Tech’s ice queen

Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! By Nicholas Carlson.Twelve Books; 356 pages; $39. John Murray; £20. Buy from Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk

TOWARDS the end of this tale about one of the world’s best known and worst run internet companies is a vivid description of a Christmas party thrown at Marissa Mayer’s Silicon Valley home in 2013. Along with the real snow shipped in for the occasion, she had ordered a large ice rink to be set up in her back garden.

Since she took over the helm at Yahoo in 2012, Ms Mayer has been skating on some rather thin ice. The latest in a long line of bosses to try and revive the web firm’s fortunes, she has seen Yahoo’s share price soar thanks largely to its stake in Alibaba, a giant Chinese e-commerce outfit whose flotation last year produced a massive payday for the American firm. But its core businesses in areas such as online advertising are still stuck in the doldrums.

Much of the first half of Nicholas Carlson’s book, “Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!”, is devoted to explaining how the firm, which began life as a simple web directory created by David Filo and Jerry Yang and then grew into a web giant, got itself into the pickle that Ms Mayer inherited. Some strategic blunders and an excess of Byzantine boardroom intrigue are to blame. The speed with which Yahoo’s directors decapitated successive chief executives brings to mind the French Revolution rather than the internet one.

Ms Mayer has so far managed to dodge the guillotine. A computer scientist by training, she honed her skills at Google and has impressed “Yahoos” with her technical know-how. As a result, programmers who once shunned the firm are now more willing to join it. She has successfully revamped services such as Flickr, a photo-sharing platform, and has instituted regular public meetings during which she fields questions from employees.

But, as Mr Carlson’s gossipy account makes clear, Yahoo’s leader has also alienated some supporters by refusing to make big cuts in the company’s bloated workforce, by failing to reverse the slide in its share of online-advertising markets and by making some spectacularly poor hiring decisions. Ms Mayer made Henrique De Castro a sizeable offer to lure him away from Google and join Yahoo in order to be its chief operating officer. Mr De Castro was subsequently fired and left the firm after just 15 months, having pocketed more than $100m in pay and severance money.

Other missteps include a performance-management system that forces executives to grade a certain percentage of their staff as underperforming. This has had some bad side effects, including discouraging high-flyers from working together and leading to political infighting and horse-trading among managers keen to protect their team members. Furthermore, a sudden crackdown on working from home, imposed by Ms Mayer, turned into a public-relations disaster.

One of Ms Mayer’s undoubted skills is burnishing her own profile. She likes to mix with global leaders at the World Economic Forum at Davos and has cultivated an image as a fashionista, hanging out with Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue. She has also hired celebrities such as Katie Couric, a well-known television host, to spice up Yahoo’s content.

Will Ms Mayer succeed? Frustratingly, Mr Carlson fails to deliver the coup de grâce that his excellent reporting suggests is merited. Although the author paints a damning picture of Ms Mayer’s management style, he ends up hedging his bets, noting that Steve Jobs only launched the first iPod in the fifth year after he returned to Apple. With shareholder activists lurking, though, Ms Mayer may not get that much time.