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Marissa Mayer Lays Out Her Strategy for Yahoo

On Tuesday, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer held a company-wide employee meeting where she explained her vision for the firm in broad strokes. Although Yahoo hasn’t released details of the meeting to the press, insiders have leaked some information. All Things D’s Kara Swisher reported that Mayer’s objective is “To grow users and usage, as well […]

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Cynthia Harvey

Sep 26, 2012

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On Tuesday, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer held a company-wide employee meeting where she explained her vision for the firm in broad strokes. Although Yahoo hasn’t released details of the meeting to the press, insiders have leaked some information.

All Things D’s Kara Swisher reported that Mayer’s objective is “To grow users and usage, as well as advertisers and talent, using personalization.” The article added,

“How Mayer was going to do this was a lot more squishy, but her strategy bullets included:

Yahoo becoming a part of users’ everyday routines.

A focus on core competencies (whatever that is!).

Being friendly to partners across a range of companies from mobile carriers to social networks to hardware makers.

A focus on shifting Yahoo’s platform to mobile.

An emphasis on thinking big and at scale, which Mayer called the ‘Rule of 100 Million.’ It presumably means attract that much of an audience to various products going forward.

And, of course, a new push to move faster and take ownership for your work.”

In addition, Wired’s Ryan Tate stated, “The former Google executive wants to focus Yahoo on four ‘Cs:’ Culture, company goals, calibration and compensation. She’d also like Yahoo to focus on its core competencies (two bonus ‘Cs’). Everyone also needs to move faster and get past Yahoo’s old ‘consensus culture’ (two negative ‘Cs’) Mayer would also like Yahoo to become part of people’s daily routines. And it should also focus on mobile! Mainly, though, Yahoo should focus on personalization. It should also add users, and grow usage, and also add advertisers and talent.”

Despite the leaks, Yahoo isn’t planning to discuss the strategy session at this time. According to Computerworld, “Anne Espiritu, a Yahoo spokeswoman, told Computerworld in an email today that the company isn’t making any official announcement today. However, she said Yahoo plans to share details on Mayer’s ‘approach to building Yahoo’s future’ during the company’s next financial earnings call in mid-October.”

In separate news, Google’s Eric Schmidt expressed interest in working with Yahoo. Dow Jones reporter Kenneth Maxwell told Forbes, “Yes, I can confirm, Eric Schmidt definitely said they’d be interested in working with Yahoo US. He also said nothing doing for the time being, but they would be interested.… He also said they had expressed this interest to Yahoo before on a number of occasions.”