By my read, the list of accomplishments for customers is notably short of anything positive that Yahoo did during Mayer's tenure, except for the fantasy sports. Non-rhetorical question: do people really think she did a good job because of how she managed the negatives?
I don't follow Yahoo! that closely, so the below is primarily based on headlines I've seen in the past few years... let me know if I have butchered any of the details. The bulleted points quote Mayers' statement.
* We became 1 of 3 internet companies in the world with more than 1B monthly users
* We grew our monthly mobile users to more than 650M (one of the largest in the world) by launching and improving our products for mobile devices
Translation: We rode the wave of massive Internet trends, with negligible profit taking, and are now taking credit for the aforementioned trends, which every global Internet company experienced.
* We dramatically focused our product strategy, dispensing 150+ subscale products and features
Translation: We admitted that a large part of our holdings/investments were non-performing or ill-advised.
* We invested in search, building an offering that drew on strengths from Microsoft, Google and Yahoo, to provide dramatically improved search to our users and attract impactful partnerships, like Mozilla
Translation: We admitted total defeat in the business most consumers still think of as defining us, to the point that we now resell the services of the competitors who won.
* We fundamentally improved Yahoo Mail, completely rewriting much of the infrastructure to provide a far more flexible and reliable system, while creating a robust mobile offering. Mobile Mail recently surpassed desktop Mail in daily users, which shows the power of the product and the platform we reinvented
Translation: After taking for granted one of the few Yahoo products with a lot of users, we finally started adopting the UI patterns that allowed our competitors to outdo us in new user acquisition. But we managed to make headlines for confusing/tricking users who wanted to leave after massive security breaches.
* We invested in our homepage and key verticals – news, sports, finance, and lifestyles – with each remaining as the go-to destinations in their categories. And, they have found new followings on mobile through the Yahoo app, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, and Yahoo Fantasy. It’s hard to believe, but, in 2012, we didn’t have any of these 4 now-cornerstone apps on iOS or Android, we weren’t developing native apps, and we didn’t use these sought-after brands outside of desktop. Today, our users collectively spend an equivalent of 1,400 years on these products EVERY day.
Translation: We avoided losing some key properties that people used think were worth a lot before Google came along. Plus fantasy football!! We found a way to say many millions people use or sites daily, which sounds ever more impressive to people who are bad at math.
* We bolstered our security defenses with cross-company initiatives like SSL, HTML5, Account Key, and HTTPS
Translation: We started improving security, mostly after some of the largest and most publicized security breaches in history.
* We committed to and invested in technical excellence in our architectures, reducing user-impacting incidents by more than half over the past 5 years
Translation: we fixed a lot of bugs in our products.
* We won 2 Apple Design Awards in 2013 and 2014, and put unified product design front and center with Fuji
Translation: A company who beat our pants by almost every measure in the marketplace, said we made 2 good things, which are not worth specifically naming... the important thing is that Apple liked them, even though they apparently killed off the Apple Design Awards after commoditizing "flat design".