WE’RE AT a moment in Silicon Valley’s long card game where relatively successful, but perhaps a little tired, players are attempting to reshuffle their hands in order to come up with new combinations to play. There’s lots of peering over one another’s shoulders to see if they can’t sneakily pluck a few ideas from another person’s deck. And a few are deciding to split from their playing partners and join the other side.
Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s new chief executive, and formerly head of Google’s most important projects, is just one example. What does a Yahoo with a Google mind look like? Will it catch the drive of Google, or is it too late for either Google-style strategy or Yahoo’s corporate momentum to save the company?
For the past few months, it’s been Apple and Facebook from which other companies have sought to “lift” ideas. Apple’s strange, self-contained world, best covered by local reporter Adam Lashinsky in his new book, Inside Apple, was forged from the counter-intuitive strategies gleaned from idiosyncratic thoughts of of Steve Jobs.
Now that unique corporate structure been ransacked for possible new business manoeuvres by those outside it. In Lashinsky’s book, unnamed former Apple executives admitted how unsure they were that the Apple way could even work outside that company.
Their skills, they repeatedly told him, didn’t seem to map on to the rest of the world. Other companies needed metrics and stability and industry relationships. Apple worked on company-gambling hunches, constant adjustment, and an almost hermetic sealing away from outside influence.
Facebook’s strangely direct leap from small start-up to billion-user giant attracts the same attempts to reverse-engineer repeat successes elsewhere. Most notably, in this game of swapped partners, Google has tried to imitate not just Facebook’s goals but its internal decision-making. When Google+, the search engine company’s social network, launched, it enforced an incredibly “unGoogly” feature, a requirement that users use their real names instead of allowing them to pick pseudonyms. It was a direct crib from one of Facebook’s least internet-like policies.
The policy was divisive within Google, but it was clear why it was chosen. It was part of the Facebook magic, and therefore needed to be imitated to beat them.
With Yahoo’s CEO hire, the imitation game continues. No-one is expecting that Mayer will do anything more than Googlify Yahoo, not least because Mayer is seen as one of the key figures who created the Google strategy and outlook. Asking Mayer to do something different from what Google has been, it is said, is like expecting Jobs not to be like Apple in another company.
But that may be underestimating Mayer – and overestimating the benefits of transplanting internet corporate DNA.
When Jobs wasn’t at Apple, he was definitively unsuccessful. All the strategies that were such a hit when he returned, failed at his second start-up, NeXT. Google’s purloining of the Facebook modus operandi doesn’t seem to be working either. The parts of Google+ that people like are the bits that don’t remind them of Facebook, but of the old Google: clean, unobtrusive, and info-heavy.
Even the past master of copying and improving on others’ early work, Microsoft, doesn’t seem to quite pull it off these days. When Microsoft copied Google in the early days of Bing, it didn’t shake the world. The company’s new touch-enabled operating system, Windows RT, is winning positive critical reviews, but only when it chooses to arch away from Apple’s pervasive influence on tablet user interfaces.
Mayer is already receiving plenty of advice from armchair executives on the internet. But I don’t think she needs to listen to much more than her own voice. The big question hanging over Yahoo is not who they should copy, but what is the material they have to work with? Jobs effectively asked the same question when he spoke to Yahoo employees. Are you a media company or a tech company, he asked. He also said he knew which he’d rather be.
At the time, executives couldn’t give him an answer. They still couldn’t when they announced Mayer’s move. Yahoo’s chief financial officer,Tim Morese, told reporters: “Our new CEO Marissa brings a strong tech background, but we also have exceptional and deep media expertise here as well. We’ve got to combine them. It’s a powerful combination when we get it right.”
My own feeling is that Yahoo has always been a terrible media company. It has attempted to bring in alien DNA and different games (to mix my metaphors) from Los Angeles and the US news and entertainment industry. If you want a media company, you don’t start from Silicon Valley.
Mayer must know there’s still room for a different rhythm, another alternative in the tech industry. Yahoo remains a company with no apparent soul but rooms upon rooms of brilliant people and wasted talent. What they need is solidarity, support and a fresh dose of enthusiasm.
Really, what these contemporary games of shuffling and rearranging represent is an attempt to inspire; an attempt to buoy up and fire up the real creative talents that lie at the heart of successful tech companies. Jobs could do it because of who he was. Microsoft stumbled when Gates left.
Mayer is somebody who a lot of technologists look up to because of her mix of engineering and management, and the sense that she’s been sidelined just a little in the Sergey Brin and Larry Page show at Google. Now is her moment to shine.
