I admit that I wasn’t right on top of the details of Marissa Mayer being made CEO of Yahoo last year. At least no more so than the average person. I really didn’t know much about her or her history at Google. I’ll say this: I did think it was a peculiar combination of hypocrisy and tone-deafness for her to, seemingly in a single stroke, tell the entire company that working from home was not an option, and then to build an extension of her office for her nanny and new child so she could be with them regularly. As one half of a working couple with two small children, that made me viscerally angry. And don’t get me started on “The baby’s been way easier than everyone made it out to be.”
But enough about that. Because the fact is, I didn’t know much about her as a business person, and didn’t really spend any time trying to find out. A short while ago, though, I read Nicholas Carson’s piece on her for Business Insider: The Truth About Marissa Mayer: An Unauthorized Biography.
Turns out Mayer’s a real-life, honest-to-god product person. I don’t know if that’s what a juggernaut like Yahoo needs to survive right now, but I can say for sure that I’ve already noticed the difference in their iPhone apps. The new Yahoo Weather app, while not absolutely the perfect weather app for me, is really nice. For one thing, it’s got the iOS7 look to it, which, in addition to being aesthetically slick, also indicates that Yahoo has recognized that to seem current (and even relevant) in the iOS7 world, your app needs to look like it belongs there.
Also, though, one of the nice aesthetic touches is the decision to use photography from Flickr as the background for the weather for your location. The app chooses photography from the general location for which you‘re getting the weather, and it’s a photograph that reflects the general weather conditions for your area too. It’s a refreshing presentation. And if you’re impressed by the photo, you can also link straight to that photograph on Flickr and see the photographer’s entire photostream.
I’ve done this quite regularly, and as a result, I’ve started paying attention to Flickr for the first time in many years. I even downloaded the Flickr app and have started using Flickr to keep a photostream. I can’t believe I’m the only one to have done so. It all brings to mind the time—and I can’t remember exactly how long ago it was—when Facebook surpassed Flickr with the largest collection of online photographs. Much ink was spilled at the time about Yahoo having squandered the opportunity they had with Flickr to make a worthwhile social media offering. Might this be the start of Yahoo executing on that opportunity?
I don’t know if this and other similar decisions across their properties constitute a recipe for success for Yahoo. It may be too little, too late. But among the universe of possible decisions the current CEO can make, these seem like the right ones.