Mayer's 3rd Trimester Is Yahoo!'s 1st
My wife was due with our first -- and only -- child years ago on Oct. 15. Doctors had to induce the 10-pound, 11-ounce bundle of joy from the womb in a scheduled encounter on Oct. 24.
This is the home stretch on the road to one of the biggest days of Mayer's life. My grandmother claims she was walking up and down stairs doing laundry right up to the day she went into labor with her three kids.
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey referred to Mayer as a Yahoo! founder the other day at the Tech Crunch Disrupt conference. I couldn't agree more. This is Mayer's company now.
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In a month or so, she'll give birth to a child. Several months later, Yahoo! will enter its third trimester and Mayer will pop out a new company.
It's been relatively quiet at Yahoo! Mayer made some changes in culture. That made headlines. She hired a few people, presumably canned some and parted ways with others who decided to move on. But that's really about it. Other than the no dividend or buyback SEC filing, no major news.
Flush with billions in cash, Mayer, aside from stating the obvious, gives the media the silent treatment. As an investor watching YHOO stock, I like the approach.
My experience as a user of Yahoo! products and services has not changed much since Mayer took over. However, I no longer receive emails from Yahoo! asking for my opinion. I used to get them somewhat frequently. On occasion, Yahoo! would invite me to Sunnyvale to participate in a focus group.
Just for the heck of it, I would play along. Though I filled out several surveys, I never made the cut to appear at Yahoo! headquarters.
I always found the idea of asking random people for their opinions on what you should or should not do as an organization, as a brand, as a company absurd. Yahoo! started doing it so frequently it became clear the people on the inside had no idea how to salvage a perpetually sinking ship.
I suspect we will not see much, if any, of this horribly unscientific market research from Mayer. Any company that draws a sample from the database of Yahoo! Mail users clearly has lost its way. In fact, it probably never had a viable way in the first place. Who are the account owners being polled? Every pet I have ever owned had a Yahoo! Mail account. So does my daughter.
That said, even if done with rigor, I don't expect Mayer to consider, let alone fall back on, such lame tactics.