Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has $160 million severance package, making potential firing tougher

[Dan Druff]

There have been a lot of rumblings regarding the possible upcoming firing of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. There are several reasons for this:

1) Several senior executives have left the company in the past few months

2) Yahoo stock has fallen 35% in 2015

3) Yahoo has not turned things around since Mayer got there in mid-2012


Yahoo has definitely been on its way down for a long time. Once a must-visit site in the '90s and early 2000s, it has become increasingly irrelevant each year. Google is constantly growing, innovating, and getting into new markets. Yahoo basically remains the same company, and they resort to imitating rather than innovating in order to attempt to grab back market share. Among other failed ideas, they attempted to imitate Myspace (Yahoo 360) and TMZ (omg.yahoo.com) -- both of which never caught on. They also have had various embarrassments over the years, including:

- Their chat system -- which never made much money in the first place -- was found to have several pedophile user-created rooms running 24/7. These would be rooms such as "Preteen girls 6-12 for middle aged men", and these rooms were NOT shock/parody. Even worse, Yahoo ran their sponsors' ads in such rooms, so people would see "This chat room brought to you by Sprint" when visiting rooms for pedophiles to find young children 6-12. Yahoo responded by disabling user-created rooms. This was all before Mayer got there. They killed the chat system completely during Mayer's term.

- In an even more embarrassing situation, Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson (the one who preceded Mayer) had claimed to have a computer science degree. It was a lie. His degree was in accounting. I understand not fully vetting the degree claims of all employees, but how could this slip by with the freaking CEO, of all things? Amazingly, Thompson listed his "computer science degree" on his own Yahoo profile, somehow fearless that someone from his past might notice. Indeed, it was caught in May 2012, but he refused to resign. They fired him about 2 weeks later.

So then they hired Mayer, an executive at google who seemed unprepared for the CEO position. It seemed that this was more of a hire to grab attention, as Mayer was young (37), female, and pretty, and broke all the stereotypes of what you expected of a CEO to look like.

But that doesn't change a company's performance, which is what I said at the time of her hire.

Unfortunately, she was more interested in posing for Vogue and having multiple children than she was in pouring her life into turning around a sinking giant of the internet.



I never got the impression that Mayer brought anything innovative or creative to the table at Yahoo.

Here is an article discussing her tenure there: http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/30/inve...a-mayer-yahoo/

Unfortunately, apparently she has a $160 million severance package, which Yahoo will have to pay if she gets fired: http://fortune.com/2015/12/04/yahoo-...yer-severance/

Sooo... nobody is quite sure what to do.

Keep in mind that I'm not being sexist here, and I'm not doubting Mayer's competency because she's a woman. I just think she was hired more for her looks and outgoing personality, rather than any kind of special ability to lead. And Yahoo really needed a highly talented CEO to reverse the long-term bad course they were already on.

[big dick]

This is why a bitch shouldn't be in charge.

[shortbuspoker]

In her defense, if you can just not give a fuck and still pull $160 million, why would you give a fuck? Obv it's bad contract negotiations by the people who hired her.

[tgull]

Basically you have Carly Fiorina from 15 years ago, which has been Trump's point all along on her miserable record. Of course, Fiorina is no longer relevant in the Presidential landscape. He basically ruined her a couple months ago, just like he did Bush, Walker, Kaisich, etc.... It's almost like political target practice at this point by Trump.

When this Yahoo gal gets her parachute, she will get into politics. Or acting. Just watch.

[Dan Druff]

Basically you have Carly Fiorina from 15 years ago, which has been Trump's point all along on her miserable record. Of course, Fiorina is no longer relevant in the Presidential landscape. He basically ruined her a couple months ago, just like he did Bush, Walker, Kaisich, etc.... It's almost like political target practice at this point by Trump.

When this Yahoo gal gets her parachute, she will get into politics. Or acting. Just watch.

Fiorina's tenure at HP was flawed, but at least she seemed qualified going in, and she definitely wasn't hired for her looks.

The Mayer thing bothered me because it seemed more about Yahoo grabbing attention with, "Look! We hired a hot blonde female CEO! See! That proves we think women can be capable AND attractive!"

So yeah, it got Yahoo some attention for a bit, but it didn't improve their situation.

[jsearles22]

There have been a lot of rumblings regarding the possible upcoming firing of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. There are several reasons for this:

1) Several senior executives have left the company in the past few months

2) Yahoo stock has fallen 35% in 2015

3) Yahoo has not turned things around since Mayer got there in mid-2012


Yahoo has definitely been on its way down for a long time. Once a must-visit site in the '90s and early 2000s, it has become increasingly irrelevant each year. Google is constantly growing, innovating, and getting into new markets. Yahoo basically remains the same company, and they resort to imitating rather than innovating in order to attempt to grab back market share. Among other failed ideas, they attempted to imitate Myspace (Yahoo 360) and TMZ (omg.yahoo.com) -- both of which never caught on. They also have had various embarrassments over the years, including:

- Their chat system -- which never made much money in the first place -- was found to have several pedophile user-created rooms running 24/7. These would be rooms such as "Preteen girls 6-12 for middle aged men", and these rooms were NOT shock/parody. Even worse, Yahoo ran their sponsors' ads in such rooms, so people would see "This chat room brought to you by Sprint" when visiting rooms for pedophiles to find young children 6-12. Yahoo responded by disabling user-created rooms. This was all before Mayer got there. They killed the chat system completely during Mayer's term.

- In an even more embarrassing situation, Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson (the one who preceded Mayer) had claimed to have a computer science degree. It was a lie. His degree was in accounting. I understand not fully vetting the degree claims of all employees, but how could this slip by with the freaking CEO, of all things? Amazingly, Thompson listed his "computer science degree" on his own Yahoo profile, somehow fearless that someone from his past might notice. Indeed, it was caught in May 2012, but he refused to resign. They fired him about 2 weeks later.

So then they hired Mayer, an executive at google who seemed unprepared for the CEO position. It seemed that this was more of a hire to grab attention, as Mayer was young (37), female, and pretty, and broke all the stereotypes of what you expected of a CEO to look like.

But that doesn't change a company's performance, which is what I said at the time of her hire.

Unfortunately, she was more interested in posing for Vogue and having multiple children than she was in pouring her life into turning around a sinking giant of the internet.



I never got the impression that Mayer brought anything innovative or creative to the table at Yahoo.

Here is an article discussing her tenure there: http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/30/inve...a-mayer-yahoo/

Unfortunately, apparently she has a $160 million severance package, which Yahoo will have to pay if she gets fired: http://fortune.com/2015/12/04/yahoo-...yer-severance/

Sooo... nobody is quite sure what to do.

Keep in mind that I'm not being sexist here, and I'm not doubting Mayer's competency because she's a woman. I just think she was hired more for her looks and outgoing personality, rather than any kind of special ability to lead. And Yahoo really needed a highly talented CEO to reverse the long-term bad course they were already on.

Not being sexist, but she was too busy having kids yo.......

2nd thread in as many days where Druff is irked by attractive females. Everything all right Druff?

[DRK Star]

http://fortune.com/2010/10/15/carly-...-telecom-past/


Carly Fiorina's troubling telecom past

[Dan Druff]

Not being sexist, but she was too busy having kids yo.......

2nd thread in as many days where Druff is irked by attractive females. Everything all right Druff?

I have no problem with career women having children and having to take time off.

But if you're going to get hundreds of millions of dollars to attempt to turn around a failing major corporation, you had better put all of your time and energy into it, and not get started on major personal life commitments such as multiple pregnancies.

If she wanted to get going with having children, she should have stayed at her well-paying but less-demanding job at Google.

[pagelpoker]

There have been a lot of rumblings regarding the possible upcoming firing of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. There are several reasons for this:

1) Several senior executives have left the company in the past few months

2) Yahoo stock has fallen 35% in 2015

3) Yahoo has not turned things around since Mayer got there in mid-2012


Yahoo has definitely been on its way down for a long time. Once a must-visit site in the '90s and early 2000s, it has become increasingly irrelevant each year. Google is constantly growing, innovating, and getting into new markets. Yahoo basically remains the same company, and they resort to imitating rather than innovating in order to attempt to grab back market share. Among other failed ideas, they attempted to imitate Myspace (Yahoo 360) and TMZ (omg.yahoo.com) -- both of which never caught on. They also have had various embarrassments over the years, including:

- Their chat system -- which never made much money in the first place -- was found to have several pedophile user-created rooms running 24/7. These would be rooms such as "Preteen girls 6-12 for middle aged men", and these rooms were NOT shock/parody. Even worse, Yahoo ran their sponsors' ads in such rooms, so people would see "This chat room brought to you by Sprint" when visiting rooms for pedophiles to find young children 6-12. Yahoo responded by disabling user-created rooms. This was all before Mayer got there. They killed the chat system completely during Mayer's term.

- In an even more embarrassing situation, Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson (the one who preceded Mayer) had claimed to have a computer science degree. It was a lie. His degree was in accounting. I understand not fully vetting the degree claims of all employees, but how could this slip by with the freaking CEO, of all things? Amazingly, Thompson listed his "computer science degree" on his own Yahoo profile, somehow fearless that someone from his past might notice. Indeed, it was caught in May 2012, but he refused to resign. They fired him about 2 weeks later.

So then they hired Mayer, an executive at google who seemed unprepared for the CEO position. It seemed that this was more of a hire to grab attention, as Mayer was young (37), female, and pretty, and broke all the stereotypes of what you expected of a CEO to look like.

But that doesn't change a company's performance, which is what I said at the time of her hire.

Unfortunately, she was more interested in posing for Vogue and having multiple children than she was in pouring her life into turning around a sinking giant of the internet.



I never got the impression that Mayer brought anything innovative or creative to the table at Yahoo.

Here is an article discussing her tenure there: http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/30/inve...a-mayer-yahoo/

Unfortunately, apparently she has a $160 million severance package, which Yahoo will have to pay if she gets fired: http://fortune.com/2015/12/04/yahoo-...yer-severance/

Sooo... nobody is quite sure what to do.

Keep in mind that I'm not being sexist here, and I'm not doubting Mayer's competency because she's a woman. I just think she was hired more for her looks and outgoing personality, rather than any kind of special ability to lead. And Yahoo really needed a highly talented CEO to reverse the long-term bad course they were already on.

Not being sexist, but she was too busy having kids yo.......

2nd thread in as many days where Druff is irked by attractive females. Everything all right Druff?

Exactly

Always respected Druff however..

Becoming more misogynistic homophobic and spartantardish by the second

Not exactly aging gracefully

[Dan Druff]

With that said, I don't think her pregnancies had to do with her failures at Yahoo.

I believe that her lack of performance at Yahoo was a combination of not being up to the task and the company being entrenched in growing irrelevancy.

For example, take Myspace. Once it was on its way down, I don't think any CEO alive could have turned it around at that point.

Yahoo wasn't in as bad of shape as Myspace, but it was a similar situation.

So you can't blame Yahoo's problems on Marissa, but she definitely wasn't the right one to task to save it.

[Dan Druff]

Not being sexist, but she was too busy having kids yo.......

2nd thread in as many days where Druff is irked by attractive females. Everything all right Druff?

Exactly

Always respected Druff however..

Becoming more misogynistic homophobic and spartantardish by the second

Not exactly aging gracefully

How is this misogyny? Because I'm criticizing a woman?

I believe I also created a thread 3 years ago when the former Yahoo CEO lied about his computer science degree. So I've been an equal opportunity basher of Yahoo CEOs.

The bottom line is that Marissa Mayer wouldn't have gotten this job if she were male with the identical credentials. They hired her because she was 37, female, and attractive.

If a young, attractive woman who is ALSO qualified to be CEO of a major tech corporation is hired, I will have no problem at all with it.

[pagelpoker]

Exactly

Always respected Druff however..

Becoming more misogynistic homophobic and spartantardish by the second

Not exactly aging gracefully

How is this misogyny? Because I'm criticizing a woman?

I believe I also created a thread 3 years ago when the former Yahoo CEO lied about his computer science degree. So I've been an equal opportunity basher of Yahoo CEOs.

The bottom line is that Marissa Mayer wouldn't have gotten this job if she were male with the identical credentials. They hired her because she was 37 and attractive.

If a young, attractive woman who is ALSO qualified to be CEO of a major tech corporation is hired, I will have no problem at all with it.

Not so much this thread as American express leso thread, so prob responding in wrong thread but whatever...

I thought you were a "free-market" believer? so why so irked by a corporation "pandering"
Isn't that what marketing is? If they want to pander to liberals, that is their right to do so

[sonatine]

I dont know if Mayer is a fuckup per se but she rolled a lot of dice that didnt pan out. EG their totally disastrous attempt to turn Yahoo into a media empire a la' Netflix. The real shame of which is, they actually ended up sinking some amazing projects because they had invested so heavily in their bullshit Community redux.


Point being; no one on earth deserves a 160m severance package, ever, least of all this broad, but Yahoo has been a walking corpse since gmail started accepting non-invited users so you know, the fuck ever.

[lol wow]

Great thoughts pedotine that space show Yahoo did was plat and I'll take whatever warmed over version of community I can get and I keep a Yahoo mail to sign up for terrible sites like draftkings and pfa

[gut]

Yahoo would have been donkdown 7 years ago if not for fantasy sports. Yahoo has always had the best and biggest site for fantasy. A couple years ago, Espn started claiming they had slightly more users, but the numbers are supposedly sketchy.
Yahoo's new foray into DFS has been a huge success for them so far as well. With already 6 million + standard fantasy football players (and more that might be unique to other sports) on their site, they pretty much immediately became the only other site besides the big 2 with a fair amount of action, and didn't really have to advertise at all.

If I was their CEO, I would just ditch about 75% of the things you see on their front page, focus on the fantasy sports (and general sports writing, where they have always had good writers) and their entertainment area. Their beginnings into episodic television were pretty solid, with them doing another season of Community after it was canceled (didn't watch but I suppose thats a "big get"), and Sin City Saints (about a Las Vegas NBA team) was pretty good I thought.

I still have my OG yahoo email as my "active spam" account. Think I started it in 1997ish, when I started playing fantasy on there.

[tgull]

Jeff Bezos said it best a while back, "all companies go out of business, I only hope it does not happen when I am alive". Rarely does a company make it a 100 years, and McDonalds, WalMart, Dell, HP, etc... are already declining, they will drift and be gobbled up and absorbed over time in 25-50 years.

Yahoo had its run. 20 years from now Apple will be a dinosaur and in decline. It's just the way it is. You get big, bloated and fat, and you start dying, theory of evolution applies to business as well.

[Krypt]

Thread reeks of chauvinism. Quite frankly, I'm disgusted.

[Krypt]

Yahoo Finance remains the gold standard for poor people.

[MumblesBadly]

Not being sexist, but she was too busy having kids yo.......

2nd thread in as many days where Druff is irked by attractive females. Everything all right Druff?

I have no problem with career women having children and having to take time off.

But if you're going to get hundreds of millions of dollars to attempt to turn around a failing major corporation, you had better put all of your time and energy into it, and not get started on major personal life commitments such as multiple pregnancies.

If she wanted to get going with having children, she should have stayed at her well-paying but less-demanding job at Google.

Frankly, she was put into an impossible situation. Since the rise of Google and Facebook, Yahoo is like the maker of the Stanley Steamer in the age of ascent of the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine.

[Dan Druff]

Comments
MumblesBadly: Ditto the LOL! Druff is jealous that the "hot" babes wouldn't go for him!

false on all counts