4/09/2015

Headline April 10, 2015/ ''' YAHOO [TOO} -WAS FOUNDED BY STUDENTS '''


''' YAHOO [TOO} -

WAS FOUNDED BY STUDENTS '''




BUT INSIDE GOOGLE her career had stalled.

In the late 2010 she was moved out of her role overseeing search and was put in charge of Google's location and local services  -maps and restaurant recommendations.

To the outside world that sounded good, but inside Google search was the center of the universe and anything else was a distant planet.

In April 2011, Larry Page stepped back into the C.E.O role, replacing Eric Schmidt. He dissolved the operating committee, where Mayer had a seat and created a top level committee called the L Team. Mayer was not asked to be a member.

Peers of hers, Susan Wojcicki and Salar Kamangar were made senior vice presidents. Mayer was not. Around that time, another executive was put in charge of location and services. Mayer would report to him.

According to journalist Nicholas Carlson, writing on Business Insider, the engineers had revolted, gone to Page and basically said,  ''Us or her.'' Three Google people also tell me that's indeed what happened.

''The feedback from a lot of people was that she wasn't a team player, that she was counterproductive, and that it was all about what was best for Marissa Mayer,'' says one. She also had a reputation for not contributing much to strategic conversations.

''She would go on a tangent just to own the conversation,'' says one person who dealt with her. ''She has to be the smartest person in the room.''

But the re-alignment was also larger than Mayer: the L Team, say Googlers, reflected a belief that it was better to have one person manage a single fiefdom in order to reduce the tension between product managers and engineers; there were others who lost power, too.

Friends say that Mayer was hurt. But publicly she didn't blink. She answered questions by saying that she had moved to supervising a lot more people. She spoke at conferences. She received awards. She was everywhere.

And some who knew her think that Mayer grew from the experience. ''She was a lot tougher and more stubborn when she was at the search,'' says one former Google employee. ''People change and mature. She made big improvements.''

Others saw a lesson in it as well.''Internally, its  'O.M.G.. whoa, Marissa is no longer in power,' '' says another former Google employee, ''Externally she was brilliant. She handled it with incredible grace. She got her P.R. team on it and said:

''Oh, now I'm managing more people..' '' And it worked; most stories about Mayer simply skimmed over her demotion.

''She is so adept at positioning herself, and she's a survivor,'' says a Valley Executive. ''She had many enemies at Google. They neutralized her, but they didn't kill her.''

''She was a genius,'' says another Valley executive. ''She played the power game better than anyone. She sucked it up, she didn't quit, she took over what she could, she didn't tag herself out. And when she had the opportunity to make a move, she did.''

If Mayer star was descending at Google, Yahoo's had already crashed. It was a shocking comedown for the company that, along with Netscape, is viewed as having started the whole Silicon Valley phenomenon.

Yahoo was founded in 1994, when two Stanford students, the outgoing Jerry Yang and the reserved David Filo, created Jerry and Dave's guide to the World Wide Web, which was basically a directory of Web sites to help people navigate the nascent Internet.

In those days, before search engines came along, Yahoo was the main way people would find things, and everyone came to Yahoo. Since the playbook for start-ups during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s was to buy traffic, they all paid Yahoo to advertise.

Yahoo was worth  $128 billion, more than twice what the Walt Disney company was worth at that time. That was just before the bubble burst and the bankruptcy of many start-ups began decimating Yahoo's revenue.

By 2001, it was worth $4.7 billion.

The board hired Terry Semel, a legendary Warner Bros, veteran to rebuild the company, and rebuild it, he did : by 2008, Yahoo's stock price was up to $28, and the company's revenues soared from less than $1 billion in 2001 to almost $7 billion in 2007.

But Semel was so non-tech savvy that he didn't even handle his own e-mail, and the company failed to find its way to the future. In the Valley, Yahoo is infamous for the string of deals it didn't do.

The worst one : Facebook.

In the summer of 2006, Yahoo had handshake deal to buy it for $1 billion. Semel decided to offer  $850 million instead, according to a former executive, and- 

Mark Zuckerberg, who hadn't really wanted to sell, took that as an opportunity to walk away

The Honour and Serving of the  ''operational search'' continues.
With respectful dedication to the Students of the world. See Ya all on !WOW! -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:


''' Start-Ups '''

'''Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless

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