It sounds to me like she's trying to build another Google. It's really (almost impossibly) hard to dethrone innovators without actually doing any innovation. It's equally difficult keeping talent when the corporate culture isn't hacker-centric.
While buying your way into the party is a nice first step, what do you do when you don't have the talent pool to continue to innovate and can't even grow it? Especially when you don't allow remote work, and this industry is increasingly going remote (even if only part-time)?
I'm seeing a lot of big talk (primarily via money) from Yahoo, but I don't feel convinced that this is going anywhere. Without a focus on the people and innovation, what do you do after you buy a bunch of startups? So far Yahoo's response has been "buy them and let them operate independently." People go to work at Google to work at Google, not to work at a subsidiary of Google. So if I wanted to go work for Hulu, I'd want to work for Hulu, not Yahoo. Yahoo hasn't been an engineer's company for a very, very long time, and I don't see them taking strides to fix that, so it's hard to say what's going to happen.
While buying your way into the party is a nice first step, what do you do when you don't have the talent pool to continue to innovate and can't even grow it? Especially when you don't allow remote work, and this industry is increasingly going remote (even if only part-time)?
I'm seeing a lot of big talk (primarily via money) from Yahoo, but I don't feel convinced that this is going anywhere. Without a focus on the people and innovation, what do you do after you buy a bunch of startups? So far Yahoo's response has been "buy them and let them operate independently." People go to work at Google to work at Google, not to work at a subsidiary of Google. So if I wanted to go work for Hulu, I'd want to work for Hulu, not Yahoo. Yahoo hasn't been an engineer's company for a very, very long time, and I don't see them taking strides to fix that, so it's hard to say what's going to happen.