this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2026
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Was Yahoo doing that well in 2012? At the time people were saying that she would never have gotten the job if Yahoo wasn't a sinking ship
Look at Google as an example. Google started as a search engine and ad company, and has since reinvented itself with investment in new areas like photos, email, Android, etc.
Yahoo started as a search engine, ad company, 'portal start page', and email. They kept doing the same old thing and went nowhere.
But they still had products with value- Flickr for example. Managing photos was starting to become a big thing, but they let Flickr stagnate, it got no development, and eventually people stopped using it. Look at their email product as another- Gmail focused on making their email usable, clean, fast, great storage, and without lock-in. Yahoo email sucked and it was hard to get rid of them because for a long time they didn't support IMAP (what you'd use to vacuum out your old messages) or email forwarding. People stayed not because it was a great product, but because they were stuck. But that's a real missed opportunity- Yahoo Mail could have been what Gmail became.
When Google modernized their site with web 2.0 technologies like AJAX and updated the look and feel to match, Yahoo still felt like a Web 1.0 site with ads all over the place and messy design.
That's why I say she ran the company into the ground. Just because Yahoo wasn't leading the pack when she joined doesn't mean there weren't any wins to be had. It's the job of CEO to recognize where the company should invest and innovate and where they should stay the course.
Another example- one of her big decisions was ending all remote work for Yahoo employees, without consideration for employees that didn't live near a Yahoo office, or even how much office space Yahoo had. I remember reports of people working in hallways and sitting on the floor because there weren't enough desks for everybody that was forced to come in.
To be clear- I'm NOT saying she's stupid. She's obviously very smart. But I am saying she wasn't a good leader, and made many decisions that were obviously wrong both at the time and as seen historically. She does not seem to be a person with good business sense or the right kind of leadership, for a great many reasons.
She was one among a string of bad CEOs for Yahoo. I worked there for a couple of years under another of them. In each case, people thought that this was the one who'd turn the company around. When I joined, I was pretty excited because they owned things like Flickr (still my favorite photo sharing site, long since detached from yahoo), del.icio.us (my favorite bookmark sharing site), and a bunch of neat stuff at Yahoo Developer Network (YQL and Pipes come to mind). Those all seemed pretty significant, but the company never really figured out how to turn those things into business success.
The interesting thing here, though, is that IMO Yahoo has been successful in its own way over the past few years, probably since Verizon sold it. It just doesn't exhibit the "infinite growth forever" characteristics that make it appealing to investors. Its sports and finance sites remain very popular. It seems to have reached a point of stability as a business. But the current private equity owned company bears little resemblance to the original Yahoo and I certainly wouldn't consider it a "tech company" in any meaningful way.
There's really no point in comparing Google to Yahoo. Google actually developed a solid strategy fairly early on, which involved (1) collecting data from any source possible (all their services are designed around collecting data), (2) selling that data to advertisers, and (3) (very important) creating and owning platforms (Android, Chrome, Youtube, Pixel, GCP etc.) that allow them to not depend on anybody else.