Salon.com > Marissa Mayer

Yahoo shells out $1.1 billion for Tumblr

Mon, 20 May 2013 14:49:00 +0000

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Yahoo is buying online blogging forum Tumblr for $1.1 billion as CEO Marissa Mayer tries to rejuvenate an Internet icon that had fallen behind the times.

The deal announced Monday represents Mayer's boldest move yet since she left Google 10 months ago to lead Yahoo's latest comeback attempt. It marks Yahoo's most expensive acquisition since the Sunnyvale, Calif., company bought online search engine Overture a decade ago for $1.3 billion in cash and stock.

Yahoo is paying all cash for Tumblr, dipping into some of its remaining stash from a $7.6 billion windfall reaped last year from selling about half of its stake in Chinese Internet company Alibaba Holdings Group. Taking over Tumblr will devour about one-fifth of the $5.4 billion in cash that Yahoo had in its accounts at the end of March.

While hailing Tumblr as fount of creativity that attracts 300 million visitors per month, Yahoo pledged "not to screw it up." David Karp, a high school dropout who started Tumblr six years ago, will remain in control of the service in an effort to retain the same "irreverence, wit and commitment to empower creators," Yahoo said.

Yahoo blows it again

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 20:37:00 +0000

Well, it's a start, I guess. On Tuesday, NBC broke the news that Yahoo, of all places, has now significantly upped its family leave policy. The company will now increase employee maternity leave from eight weeks to 16 weeks, and offer new dads eight weeks paid leave. It will also give new parents $500 "to spend on such things as house cleaning, groceries and babysitters, plus Yahoo-branded baby gifts." What's this, boss? A tiny onesie with a corporate logo on it? You shouldn't have! So yeahhhhhhh, thanks.

In recent months, Yahoo has not won a reputation as the most family-friendly of organizations, in spite of its new CEO, Marissa Mayer. You may recall hearing a word or two about how everything in the world was going to be different henceforth for working parents back when Yahoo hired her last year, while she was still pregnant. Instead, Mayer made good on her vow to power through her own brief maternity leave like a character out of Monty Python, popping out a baby while never breaking stride. True to form, by November, she was confidently declaring, "The baby's been way easier than everyone made it out to be."

Leaning in won’t help your career

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 12:02:00 +0000

OK, Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg didn’t say “join a union.” But that’s the message the vast majority of working women should be considering this Women’s History Month. The best way for the most women to improve their working lives is through a union.

The new PBS documentary Makers: Women Who Make America shows how the women's movement changed the workplace for women, men and families. Two of the young Makers highlighted in the film, Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook and Marissa Mayer at Yahoo, now dominate the news. Here's what neither of them tell you: union women earn more than non-union women and have better benefits and working conditions.

Women at Facebook and Yahoo should consider spending their time organizing to have a say in their workplace.

The 6 most appalling statements of America’s biggest CEOs

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 18:10:00 +0000

The sh*t CEOs say! When the chiefs of giant corporations are not blaming others for their mismanagement and unscrupulous behavior, they’re explaining why their distorted worldviews are best for the 99 percent. They do this, of course, at a time of declining national median income and huge paydays for executives.

Recently, there has been an uptick of particularly stupid remarks coming from the mouths of America’s CEOs. Here are a few of the most out-of-touch and out-of-line oracles, a mix of recent gaffes and classic blunders.

1. “That's why I'm richer than you.”

JPMorgan honcho Jamie Dimon has taken time out of his regularly scheduled program of mismanaging a systemically dangerous bank to divulge why he's richer than the rest of us. Last week, Mike Mayo, who is both an analyst at CLSA and a critic of too-big-to-fail banks, was on an investor conference call -- a forum in which executives typically offer BS about their company’s performance. Mayo wasn’t having it. He asked pointedly if customers might take their money to better-capitalized banks than JPMorgan. (Check out the video.)

Marissa Mayer, morale killer

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 19:37:00 +0000

When All Things D's Kara Swisher reported Monday that Yahoo CEO and reluctant metaphor for working motherhood Marissa Mayer's brave new vision for her organization now involves telling several hundred workers they can either stop working from home or get the hell out, a nation of hardworking, life-career-juggling telecommuters winced in sympathy. As our own Irin Carmon put it, "Yahoo is setting back … progress and flexibility" in a move whose "impact falls disproportionately on women." A Yahoo employee, meanwhile, told Swisher it was "outrageous and a morale killer."

Marissa Mayer had nursery installed in office

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 15:17:00 +0000

Marissa Mayer, the Yahoo! CEO, paid to have a nursery built in her office when she took the job at Yahoo, it's been revealed after she caused a stir by banning working from home. Mayer, 37, told fellow "Yahoos" that they must work in the office and should quit if they "couldn’t or wouldn’t."

However, the former Google Inc. executive — who is on a $117 million salary over five years with Yahoo! — has further upset many employees, particularly working mothers, with the double standard, reported by Business Insider.

They accuse Mayer of not understanding how difficult it is to work and raise a family at the same time.

Mayer took on the top job at Yahoo! when she was six months pregnant and vowed to be back to work more or less straight away.

However, BI cited one Yahoo as backing her decision to ban working from home:

"For what it's worth, I support the no working form home rule. There's a ton of abuse of that at Yahoo. Something specific to the company."

The source also said Yahoo's large remote workforce led to "people slacking off like crazy, not being available, and spending a lot of time on non-Yahoo! projects."

AllThingsD, which broke the story about the ban, pointed out that Mayer is trying to reverse Yahoo's long downward spiral.

A source told the website that while she had held out carrots such as free food at work and iPhones, she had grown frustrated because the Yahoo! parking lot in Sunnyvale, California, was slow to fill up in the morning and quick to empty by 5 p.m., which is atypical of the company's Silicon Valley rivals.

Free your workers, Yahoo!

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 18:50:00 +0000

I don't have children, although someday I hope to, but I am a big fan of efficiency and changing from pajamas into pajamas. In other words, I am a fan of working from home, which is why I was dismayed to see that Yahoo!'s new-ish CEO, Marissa Mayer, has signed off on eliminating it as an option for her employees. This is about more than lifestyle or employee cohesion (or pajama pants). It's a deeply political move.

All Things D's Kara Swisher, who first reported on the memo and its protest-too-much assertions that this is about "fun," also notes that the new policy doesn't just extend to a few hundred customer service employees, but to "any staffers who might have arrangements to work from home just one or two days a week, too." That includes waiting for service and repair visits, and, presumably, other home responsibilities. In the name of morale and becoming "the absolute best place to work," Yahoo! is setting back the progress and flexibility that some employees have been able to enjoy. That not only belies contemporary realities and preferences -- including the fact that productivity is about a lot more than putting in hours -- but its impact falls disproportionately on women.

Zooey Deschanel declares her feminism

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 17:49:00 +0000

Zooey Deschanel, you make feminism totes adorbs. The star of the self-proclaimed "adorkable" Fox sitcom "New Girl" has in recent years been spiraling into a tailspin of overwrought cuteness, a Lindsay Lohan on a bender of twee. Yet in the new issue of Glamour, it's that same woman, the one who co-founded a site called Hello Giggles, for God's sake, who unreservedly declares herself a feminist. A f---king feminist, in fact.

In the interview, Deschanel, the doe-eyed, ukulele-playing poster child for Manic Pixie Dreamgirlism, takes charge of a conversation about women, media and image in a way that proves she may look like a fluffy kitten, but she's fierce as a lioness. When asked if she'd one day like to have children, Deschanel shoots down the question by replying, "That is so personal, and it’s my pet peeve when people press you on it. And it’s always women who get asked! Is anybody saying that to George Clooney?" And she has a reply for all the critics who question her sunshine-sweet image: "If you are tearing down somebody who has forged her own path just for wearing a tiara, rethink your priorities. I never stop myself from doing something because I’m afraid of what people might think." ZING.

Why are women scared to call themselves feminists?

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 19:21:00 +0000

It's a glorious time to be a declared non-feminist. This weekend, Katy Perry accepted Billboard Woman of the Year award by announcing to the world, "I am not a feminist, but I do believe in the strength of women." Way to take home a prize for womankind there, Perry. And last month, the former supermodel/first lady of France Carla Bruni-Sarkozy declared in a magazine interview that "I'm not at all an active feminist. On the contrary, I'm a bourgeois. I love family life, I love doing the same thing every day." Because you can't be bourgeois, love your family, or value stability and be a feminist. It's in the manifesto.

Bruni-Sarkozy added, "We don't need to be feminist in my generation." As a member of Bruni-Sarkozy's generation, let me address that. Ha! HA HA HA! No, we don't need feminism at all! Women over 40 are too valued and respected for that! They don't have their looks scrutinized and mocked; they don't face skepticism that they're too old to do their jobs; they aren't the punch lines of garish jokes about predatory cougars. Ha ha ha!

Marissa Mayer can work if she wants

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 19:35:00 +0000

The concern trolling about Marissa Mayer started long before her son was born earlier this week. It began last summer, at precisely the moment the world learned she'd been named Yahoo's new CEO — and that she was pregnant. Her announcement then that "My maternity leave will be a few weeks long and I’ll work throughout it" made for all kinds of morning news show banter and tsk-tsk opinion pieces about how this accomplished, educated woman was clearly in waaaay over her knocked-up head. And now that she has brought forth her issue, and Yahoo has stated, "She will be working remotely and is planning to return to the office as soon as possible (likely in one to two weeks)," it's time for the pundits to stick their noses in her placenta yet again.

This week at New York, Ann Friedman takes Mayer's story — and the very real issues of insufficient paid maternity leave and the "professional repercussions" for those who do take time off — to leap off the rails with the radical case for "mandatory" parental leave to "normalize" family time for new parents. Making people stay home with babies — that's way more progressive than making them go to work, right?

Hey, moms: Hush up!

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 19:45:00 +0000

When the announcement came this week that former Google exec Marissa Mayer had been named Yahoo's new CEO – followed closely by her revelation that she is six months pregnant – you'd think the response to such a historic moment in corporate and maternal history would be unique. Behold this once-in-our-lifetime moment of female achievement! Instead, you know what the overwhelming, demoralizing chorus has been? The same BS we all hear the first time we get knocked up. Lady, you have NO IDEA what you're in for.

You could hear the howls of "That's what you think" rising across the land when Mayer confidently explained that even though she's about to embark on the hardest and best job in the whole wide world – motherhood, of course! – "I like to stay in the rhythm of things. My maternity leave will be a few weeks long and I’ll work throughout it." It seemed, to the pundits who scrambled to make Mayer's situation our newest Metaphor for Everything That Happens in American Motherhood, not just arrogant, but deeply naive.