Phones May Come At A Physical Price | Buzzfeed – not terribly surprising when you think about it

Economics

Spotify is causing a major problem for economists – Business Insider – surely the same as services? – HSBC global economist James Pomeroy recently published a fascinating paper that looks at this question. “The rise of the digital natives” argues that the increase in digital services like Spotify — and Apple and Google and Facebook and Amazon and on and on — put downward pressure on prices and inflation.

Finance

WSJ City – Woodford: Investors Face Short-Termist Pressures – Neil Woodford’s criticisms remind me a lot of Will Hutton’s The State We’re In. The key difference is that Woodford seems a bit suspect (paywall)

FMCG

McDonald’s Celebrates 26th Birthday in China | Whats on Weibo – great WeChat and Weibo brand marketing case studies from What’s On Weibo. McDonald’s is very well known, but is surpassed in Chinese success by KFC.

How to

Foundations of Data Science by Blum, Hopcroft & Kannan | Cornell University – (PDF)

Use iMessage apps on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch – Apple Support – not the most intuitive process, quite easy to miss the whole app store process

Ideas

Nabeel Hyatt on Silicon Valley innovation vs invention – Business Insider – and herein lies why China and other countries are able to dial-down silicon valley’s halo and make the bay area look more like Detroit-in-waiting

Photos: How Tools Start a Revolution | Learning By Shipping – iPhone (or any other smartphone) is not the bokeh you were looking for

Media

Shazam’s CEO Talks 1 Billion App Downloads And The Future Of The Brand | Forbes – a billion downloads to get to profitability…

Verizon reportedly wants $1 billion discount on Yahoo | VentureBeat – expect more things to come out before this fight ends. It was inevitable that Verizon would revisit the value as this would affect many younger tech savvy Yahoo! customers

Bloomberg Announces New Multiplatform Brand for Tech News | Adweek – interesting that much faster page load times is pulled out as a key differentiator

Yahoo! rebrands its main app as Yahoo Newsroom, lets you post your own news links | TechCrunch – a mix of Metro style tiles and Apples News app, I don’t think that this will be a success as there are similar services with longer traction. The ironic thing is that these are newsreaders are still using RSS on the back end. The window dressing has changed, but the importance of RSS / Atom hasn’t

Viceland UK scores zero ratings on some nights after Sky TV launch | The Guardian – I’d seen these numbers the previous week, but its not a good narrative for Vice. I suspect the problem is being on Sky given the propensity for cord cutting

Online

Introducing Marketplace: Buy and Sell with Your Local Community | Facebook Newsroom – second (or third) time lucky?

Retailing

Amazon bans incentivized reviews tied to free or discounted products | TechCrunch – this is going to have an impact on influencer relations by PR agencies

Security

Yahoo Disputes Report on E-Mail Scanning for U.S. Government – Bloomberg – ‘non-denial’ denial

Yahoo Slams Email Surveillance Story: Experts Demand Details | Threatpost – would you believe Yahoo!’s denials? But how could they adequately disprove it now, the FBI and NSA won’t help them

The Hacking of Yahoo – Schneier on Security – “state-sponsored actor” is often code for “please don’t blame us for our shoddy security because it was a really sophisticated attacker and we can’t be expected to defend ourselves against that.” – this might be Marissa Mayer‘s leadership legacy at Yahoo!

Delete Your Yahoo Account | The Intercept – Yahoo program seems “in some ways more problematic and broader” than previously revealed NSA bulk surveillance programs like PRISM or Upstream collection efforts. “It’s hard to think of an interpretation” of the Reuters report, he explained, “that doesn’t mean Yahoo isn’t being asked to scan all domestic communications without a warrant” or probable cause. – It probably won’t impact Yahoo!’s core active audience of techno-neophytes, but it does nuke any fantasy Verizon had of growing the user base

Exclusive: Yahoo secretly scanned customer emails for U.S. intelligence – sources | Reuters – expect more dirty laundry to drop

Software

WeChat’s world | The Economist – a boisterous four-year-old living in Shanghai, is what marketing people call a digital native. Over a year ago, she started communicating with her parents using WeChat, a Chinese mobile-messaging service. She is too young to carry around a mobile phone. Instead she uses a Mon Mon, an internet-connected device that links through the cloud to the WeChat app – its a WeChat world, the other technology companies are just copying their innovation

Behind The Crash Of 3D Robotics, North America’s Most Promising Drone Company – it’s just going to be inherently much more difficult for a Silicon Valley-based, software-focused company to compete against vertically integrated powerhouse manufacturing company in China

Apple Said to Plan Improved Cloud Services by Unifying Teams – Bloomberg – I wonder what the implications could be for product leaks? Or are services an area of less concern?

Microsoft’s bot platform is more popular than Facebook’s among developers | VentureBeat – interesting, though this might change with Facebook for Work

Technology

Encouraged by Apple, Sharp invests in OLED production equipment | Electronics EETimes – also managed to get some interesting tech that improves VR experience

Sharp’s IGZO Display Makes Dots Invisible for VR | Nikkei TechOn – and Apple is looking to dial up production of OLEDs by buying from Sharp….

Wireless

Google’s 24/7 live support for the Pixel phones comes complete with screen sharing | Android Police – interesting step up in customer services, presumably what was required to get them into Verizon

Source: Huawei passed on chance to produce Pixel phones, US division badly struggling | Android Police – big issues across handset business in US, interesting that they cleaned out the Honor marketing team despite them being the best performers. This is likely to create motivation issues moving forwards

October 13, 2016
Yahoo’s downfall
I’ve seen a lot written about Yahoo’s downfall.

Most of it lacks insight. And at the most basic level lacks precision. Yahoo is an employee who works at Yahoo! or Y! (the Y-bang). It was the best culture I ever worked in; and the most dysfunctional company that I ever worked for. I got to work with amazing people at a company that managed to fumble the ball on opportunity after opportunity. Most analysis you see comes from outsiders who lack insight.

So when I came across this question on Quora and decided to post my answer. I’ve shared my answer on this blog with additional data points and information on ‘Yahoo’s downfall’.

This is a big question. In the answers that it will receive you are likely to see:
- Difference of opinions about the reasons of the decline
- Differences of opinion about when the decline actually set in. Which begs the question was the downfall that drastic?
Before we get into the why, lets think about the nature of businesses.

Public listed companies generally don’t last forever

The AEI said that 88 per cent of the companies that made up the Fortune 500 in 1954 are gone. Yahoo! is between 21 and 22 years old depending which way you count its age.

Yahoo! has outlasted many of its peers:
- Excite – merged with @Home Network in 1999. It went bankrupt in October 2001. It was sold in December 2001. By 2007, the business was broken up by territory.
- Lycos – was sold three times, each time for a fraction of the purchase price
- Hotbot – bought by Lycos
- AltaVista – minority stake sold to CMGI in 1999. Bought by Overture in February 2003. Yahoo! acquired Overture in July 2003
Only MSN remains of the original brands that it competed against. If MSN wasn’t a Microsoft business, its survival would be questionable. Microsoft’s online services lost money from 2006 through 2010. By comparison, Yahoo! has kept making a profit – despite its issues.

Macro-effects

The technology sector has become a hunting ground for active investors. Back in the 1980s, American publicly listed brands were attacked by investors:
- RJ Nabisco – leveraged buyout by KKR
- Gulf Oil & Unocal – T. Boone Pickens had failed bids for both oil companies but made a large profit on his holdings
- TWA – leveraged buyout by Carl Icahn. Icahn’s business practices were responsible for its bankruptcy in 1992 and 1995
- Revlon – acquired in a hostile takeover by Ron Perelman, much of the business was broken up to pay for the deal
In the 1990s, factors changed:
- Credit lines for deals dried up as some leveraged buyouts proved to be bad for investors
- Businesses developed more effective defences including poison pills, golden parachutes and greater debt
- Overall value of the stock market increased. This reduced the amount of opportunities to get companies on the cheap
Moving forward 20 years, the technology sector became in a similar place

Historic technology businesses have moved from being high growth to value businesses. This changed the nature of investors interest in them.
- Microsoft gave a seat on its board to an activist shareholder ValueAct Capital
- Apple started paying dividends and raising the debt on its balance sheet to fend off Carl Icahn
Google’s unique two-tier shareholding structure has proved to be an effective defence so far.

A business like Yahoo! looks like a classic corporate raid target as its value is less than the sum of its parts. It has a regular cashflow that could service a lot more debt at current interest rates. It has assets that can be quickly sold.

Capital has become much cheaper. This is partly a result of low interest rates set to keep the economy out of trouble in 2008. But there is also a lot of foreign capital and pension fund money looking for a home.

Missed opportunities

Given that we have the perfect vision of hindsight, Yahoo! missed key opportunities. Here are some of them.

Yahoo! failed to buy Google

Yes, Yahoo! did fail to buy Google. And their competitors failed to buy Google as well. Excite rejected the opportunity to buy Google for $750,000 in a deal arranged by Vinod Khosla. By comparison Terry Semel, then CEO of Yahoo! failed to buy Google for $5 billion. At the time Yahoo!’s entire market value was roughly $5 billion.

Yahoo! failed to buy DoubleClick

While Yahoo! was playing catch-up with Google on search. Google outbid the online industry to pay $3.1 billion for DoubleClick. DoubleClick provided advertisers with more opportunities to place banner ads than Yahoo! did.

Yahoo! failed to buy Facebook

Terry Semel offered $1 billion for Facebook in 2006. Semel wouldn’t go to $1.1 billion Facebook’s board wanted.

Yahoo! failed to sell to Microsoft

I don’t think that the Microsoft deal was a serious offer. There are reasons to be suspicious:
- Microsoft couldn’t make its own online business profitable at the time. The deal was unpopular with shareholders
- Yahoo!’s contribution to the open source community would have been an antitrust issue
- It would have to get through approval by Japanese competition authorities
- It would likely have to get through Chinese antitrust authorities
Yahoo! didn’t communicate these risk factors to shareholders. Which then left the door open for the Microsoft-funded Carl Icahn coup later on.

Yahoo!’s board has failed the company

I think that there is a stronger argument for this when you look at their selection of CEOs over the years
- Tim Koogle – led Yahoo! on the upcycle of the dot.com boom. He resigned and replaced by Terry Semel during the bust that followed.
- Terry Semel – was a senior media industry executive who bought the business out of the bust. He never got the product and never used email. He never managed to build a media company despite his Hollywood heritage.
- Jerry Yang – history will look with more favour on Jerry Yang in the future. He did the Yahoo! Japan and Alibaba deals which are the most interesting parts of Yahoo! today. As a CEO, his time was consumed by Microsoft’s hostile bid
- Carol Bartz – Bartz was a Microsoft approved appointee. Her deal on Facebook Connect saw the social network build its business on the back of Yahoo!’s user database. Bartz does the Microsoft search deal badly. She also launched mobile apps that were bad. The one thing she needs respect for is her approach to marketing. Bartz realised that she needed to promote the entire Yahoo! brand. Although there was a buzz marketing team in the US, most marketing was based around products. Unfortunately the execution of the brand campaign was poor. This was partly because it was led from the US with little engagement of regional and national marketing teams.
- Scott Thompson – stayed for five months. Allegations were made about his education, better due diligence on his recruitment required.
- Ross Levinsohn – Ross served as interim CEO after Thompson left. It is hard to know what CEO he would have made. But his successor seems to have borrowed his strategy.
- Marissa Mayer – Despite the goodwill Mayer had going into the job she hasn’t managed to change Yahoo!’s current business. That the company’s strategy is being driven by activist shareholders says a lot.
Problems in execution

Yahoo! had its fortune hitched to brand display advertising. Growth has dropped in this for the past ten years. Yahoo!’s declining advertisng revenues started in Q2 of 2006. Part of the problem was that Yahoo! had been too successful to begin with. Yahoo! sold its display advertising for way more than it was worth.

Yahoo! failed to monetise search as well as Google. And then handed its search business over to Microsoft, who failed to do as good as job as Yahoo! managed on its own.

Yahoo! failed to execute in mobile, despite some smart early efforts. Photo community Flickr was the default photo app on Nokia’s N73 blockbuster smartphone. The N73 launched at the end of April 2006. It was was one of the last things I worked on before leaving. Given that headstart Flickr could have been Instagram. Instead its a more specialist community of ‘proper’ photography enthusiasts. Yahoo! Messenger and Mail both worked on Nokia handsets from the mid-2000s. Yahoo! Go was an app which provided access to services including:
- Flickr
- Address book
- Calendar
- Email
- Maps
- Search
- Content: news, weather, finance, sports, entertainment
It could have provided the same function that Android provides for Google, but Yahoo! considered as ‘beta software’ right up to it’s demise in January 2010. Yahoo! has been providing Apple with weather information and stock data for the iPhone. Yet it hasn’t managed to build a successful iPhone app.

One way of illustrating the decline of Yahoo! in mobile is to look at the user numbers of Yahoo! mail, which seems to have peaked around September 2011.

Hotmail shows a linear increase over time, likely due to organisation changes as it has moved to the cloud and Gmail takes off, presumably on the back of Android – though iOS users also have Gmail accounts.

Yahoo!’s acquisition process was broken. Ever since Yahoo! wasted 1 billion dollars buying Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com the business slowed down. Broadcast.com was a scare on the collective memory. Capital decisions took longer, acqusitions took longer. The cheque book was harder to open. Under Marissa Mayer, it was finally let loose, but the purchases seem to have made little difference.

Yahoo! failed to become a media company. Back when I was at Yahoo! we launched Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone – a sort of proto Vice News in 2005. Despite Semel’s Hollywood background, he and following CEOs never made it work. Despite the fact Yahoo! had joint ventures with TV networks in Australia and Canada. When Marissa Mayer finally managed to get talent in the door, audiences had moved to other sites:
- Gawker Media
- Buzzfeed
- Daily Beast
- Aol’s blog network
- Huffington Post
Yahoo’s downfall in social is spectacular. Yahoo! owned pioneer social brands, any of which could have been the Instagram, Facebook or WhatsApp:
- Yahoo! Chat – chatrooms were the Facebook Groups of yesteryear. Yahoo! was doing social before it was a thing
- Delicious – neglect, internal politics and corporate interference meant that Yahoo! never capitalised on Delicious. Despite its tribulations there are some people who still use it, though I am not sure why
- Flickr – corporate interference and neglect destroyed the potential growth of photo sharing site Flickr. The site is kept going as a photographic enthusiasts community. It could have been Instagram. Thankfully, Yahoo! only spent $30 million on it
- Yahoo! Messenger – Yahoo!’s Messenger had a poor mobile client, but could have been WhatsApp. Facebook dominates the sector along with Tencents WeChat, NHN’s LINE and Daum Kakao’s KakaoTalk
- Tumblr – Yahoo! was forced to writedown the value of Tumblr to nothing. The company failed to monetise the popular blogging and curation platform. Tumblr is one of Yahoo!’s few products that attracts a millennial audience
Yahoo! products had a poor experience. I launched over 14 products at Yahoo! in just over a year. I only ever used 2 of them on a regular ongoing basis – Delicious and Flickr. Other products like Yahoo! 360, Yahoo! Answers or Yahoo! MyWeb 2 – fell into three categories:
- Dogs to use – particularly in the set-up part of the process
- Not particularly useful – Yahoo! Answers, great idea in prinicple but poor cultural fit. That poor fit meant that it filled up with noise, Yahoo! Answers isn’t as useful as Quora
- Strangled soon after birth – so it became frustrating to commit your time to them as a user
Politics paid a part in this process. The Communications group (responsible for Messenger and Mail) had a lot of duplicate products. Yahoo! Photos was a bad version of Flickr. For storing your bookmarks there was:
- Yahoo! Bookmarks
- Yahoo! MyWeb
- Yahoo! MyWeb 2
- Delicious
This all bogs management down and sucks away resources. There were also so many projects that never saw the light, due to constant changes in priority. More Yahoo!-related posts here. What do you think brought about Yahoo’s downfall?

More information
Fortune 500 firms in 1955 vs. 2014; 88% are gone, and we’re all better off because of that dynamic ‘creative destruction’ | AEI Ideas
Microsoft’s Bing/MSN Results Truly Horrifying — Loss Rate Balloons To ~$3 Billion A Year | Business Insider
Stupid Business Decisions: Excite Rejects Google’s Asking Price | Minyanville
A Microsoft First: Activist ValueAct Gets a Board Seat – WSJ
How Yahoo! Blew It | Wired
Yahoo! Could Have Bought Facebook For 2% Of Today’s Valuation | Business Insider
Sorry Microsoft, Yahoo — Google Just Got Bigger | Ad Age
April 26, 2016
Generation X + more things

5 Reasons Marketers Have Largely Overlooked Generation X | Adweek – definition of generation x is an issue, small segment (weird 18 year block rather than 20 year block), transitional position in terms of analogue and digital world experience, identification with the label generation x. More on gen-x here

Video surveillance cued for surge in next five years | Telecom Asia – depressing reading

Product innovation is the new marketing | Marketing Interactive – innovation being mis-construed for stunts?

Telenor looks to be #MoreThan just a telecommunication giant | Marketing Interactive – tricky picking a hashtag that you can’t own, interesting campaign ideas

WhatsApp’s move to protect user privacy: What does this signal? | Marketing Interactive – interesting discussion around the implications (beyond marketing) of end-to-end encryption in OTT messaging space

Huawei unveils its flagship P9 and P9 Plus smartphones: ‘coengineered with Leica’ | VentureBeat – Huawei CEO Richard Yu even went so far as to say the camera was “coengineered” with Leica.

Centre for Analysis of Social Media – Demos – interesting research on the interface of politics and social media

Snapchat Is Suddenly Attracting a Lot More Millennial Women Than Men | Adweek – surprised men were in the majority in the first place. If one looks at similar social interaction platforms like Facebook you have greater female engagement

Digital strategy: Understanding the economics of disruption | McKinsey & Company – (audio recording)

Marissa Mayer vs. “Kim Kardashian’s Ass”: What Sunk Yahoo’s Media Ambitions? | Vanity Fair – great headline, a secondary aspect to this is how must the superstars feel, having bet their bankability on Marissa Mayer and Yahoo!

Data USA – done by MIT

Download | Proof Finder – interesting software for just $100

Goldman Sachs leads a $30 million round for Persado’s AI-based, automated copywriting service | TechCrunch – adequate copywriting or great copywriting and how will that compare with the economics of doing it out of the Philippines instead?

The Dropcam Team — Medium – airing Google’s IoT laundry in public

April 9, 2016
Starboard threat + more news

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer downplayed Starboard threat – Business Insider – thinking about the Starboard threat, she didn’t see that Microsoft could use its money to leverage a more friendly board. Mayer has quite rightly looked to better monetise search. I don’t agree with a lot of what’s she’s done but her instinct on this was right. More on Yahoo! here

Those Entry-Level Startup Jobs? They’re Now Mostly Dead Ends in the Boondocks — Backchannel — Medium – looking at this, even Silicon Valley doesn’t value Cluetrain Manifesto

Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley – The New York Times – Mr. Grove contrasted the start-up phase of a business, when uses for new technologies are identified, with the scale-up phase, when technology goes from prototype to mass production. Both are important. But only scale-up is an engine for job growth — and scale-up, in general, no longer occurs in the United States. “Without scaling,” he wrote, “we don’t just lose jobs — we lose our hold on new technologies” and “ultimately damage our capacity to innovate.

Facing 35 percent ad-block rates, Future decided to drastically cut ad impressions | Digiday – interesting and probably smart approach to ad blocking

Jean-Claude Biver: ‘The Watch Industry Is Not in Trouble, The World Is.’ | BoF – TAG Heuer has latched on to wearables

Domo, Slack and Tableau: How the disruptors are already facing disruption | VentureBeat – not terribly surprising: easy rather than hard innovation with low barriers to entry. The barrier to entry is brand, marketing and user inertia

The FTC Cracks Down On March 2015 Lord & Taylor Social Media Launch: Native Advertisers Beware! | Fashion & Apparel Law Blog – native advertising, not quite the wild west it had been

Dynamic battery for the future developed by Japanese team – A lithium-ion battery more than three times as powerful as normal that could be used in vehicles and power grids has been developed by a team of academic and corporate researchers in Japan

March 29, 2016

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