She s done an extremely defensible job of removing the sense of inertia and defeatism. It s one thing to do that. It s another thing to turn it into another Google or Facebook. It s not going to be that. Turning it into Google or Facebook wasn t on the list of options.
— Benedict Evans, a partner at venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, on Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who s been at the helm for about two years and is under pressure to help Yahoo get its groove back. As Mayer works to make changes at Yahoo, she s also increasingly facing investor grumbling. Some have called for the company to merge with AOL, and to be more aggressive about returning shareholder value.
Amid all that, Mayer keeps talking up an important part of her turnaround plan. Fast Company reports on Yahoo s progress in mobile, which the company says brought in $1.2 billion in revenue in 2014.
We had to build that — the people, the core competencies, the product base, the users, the traffic, and that revenue — from scratch, Mayer says. And we did it really quickly. More than half of Yahoo s 1 billion users now reportedly use mobile apps such as Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Weather, Yahoo News Digest and Flickr.
The company for the first time held a mobile developer conference in February, as our Matt O Brien wrote. From Fast Company: The fact that Yahoo held a developer conference at all was a rite of passage. In the tech industry, such events are often as much about image-building as education.
Next up on Yahoo s mobile agenda, according to The Information this week: a messaging app supposedly rolling out this quarter that will make use of live and recorded video and text, like Meerkat, Snapchat and Skype all rolled into one.
Photo of Marissa Mayer from NBC via Associated Press
