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.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/...32_634x430.jpg
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.