New Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has outlined her strategy for the company, with the focus firmly fixed on mobile and improving the "user experience" of the company's services.
Further reading
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Yahoo under successive CEOs had claimed that it is a media company, not a web company. As a result, it outsourced its core search function and other useful services, such as its online language translation service Babel Fish, to rival Bing, controlled by Microsoft.
Indeed, over the past 100 days since she joined the company, Mayer has been examining every facet of its offerings, starting with search.
"While our search area's challenged, we're working closely with Microsoft to define the future of search. Many people are surprised to learn that our alliance with Microsoft affords Yahoo significant control over our search user experience and the ability to innovate therein," said Mayer in an investor conference call.
However, "on the economics front", the alliance with Microsoft had "fallen below expectations", she added.
Part of Mayer's aim in search, though, is to make Yahoo's portfolio of services a "daily habit" in the same way that many people go first to Google by habit.
"At Yahoo, we see users making daily use of search, mail, the home page and mobile, among other offerings. Search is a core daily habit for all of us and a fundamental user behaviour, the top priority for Yahoo. We'll focus on reshaping search, driving smart distribution deals and making organic investments to grow our market share," she said.
She also hinted at (another) makeover for Yahoo Mail and Messenger, the company's email and instant messaging services: "Communication is another of these daily habits and is prime to be re-imagined. There is great opportunity to modernise Yahoo Mail and Messenger, especially given the continual increase in the amount of communication we're all receiving."
But it is in mobile that Mayer is planning a big push, particularly in view of other web companies' inability to translate their popularity on desktop computers into similar dominance on smartphones and tablets.
"Mobile represents not only a daily habit, but a fundamental and massive platform shift, a platform shift that we have to ride and participate in, in order to be relevant.
"Today, there are more than one billion smartphone users globally. As expected, that will double in the next three years. And, while we've made progress, Yahoo hasn't capitalised on the mobile opportunity. We haven't effectively optimised our websites, we've under-invested in our mobile front-end development and we've splintered our brands. We have more than 76 applications across Android and iOS. All of this needs to change.
"Our top priority is a focused, coherent, mobile strategy. We're accelerating our efforts to build a strong technical talent base for mobile. This includes engineers, product managers and designers," said Mayer
In addition to thrashing out strategy, Mayer also spent her first 100 days putting in place a senior management team to help implement the turnaround.
This included new chief financial officer Ken Goldman; new chief operating officer Henrique de Castro, poached from rival Google; general counsel Ron Bell, a 13-year veteran of Yahoo; Jackie Reses as head of people and development; and, former Amazon executive Kathy Savitt as a new chief marketing officer to help "reimagine the Yahoo brand".
