I think the strategy is to get as many new decent developers outside the yahoo echo chambers, in an effort to change the working culture inside the company.<p>For many years Yahoo suffered from mismanagement of CEO with short term goal to appease shareholders as opposed to building a company based on strong workforce and values. Despite all the PR speech by the previous CEO, I never felt that the previous leadership really knew what the hell they were doing.<p>One of the first thing Mayer had to do was stop the culture rot within the company, and you will see that a lot of her decisions, whether its buying up other companies and making new rules around favorable working conditions, is targeted on building a strong group of core developers. This obviously takes a lot of time, there is no magic bullet to fix culture rot.<p>Mayer is from Google school of thought, so she knows a thing or two on how good working environment works. You will see that while Google has a strong leadership to guide the company, a lot of its products and services started from and driven by not the leadership, but their developers on their 20% project.<p>So to put it in short, Yahoo is not in a position like Google where they can dictate long term strategy without getting its bases in order and fix decades of rotting.<p>I think in the next 12 months or so will be interesting time to see what comes out of Yahoo.
Does acquiring companies for injecting 'young blood' actually work? I feel an acquisition means the founders and early employees would want to kick back and relax in the comfort of a big company job for a while. The examples I've seen are where they wait out their vesting period, and then quit and start their own company.
The strategy is to appease wall street and shareholders. Doesn't matter what their plan is or what they do, as long as they have a plan and do something.<p>While somewhat rare for publicly traded companies, Amazon has shown that companies can float while prioritizing long term strategies above everything else.
Mayer realized that Yahoo's position is that of a big old corporation: High assets, weak on true innovation. Using the assets to absorb external innovative power is the logical consequence. As time is running out, they have to go for 10M+ opportunities, instead of trying too many too small projects.
If this were any male CEO doing all these acquisitions, would the author of this article have written about him going on a "shopping spree"? I kind of doubt it.<p>Edit: Criticism retracted - searching around in Google, it looks like this is a common phrase when referring to companies that make a lot of purchases in a short period. Apologies to the author for implying something negative.