This I think is a good rule for Yahoo! You need to have a real product in the market to get users. Pre announcements don't drive engagement, usage, revenue, or advertising sales. Eyeballs do. Users do.
Also, the it needs to be a product that could reach 100 million users or $100 million dollars is a great filter. It provides focus.
Unfortunately, based on the last 10 years of Yahoo's corporate history, there are probably a lot of bad habits and corporate culture shenanigans that will need to be dealt with before Yahoo's actions match their CEO's marching orders.
At least Yahoo is trying to do something hopefully more interesting than being another internet media company held over from the AOL era of the internet. Perhaps soon someone at Yahoo! will be able to clearly explain what Yahoo! is and does.
I don't see the point of this rule. It seems like it would instill fear, and cause hesitation and second guessing. But I don't like rules in general, I prefer having philosophies. Personally, I would encourage failure and risk taking with limited downside and unlimited upside.
There seems to be much adoration on HN for anything Marissa Mayer says. I watched a few interviews of her, she has an uncomfortable personality, hard to listen to imo.
> Personally, I would encourage failure and risk taking with limited downside and unlimited upside.
But isn't that sort of what she's doing? She is limiting the downside by setting a time limit. She is ensuring people aim high enough with the $100m number.
I worked in engineering in Yahoo 2003-2005 (I feel old - it doesn't feel like 7 years ago...), specifically the European biling platform (yes, Yahoo had multiple - on the order of 10 distinct billing systems at the time, for various reasons, some good some not so good).
I spent those years without writing a single line of code at work, despite a small team, because about 2/3's of my time was taken up reading product requirements documents from business units that wanted to add features tied in with premium services / billing and attending project meetings.
Of all those projects, maybe 10% went anywhere. The rest spent months in PRD hell. Whole business units where dithering back and forth as to whether they should even try selling stuff, when the resource cost of trying was substantially smaller than the resource cost of the endless project meetings.
There were probably no $100m opportunities amongst the ones I reviewed when limited to the countries in Europe that actually were actively involved with the billing team. But that was part of the problem: People were far more concerned with delivering stuff that was successful than with the big picture, and so we only got go-ahead for projects when the business unit were really, really sure they'd make a good amount of money from adding premium services to a product.
And then only market by market, with many markets remaining totally unserved because the local team didn't believe in the project enough to want to stick their necks out. While I was there, we kept trying to get Yahoo Italy and Spain to start billing for something - anything - for example; in 4 years that went nowhere.
Downside: like you say, it'll cause second guessing. It might be a genuinely great idea but no one is sure how it's going to spin out in the real world, which could create a business of conservative ideas.
Upside: Yahoo needs new things to get the attention back to "Yahoo has released a new product, and it does X" rather than "Yahoo hasn't done anything and we think they're sucky".
It depends if the 100 million users is a fast and firm thing, if it's a case of get it done in 6 months or aim for 100 million users it could be more interesting. Lots of crazy idea being done quickly.
To me it would inspire ambition, not fear, but I guess it depends on the listener.
If you work at Yahoo (or Google, or Facebook), and the product you want to work on ins't going to affect 100 million users, then you should probably be working somewhere else, it's simply the nature of their businesses.
It's not meant to be easy, and it never will be, but it has to be the goal.
If you want to make niche software, Yahoo is not the place to go it, anymore than Unilever is the place for people who want to make small amounts of high qualty hand made soaps.
I just got done participating in Startup Weekend. I was scared, but I worked harder and faster than maybe ever. In the end it paid off. We had a MVP to show off and a somewhat shaky business plan. But the fear and the speed help.
Also, the it needs to be a product that could reach 100 million users or $100 million dollars is a great filter. It provides focus.
Unfortunately, based on the last 10 years of Yahoo's corporate history, there are probably a lot of bad habits and corporate culture shenanigans that will need to be dealt with before Yahoo's actions match their CEO's marching orders.
At least Yahoo is trying to do something hopefully more interesting than being another internet media company held over from the AOL era of the internet. Perhaps soon someone at Yahoo! will be able to clearly explain what Yahoo! is and does.