I think it not surprising that she left Google to be a CEO somewhere, it was just surprising that she picked Yahoo. Another one of those VP -> CEO jumps that was interesting to watch was Ed Zander (Sun Micro -> Motorola).
What I was expecting was that she would leave and start some sort cross between 'solve a world issue' with 'easy accessibility' kinds of UI. At Google her strength was having a clear idea of how to speak to users through UX, The Yahoo gig can use that, certainly, but watching the succession of failures and missteps at Yahoo the issues aren't primarily UX or users, it seems like Yahoo is in a major identity crisis about what exactly it actually is.
When one of their recruiters was trying to convince me to join the pitch was this:
"Yahoo is the premier digital media company
Yahoo! delivers amazing personalized digital content and experiences, across devices and around the globe, to vast audiences. We provide engaging and innovative canvases for advertisers to connect with their target audiences using our unique blend of Science + Art + Scale."
To which my response was "Really?", if someone were to ask me what the "Premier digital media company" was I don't think I'd respond "Yahoo!"
I'd say the "premier digital media company" at the moment is Netflix. They have their problems and troubles, but they have enough brand recognition and enough good content (albeit produced by other people) to quality for that moniker.
What about YouTube? Or Zynga? Or Facebook for its photos?
I think when people hear the phrase "digital media", they think of it has traditional-media-delivered-digitally. But I think the internet enables entirely new variations of traditional media, tailor-made for our hypersocial, crowdsourced, and attentionless internet society.
Agreed. I would think you could make an argument for NetFlix (streaming/rentals), Apple (iTunes + players), or Amazon (streaming/rental/sales/player (book)) as being 'digital media' companies.
It may be that I think 'education/entertainment' more than I think 'discovery' when I think digital media. If Yahoo claimed to be the digital media discovery company that might be the starting point for a bigger vision.
And there's no problem with that, if they took their engineers and had them create new media distribution platforms or new efficient encodings or any other of the huge amount of highly technical things that can improve media distribution and consumption.
What I was expecting was that she would leave and start some sort cross between 'solve a world issue' with 'easy accessibility' kinds of UI. At Google her strength was having a clear idea of how to speak to users through UX, The Yahoo gig can use that, certainly, but watching the succession of failures and missteps at Yahoo the issues aren't primarily UX or users, it seems like Yahoo is in a major identity crisis about what exactly it actually is.
When one of their recruiters was trying to convince me to join the pitch was this:
"Yahoo is the premier digital media company
Yahoo! delivers amazing personalized digital content and experiences, across devices and around the globe, to vast audiences. We provide engaging and innovative canvases for advertisers to connect with their target audiences using our unique blend of Science + Art + Scale."
To which my response was "Really?", if someone were to ask me what the "Premier digital media company" was I don't think I'd respond "Yahoo!"
Hence my surprise.