The most devastating points of attack:
Mayer is an executive outsider not only as a woman but also as a techie. Her background is not in business or marketing, but in the actual guts of product development and management. This makes her far more of an outsider to business culture than women like Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman. Creative, technically oriented outsiders are founders, not corporate ladder-climbers: David Packard, Walt Disney, Ted Turner, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and even Bill Gates.and, after discussing the brutal level of corporate politics the piece continues:
These aren’t incidental details. They speak exactly to the sort of people whom Mayer is deposing, and to why they certainly could never have saved Yahoo, just bled it dry while it withered. I suspect one of the final quotes in Carlson’s piece is dead-on: “If [Mayer] hadn’t come in, all the smart people would have left.”I don't want to say that Ms. Mayer will succeed in her venture or that she is without flaws (she has a few that would drive me nuts in a manager). But this sort of radical approach at least holds the possibility of a successful turn around. If she does this as a techie and not as an MBA then I cannot say that I would see this as a tragedy.
EDIT: Nicholas Carlson has a different perspective on the Marissa Mayer piece than the one voiced in the first paragraph:
This is Nicholas Carlson.
I reject the idea that my story was a "hatchet job" of any sort.
Here is how it ends:
“If she hadn’t come in, all the smart people would have left.
“And that would have been the end of Yahoo.”
I am not sure that I completely agree, but on sober reflection a better description could likely have been chosen than "hatchet job".
