How Marissa Mayer Mobilized Yahoo | Hacker News Reader

How Marissa Mayer Mobilized Yahoo

fastcompany.com

13 pointsevilops16 comments

> unless Yahoo gets mobile right, right now.

The people getting mobile right are those making dinky little apps and then selling them for a billion dollars or more.

Yahoo is buying apps and websites for billions of dollars, and it is unclear if it has been able to leverage any of these purchases. It is just making others very, very rich.

Google and Facebook can spend billions on acquisitions, and then use them to enhance their already booming business. But simply enhance, not rescue - Facebook did not buy Instagram because it was on the ropes - it bought it because it complemented its existing killer product, and in hindsight was a bargain. And for Facebook and Google, a billion dollars here and there is a small investment.

Yahoo is trying to dig itself out of a deep hole of irrelevance with all these purchases and acquisitions - and I have not heard of many such success stories. In reality, I think I have heard less of Yahoo in the last couple of years than the years previously, and the ONLY times I have heard of it was either on their latest acquisition or something about Mayer. I mean good luck to them, but time is running out.

My impression is that the biggest impact MM had since becoming CEO of Yahoo! is the change in perception at the level of Wall Street, journalists, and analysts. "She must know what to do. She's been so high in Google ranks" By no means I'm implying that MM doesn't have a plan and some signs can be seen here and there from a customer perspective: better iOS apps, a budget for Flickr, more users through the acquisition of Tumblr, etc. But at the end of the day, what matters for Yahoo! the company is this:

> In eight of the nine quarters that Yahoo has completed since her appointment, its display-advertising revenue has seen a year-over-year decrease.

Yahoo is the Kodak of the 21st century. No matter the struggle and no matter the quality of leadership there is only one possible outcome. I would rather put my money into Twitter as there is at least the chance of a different outcome with Twitter.

As an aside Kodak knew what was coming from the 1970s and they still could not stop what happened - it is almost enough to make one think Marx was onto something with historical materialism [1].

1. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism

They need to get software engineers interested to work there as well. Nothing cool has come out of yahoo. They should look at all the new cool open source projects coming out from Microsoft since the leadership change.

Also why would I work for a company that is 100% against working from home? It is just a nice perk some time.

Let's not start praising Mayer until she actually turns Yahoo around. It's still in decline, and while she's able to slow it, Yahoo isn't winning again yet. They have a lot of push in the mobile market, but there's nothing attractive to me about Yahoo's suite of apps yet. Even Tumblr, the service that should be seeing some of the most mobile exposure, doesn't appeal to me on my phone as much as Twitter, Facebook, or even YikYak.

Not to mention, I'm concerned about her earlier investments in content creation. Does anyone have any knowledge of how well Yahoo is doing on the video side? Yahoo spent a lot of money on high quality video and video streaming, but mobile users don't have the bandwidth necessary to make use of that service. I think Mayer should look to cut costs by dropping or slimming down Yahoo Screen, unless they can improve the experience for mobile clients.

I'm waiting for the day yahoo email has 2fa as convenient as gmail's. You don't need to be able to receive a txt for gmail's 2fa. And yes this is an issue for some people. My parents don't have cell phone reception at their home and my uncle doesn't include txting on his cell phone plan.

Also, SMSs can easily be rerouted with only a modicum of social engineering.

I still go to Yahoo!'s home page on occasion. It is a reasonable way to find interesting things to read for a few minutes. While I don't feel like they stack up to, for example Google, in providing useful services, I would like them to do at least OK financially just as a bit of competition and an alternative. In general, I just don't like the winner take all alternative to a rich ecosystem with many players.

BTW, one thing about the article that has nothing to do with Yahoo per se: their experience that HTML5 is not effective enough for mobile apps. I really hate the pressure to install a lot of apps on my Android phone and iPad. I would like to see HTML5 to be the dominate platform for content and web applications, but that is probably not going to happen.

I've gone through a phase where I've started deleting native apps from my phone and just bookmarking the mobile web page to my home screen. Not only do I love the battery life but I'm less attached to the apps with their random notifications of things that really weren't important to me.

I'm very impressed with the quality of mobile apps these days and I love the idea of mobile apps being the standard. I can move from device to device as long as it has a standards-compliant web browser.

I do the same thing, mostly just using manually installed apps for Fastmail and two games (Chess and Go).

Somehow, I don't see 'mobilization' being their problem. I'd be more concerned about the lack of real revenue streams and slowly bleeding their Alibaba stake dry to prop up their stock. I have little reason to use any of their stuff, let alone pay for it.

What awesome things has Yahoo done as a company since MM took the helm? I'm not saying there aren't any, I just can't think of any myself, and I'm guessing I'm not the one curious about what changes they're making.

All I know is that my Mother is happy using yahoo email on her first smart phone.

Yahoo is dying slowly.

fastcompany is a serious publication or do they only do fluffy pieces?

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