Wednesday, June 25, 2014
People skills?
In techy news:
Yahoo's chief executive Marissa Mayer has responded to critics after she came under fire for oversleeping at an advertising festival in Cannes, insisting the event was productive and that she apologised for being late. Mayer was supposed to meet with clients and give them an update on Yahoo's strategy under her watch. Instead, she fell asleep and, by the time she made it to her table, some of the guests, including IPG's CEO Michael Roth, had left. Mayer, who left Google for Yahoo while being six months pregnant in 2012, has previously been criticised for being too focused on technology and product development while lacking people skills. In January, Mayer fired her chief operating officer, Henrique de Castro, whom she persuaded to leave Google for Yahoo and was mainly responsible for advertising. Mayer has effectively taken over his duties with no direct replacement for de Castro announced so far.TOO FOCUSED ON TECHNOLOGY? Lesus! As a plain old customer, I don't care what happens at executive meetings. I only notice that Yahoo's TECHNOLOGY was getting worse for a long time, and it's been getting worse DRASTICALLY FASTER since Mayer took over. Before Mayer, Yahoo Groups and Flickr were still usable. Now they're not worth looking at. Serious photographers are abandoning Flickr in droves. It's blazingly clear that nobody at Yahoo actually USES their products. There's no feedback. I don't know how they manage to develop stuff without trying it. When I develop stuff, whether it's courseware for a large publisher or humble tools for fellow Poser users, the company or customers try it out intensely and let me know when something is inadequate. None of the recent Yahoo shit could get past this trial process. Ergo, Yahoo is simply not testing its shit. That's the opposite of TOO FOCUSED ON TECHNOLOGY. I don't know if it's GOOD PEOPLE SKILLS or not. But I can safely conclude that Yahoo's customers are not the 'people' who matter. Only the next LBO purchaser of the entire company is 'people'.
Labels: the broken circle
¶ 4:22 AM
