Is Yahoo trying to buy itself cool?

No it isn't. The scale of the purchases are huge because Yahoo knows what it wants to be and how it is going to get there. Don't be surprised if soon they launch a cloud storage product that links up to a 1TB Flickr account, which is linked to your Tumblr account. They want Hulu because then your Yahoo cloud drive is also you DVR. They are going to manage content. They have bought summly which I am sure will pull content on to the Yahoo hompage in a similar way to Zite or Flipboard. They bought 2 gaming companies, mobile and online specifically. They are making Yahoo.com the hub and all their services the spokes. Their new weather app is cool, their redesign of flickr is cool. If they start associating with cool products, and giving them a cool appearance Yahoo! will become cool. Marissa Meyer knows exactly what she is doing.
 
Mayer is a very sharp lady who's come all the way with Google and had no-where to go but out as the next step for her was obviously a CEO position and Google had no such vacancy ... and won't have for many years to come. She's a minimalistic thinker who keeps things simple ... and this seemingly exuberant behaviour is not in line with her known traits ... which to me says that there must be a grand plan in her mind that requires these assets. Yahoo! was going no-where fast so a dramatic intervention and change of direction was urgently required. She could not enter Yahoo and be yet another CEO failure who tried to make the old dying horse go another few kilometres. She had to reinvent the company. That is what she is trying to do ... and the more options on the table the better. These acquisitions are like potentials ... offering alternative opportunities. It's either that or a sure death.

She's trying to rescue Yahoo! by bringing more options and building platforms into the company. To just focus more on what they had would have been a sure dead-end in my view. No use trying to be just a smaller version of Google. Media and social integration is where the company needs to go and for that they need these acquisitions. Some of these will be discarded in time but you have to have them first else someone else will snap them up and you have no access. If she fails in this process would Yahoo! be any worse off? Nope. She may just as well give it her best shot and see what happens. To do nothing new meant a sure death.
 
BeVonk! said:
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Nice post. I don't really know where she's going with it, but she better have a plan. Long term, yahoo needs to become a cool innovative place to work again. I'm not too clued up in the inner workings back at YHQ, but I did find Paul Graham's take on why it failed as rather insightful. And not just for Yahoo, but any tech company.

http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html
 
Rouxenator said:
erm... those are 419 scammers, not loyal users.
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I am a "loyal" Yahoo user. I subscribe any suspect sites ("You have to register to view this forum") to my Yahoo address. So if they spam me they spam there. I read the mailbox on occasion.
 
Go Yahoo!

Google needs some good competition. A one horse race is never a good thing, no matter how good the horse.
 
Rouxenator said:
Too bad Yahoo did not feel the same way about Altavista. I say lets go back to Lycos or Hotbot.
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Lycos! Are they still arround? what about webcrawler?

Damn it was hard finding [-]porn[/-] things on those.
 
Yahoo will have to work on their website. It just seems cluttered and busy.
 
Nod said:
Yahoo will have to work on their website. It just seems cluttered and busy.
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The first thing they need to do in order to share their dodgy image is to block all email accounts in West and East Africa.
 
Nod said:
Yahoo will have to work on their website. It just seems cluttered and busy.
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In a recent article I read MM was credited for Google's minimalist approach. She was the minimalist police at Google and wanted things to be clean and simple. I therefore expect her to get your wish fullfilled in time. She inherited hell and must turn it into heaven.
 
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