Friday, October 31, 2014

Is Yahoo! Marissa Mayer Simply Throwing Darts?



What Yahoo! is trying to do with Tumblr is like throwing darts at the wall, but maybe something will work.

Andrew Nusca and Erin Griffith capture in a nutshell my take on Yahoo!  CEO Marissa Mayer is burning a lot of cash in buying sprees, but doesn't seem to know what will actually work.  That's not necessarily a showstopper, because after all Google needed a few years to figure out how to profitize YouTube, when it made this acquisition.  But I don't have the confidence that Mayer, a former Googler herself, knows what she's doing or, if she does, has what it takes to do what she needs to do.

I think part of the problem is that she's taking a copycat tact with growing Yahoo!, instead of blazing new trails via innovation.  If Griffith is right, then pursuits of Dailymotion and Twitch, as so to have a YouTube under her umbrella, were pathetic efforts.  In one interview, she did acknowledge that some of her acquisitions were more for the talent than for the platform or product.  That's a good thing, because it positions Yahoo! to invent better darts, new boards, or an entirely new game.

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