At one point she was seen from the outside as the 3rd most powerful/influential person at Google, after the two founders and even ahead of Schmidt, I remember articles praising her decision of leaving the Google front-page almost empty with only two buttons on it (I think this was around 2008-2010). Then she went to Yahoo and drove it into the ground and as such I'm surprised that people still take her business-related pieces of advice that seriously.
It is a question of perspective. She was the head of a sinking ship, yes. But did she cause the sinking, or did she recoup the most returns possible for the investors before it sank?
I wasn't there. I don't know the inside story. I'm not going to take sides. But neither am I going to assume that she has poor business skills just because she headed up a shutdown effort.
For months, the team had settled on blue and gray. If users were going to read emails on their phones all day long, the thinking went, it was best to choose the most subtly contrasting hues. But now, Mayer explained, she wanted to change the colors to various shades of purple, which she believed better suited Yahoo’s brand.
According to one senior executive, Sharma’s body language changed the moment Mayer issued her request. He looked deflated. Altering the color of such an intricate product would require that members of his team spend all night adjusting colors in thousands of places. He slumped off and prepared to tell his staff the bad news.
I don’t know, but I can change the colors of all our products from one single place in the code. If you have to do it in multiple places something is probably wrong.
Excecutives change their minds on a whim, you are much better off anticipating that.
Does your codebase date from 1995? Because some of Yahoo's does. Time to send Jerry a nastygram about not adequately preparing the codebase for arbitrary color changes 25 years ago?
