1 Line Review: I’ll be surprised if there is no movie made based on this book.
Nicholas Carlson is a Chief Correspondent with Business Insider and with his style of writing I would recommend him to start writing fiction and mystery books soon. This book is a page turner and for anyone interested in the inside story of this giant company called Yahoo!, this is it.
The book covers the history and turmoil that Yahoo! went thru in it’s management and how finding the right CEO at the top has always been a struggle. Yes, even after approaching 20 years of its existence, the book clearly suggests that the Fight to save Yahoo! is still on.
Problem with Yahoo! has been pretty simple yet no one is able to solve it! When Jerry and David founded the company in January 1994, internet was not a organised world and Yahoo! provided the entry point to the world wide web with ease and categorisation. Once that problem was solved, Yahoo! could not hang on to a problem statement that it wanted to solve. Even today it looks like its not clear if Yahoo! is a product technology company or a media company.
The book will take you thru the roller coaster ride of Yahoo! as well as some parts of Google to give a fair idea of what Marissa Mayer was upto at Google when Yahoo called in for the job and why she grabbed the job offer after spending 13 years with Google. Getting to Google straight from Stanford.
There are many Yahoo! incidents described in the book where Marissa is involved. Few for good, many for not so good reasons. One of the most controversial is the employee appraisal method where the project manager had to necessarily put few of his team members in the ‘needs improvement’ bracket.
From the time she took over, the revenue numbers never bounced back, she hired a Googler for the COO position but that backfired too. The person who could have actually helped was the man who was supposed to be at Marissa’s place at the first place (a little word play there), but then the board did not choose him and also because Marissa hurt his ego, he decided to leave.
The famous incident – When Marissa wanted to meet Livinsohn (interim CEO) she asked her secretary to make him to sit ‘outside’ her cabin, he said my cabin is just a few steps away andf I will be right there. Marissa said “NO, you sit right outside”. That was the end of it.
There were multiple stories of how people used to queue up right outside her cabin to meet her.
Her face to face weekly Q&A sessions at the cafeteria in the head office of Yahoo! became a big hit. No denying the fact that she did and is doing her best to make Yahoo! the best company to work for. She shipped MacBooks for its employees and also all Blackberry’s were replaced with a choice of iPhone/ best of Android phones or Windows phones.
But guess Yahoo! has never been able to lift the jinx it has got from the very start. It just does not know how to define itself. What is the focus at Yahoo! ? Only time will tell.
Till then ask these questions to yourself –
When was the last you used Yahoo! ?
What is the one thing that comes to your mind when you think of Yahoo! ?
Do you think Yahoo! will survive till 2020?
Now go read the book.