I think a much more likely explanation is that Marissa failed because she brought no new ideas to the table, and also made a whole bunch of boneheaded blunders like this:
http://gawker.com/5987043/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-installed-...
and this:
http://nypost.com/2016/01/18/marissa-mayers-job-safety-joke-...
while she unashamedly pocketed $36M for her first six months worth of work.
Yahoo's problems have absolutely nothing to do with Mayer having a "nursery" put into her office. She could have taken minimum wage and no other compensation, and no part of this story would have turned out differently, except they might have sold the company by now.
Arguments about Mayer's performance on threads like these are frustrating because the consensus (elsewhere, not here) seems to be that her first order of business should have been a significant layoff. But at this point, now that we have lurid stories about logos, nurseries, and poorly-timed jokes, there's no winning: their core business has been on a downward trajectory since long before she took over, and nobody believes they're appropriately staffed.
Later
For what it's worth, if you look at what I'm saying, nowhere am I claiming that Mayer is a good CEO. But I have doubts as to whether a good CEO could have done much to change the outcome here, except perhaps by fetching a better price at auction for Yahoo.
Of course they don't. That's not the point. Putting a nursery in her office was not a boneheaded blunder because the cost of the nursery (or her salary) made the difference between the company succeeding and not. It was a boneheaded blunder because at the same time she put the nursery in her office she also rescinded all telecommuting. That had an understandably (and predictably!) devastating effect on morale. The message was: I (Marissa) deserve to have this perk that makes my life more convenient, but you, silly rank-and-file employee, do not. I don't even care if you can demonstrate that you can be productive from home, I don't have time to sort that out. I'm much too busy and important for that sort of trivia. So you're just going to have to suck it up and deal with your commute.
> her first order of business should have been a significant layoff
Could be. Whatever it is she should have done, she manifestly hasn't done it yet.
> I have doubts as to whether a good CEO could have done much to change the outcome here
People were saying the same thing about Apple before Steve Jobs came back. Sadly, in this case we will probably never know because that experiment will never be done.
I'm saying something simple. You claim that Mayer had 4.6B of cash flow to play with turn around Apple. My response is simply (a) no she didn't, and (b) to the extent she had real revenue to work with, it was an encumbrance: she was tasked with turning around a company for which 30% of its income was people routing their search queries to Yahoo. It's hard to think of big moves you can make that don't somehow jeopardize that revenue stream. She's boxed in.
(Then you look at the activist shareholder critiques of her tenure, and it's like, "she spent 10MM buying iPhones for everyone on her staff", and I'm like, it's fucking 2014, almost nobody but Apple has figured out how to make huge amounts of money on mobile but pretty much everyone thinks it's the most important thing in the world to do, and she's, what, buying the staff computers to do that with? Sheesh.)
Did she rise to the occasion and do something unprecedented in business history, like Jobs did? No she did not. Executive hired to do the impossible fails to do the impossible, film at 11.
Certainly turning Yahoo around was never going to be easy. And it can be difficult to distinguish between "impossible" and merely "hard." We cannot possibly settle that question here and so there's no point in getting deeper into those weeds.
I will point out this though: I'm choosing to give Marissa and the Yahoo board the benefit of the doubt and assume that they disagreed with you, that they all thought it was possible. I'm also giving them the benefit of the doubt in assuming that they weren't necessarily wrong. Because the alternative is to believe either that 1) they are all idiots for thinking it was possible or 2) that they hired Marissa knowing full well that she was going to fail no matter what she did, and she accepted the offer and pocketed the $36M for her first six months on the job knowing full well that she was going to fail no matter what she did. That seems to me to be a much more damning accusation than anything I've said or implied. That they undertook a clearly impossible task is not actually a defense for a CEO who accepted an eight-figure salary IMHO.
What I do know is that at the time of her hire, on these very boards, people were singing her praises for the most part. Because the Valley protects its own.
Steve Jobs isn't the benchmark here. Maybe it was an impossible task to right the Yahoo ship, but what exactly did she do that was positive or innovative...at all?
I was suprised she didn't fire more people.
I thought it was a mistake to bring all telecommuting employees in.
I know she meant well, but all she did was irritate employees. There was no way these employees were going to bond, and magically turn into a Google love fest.
For some reason, I still think about happily doing your work at home, and then having to come into work and bond. Yes, I think it's important, at innovative companies, for employees to be present, all around the camp fire, but it's someting that needs to be done from day one.
In my world, I still stumble upon a yahoo page, but it's usually by malware on my old laptop I just haven't fixed. I'm glad they haven't changed their look, and then suprised.
Yahoo reminds me of just how dispensable these companies are in the bigger picture. Yahoo could dissapear, and I wouldn't even flinch. I don't even know anyone with a Yahoo email anymore.
Their next CEO should be an unknown, who's really into his/her tinkering stage in life. Young, crazy, motivated, bursting with angst. Gave this person a strong financial team, but don't hire the right looking candidate on paper.
What Apple lacked was a clear focus on what their business needed to be, which was selling hardware, not licensing the OS or making business software, or any of the other bad ideas they had from trying to compete with Microsoft directly.
What no one here or anywhere else seems to have an answer for is "What is Yahoo's core business". It used to be the Yellow Pages for the Internet, and now it's basically a Media company with some legacy stuff like web email.
-- http://thenextweb.com/apple/2010/06/02/steve-jobs-90-days/#gref
-- "Steve Jobs", Isaacson, pg 314
That's probably indicative that we are not CEO material :-)
It was the worst state the company had been in, but the losses had stopped even before Jobs took over. Not to understate Jobs accomplishments. Just saying a competent CEO could turn Apple from a doghouse company to a profitable company. It took a genius CEO takes a company from the the doghouse to the most valuable in the world.
From the comments on this part of the thread, you'd think Yahoo was some kind of Internet colossus before Mayer took their reins, rather than an overgrown relic kept alive and profitable through sheer inertia.