Not smart just ruthless describes nearly every CEO. Uncaring and lacking empathy should be screened for from a early age. Those kids should be identified to everyone so you know to avoid their schemes and thus preventing the harm they cause. That this woman is unable to see her daughters talents and positive attributes is just in line with their missing piece of humanity.
“Also, find out whatever she’s into and add a reminder to my calendar to send her some of whatever it is on her birthday whenever that is. It’s a ‘she’, right?”
Wtf is a girlboss? Sounds incredibly sexist and condescending. She just better wear something cute and not bump her head on that glass ceiling.
2014-2018 it was used unironically to connotate women creating spaces for themselves in business - from a popular, well-meaning book of the same name
2019 onwards it has been used sarcastically to reference performative, ineffectual feminism.
You’d think she could at least use the term ‘woman’ to avoid coming across as a specialized dominatrix for people with an unfortunate brat fetish.
She didn’t call herself girlboss, the writer of the article did
Because he’s got an unfortunate brat fetish.
I don’t understand why people are still taking this woman seriously. She is not a ‘girlboss’. She is the woman who ran Yahoo into the ground, taking it from one of the giants of the dot com era into a largely worthless and useless has-been by grossly mismanaging every single one of their formerly valuable properties.
The fact that she is involved immediately makes this company lose credibility in my eyes.
The fact that she apparently needs an AI model to come up with three compliments for her own daughter only reinforces my opinion.
What about that doesn’t sound like a “girlboss” to you?
When I hear ‘girlboss’ I envision someone confident, competent, and in charge, who understands their business and is making the right choices.
Letting a company’s most promising products languish while the company loses what value it has left is not what comes to mind with ‘girlboss’.
Before google, yes. God, otherwise you would have to try to use a search engine, and those were shit.
So yeah, if Yahoo! was down around 1997, I would be pissed. However, I would just jump on mIRC.
She probably “extracted value” for shareholders of a dying company. This usually means picking the company apart, selling things, firing people, and offshoring labor.
IMO, every time a CEO, bigshot capitalist, or industrialist is cited as a “hero”, I try to keep in mind they are not our hero.
Yahoo owned so many interesting services at some point or another over the years it’s absolutely insane.
Some Yahoo-branded services that spring to mind (really just off the top of my head) are things like the Yahoo Directory (larger than DMOZ at some point), Search (more popular than Google at some point), GeoCities, Maps, Mail, Messenger, Groups, Games (online boardgames) and Answers.
And then there’s all the stuff that wasn’t Yahoo-branded, which includes some absolute bangers like del.icio.us, Flickr, Tumblr, AIM, MapQuest, RYOT, or fucking AOL and Netscape(!)
It boggles my damn mind that anybody could own and squander that much stuff. Properly managed they should have been an internet service giant today.
Private equity: never build for tomorrow what you can sell for parts today
She is the woman who ran Yahoo into the ground, taking it from one of the giants of the dot com era into a largely worthless and useless has-been
Yahoo was once a big recognizable brand, but there was pretty much no moment in history when anyone would have said “Oh no, Yahoo is down, now how will I get important things done?” It was never focused, it was never indispensable.
Yahoo was valued at over $100B briefly in 1999-2000, after Google had demonstrated a much, much better internet search. Yahoo cratered to as little as 5% of its all-time high, recovered for a while, then began fading away. Its market cap was just under $20B when Mayer was hired in 2012. After which the market cap trended up.
And that’s why I say she ran it into the ground- because when Google demonstrated a MUCH MUCH MUCH better Search, Yahoo didn’t do anything differently. They kept going as a ‘start page portal site’, kept pushing their really shitty email system, and just rode that wave into irrelevance.
Yahoo HAD some properties that COULD have been immensely valuable, even post-Google, if done right.Flickr is one that comes to mind. Google had Picasa, and Google was innovating and pushing updates while Flickr (app and website) stagnated. So with no innovation everybody eventually left Flickr. With some vision, Flickr could have become what Tumblr or Google Photos ended up being.
Yahoo Answers was another one. It was a forum sort of like AskReddit where you could post questions on any subject you wanted and others would answer it. Again, stagnated, became irrelevant.
I’ll give you that Mayer came in after much of the value had been lost. But she came into a diamond in the rough, a site that was ready to reinvent itself into something relevant again, and she just didn’t.
And that’s why I say [Mayer] ran it into the ground- because when Google demonstrated a MUCH MUCH MUCH better Search, Yahoo didn’t do anything differently.
Look, this sentence literally blames Mayer for things that happened before her tenure. You acknowledge that this doesn’t make any sense, but you can’t really deny that it’s what you’ve said. Somehow the media that’s covered Mayer has made a lot of people react this way.
Flickr is one that comes to mind. Google had Picasa…
As a response to its community’s concerns, Flickr saw a substantial engineering investment from 2014-2015 or so, under Mayer’s tenure. I’m afraid the best summary I’ve found is pretty obvious AI slop, but it’s relating some real events.
Flickr lives, Picasa was killed, Google Photos is now an extremely annoying nagware for backup services. Things could be so much worse for Flickr.
Yahoo Answers was another one…
God I hated Yahoo Answers.
Mayer’s attempts to make Yahoo relevant again may not have worked but it’s not responsible or accurate to conclude that she was necessarily inept.
It is my suspicion that if, say, Jack Dorsey had overseen the dismantling of Yahoo, the business press would have told us that he made a great effort but Yahoo’s problems went too deep. Rather than leading us to believe that he was just inept. Or that he failed because he took the wrong amount of paternity leave.
I largely agree with you, though by the time she took the reigns at yahoo, it was already pretty dead.
But this pattern of executives proudly offloading ‘pesky personal connection’ to AI just works to confirm that their stratum of society are almost exclusively sociopaths.
She is the woman who ran Yahoo into the ground
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.
Google started as a search engine and ad company, and has since reinvented itself with investment in new areas like photos, email, Android, etc.
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.
Fuckin half wit, no wonder CEO’s love AI, dumb as bricks
She sounds like a loser, I feel bad for her kid.
hey google why do i love my children
“Since you are asking an LLM this question, you apparently do not.”
“This is an interesting question, why do you love your children?”
“omg it’s sentient”
Gork, is this true?
You made me imagine a Gorn AI. It doesn’t answer your questions it just keeps trying to fight you to the death.
“Gorn, what’s the weather today?”
"Expect lots of rain from your family’s tears as your blood floods the streets. There will be a high of 82 and a low of 58. Tonight, you can expect lots of clouds of smoke as I burn your carcass to watch the flames glisten upon my blades!"
That’s basically Carrot Weather.
best weather app
You should probably keep grok away from your kids.
Mork, where is Mindy?
That’s a very kunnin’ question, Gork will answer it
if anything, it shows Mayer performing the exact kind of cognitive offloading that any AI tool worth its salt should free us up to focus on rather than doing for us.
This has been the focus from the start, though. Almost all of the “killer apps” for AI that we’re being sold by the AI companies are about doing the creative stuff and human interaction for us. So we can spend more time being depressed, mindless worker drones, I guess?
“Cognitive offloading” may well be the words that doom the human race to our Idiocrasy future
“Cognitive offloading” == “lobotomy”
The words aren’t what doom us, the phenomenon they describe is. Without the words, we remain in ignorance, which compounds with the thoughtlessness.
Conversely, putting words to it gives the mind something to work on.
🍆💨 uuh mmm yeah!
It’s cognitive too, right?
I’d love for an AI to chit-chat with my co-workers and fluff my boss so I could just do my work and go home.
Instead of typing a prompt and getting a response, Dazzle has users snap a photo as the starting point and lets the agent point to what it thinks the next course of action should be. “Snap a picture of a purchase you’ve been thinking about, a flat tire, or fridge ingredients, and Dazzle buys on approval, schedules repairs, or suggests recipes,” the company says.
Finally, what we really needed: ChatGPT for people too lazy to type a prompt
About the stupidest Ai idea I’ve heard yet. Whose photo album is comprehensive and representative of their lives? Social media types take curated photos to send a specific message. The rest of us clutter it up with cat photos, images of items we don’t want to forget, memes, and photos from others thrust upon us by applications like Viber.
Snaps a picture of their daughter, what’s it supposed do without input at that point? Just start making up critiques? “Well she doesn’t have a flat tire but her hair cut is terrible, her features don’t match societies preferences so she could use a nose job, the fact that she’s not smiling tells me she could use a doctor’s visit to diagnose depression medications”
“On second thought there aren’t 3 good things about your daughter”
See! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell her!!!
How long before someone mates this with a drone to basically become Jafar and lose their fucking mind
This woman’s bad decisions brought down an Internet giant and yet she’s still treated as if she is someone worth listening to.
hey now, she was paid quite well for that work, over $200m.
Dhe was paid to do a job and, since shes stilñ there, i guews she is doing the job well
The job simply wasn’t “make yahoo something big and successful”
This is dystopian as hell.
I kind of like that the article points out a problem with a lot of stuff that is implemented on us:
Like, did we think about this for more than a second?
We forget sometimes that part of women’s liberation is that a woman is free to be just as big an asshole as a man.
When you have no idea how to parent specifically because you’re a fucking monster.
So AI is there to help psychopaths connect with family and wider society
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I genuinely don’t understand people like this who are so averse to thinking that they go out of their way to prompt a language model to get an answer that they should’ve known already.
People in my life say I think to much despite the fact I’m naturally a deep thinker, quick is disappointing to hear from them because I know they use LLMs for “research”, which really means to ask tops 3 questions and think you’re informed.
Well hey, at least the rich can be unthinking dumbasses too
