Yahoo's Developer Conference Is The Company's Way Of 'Fighting Back'

Yahoo! Inc. YHOO announced this week that it will hold its first mobile developer conference on February 19, 2015.

The event is expected to demonstrate Yahoo's mobile first strategy, which could include presentations by Flurry, a mobile analytics company that Yahoo acquired earlier this year.

“Yahoo is trying,” tech industry expert and analyst Jeff Kagan told Benzinga. “It's not just sitting back and letting the world tear it apart and shrink its market share. It's trying -- it's fighting back -- it just hasn't had a lot of success.”

Kagan said that Yahoo hasn't attracted a lot of attention from users, developers or anyone else, but he hopes the company can finally turn things around.

“Maybe it's not crashing and burning anymore, but it's not rapidly growing either,” Kagan added. “It could, but the problem is developers, customers, users and advertisers all congregate toward the winning names, and Yahoo is not one of the winning names right now.”

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is no stranger to developer conferences. Google Inc GOOGGOOGL, her former employer, hosts a hugely popular developer conference every year.

Related Link: Will Comcast, Yahoo And The Streaming Video Alliance Reshape The Future Of Entertainment?

'Worth A Shot'

Dan Miller, senior analyst and founder of Opus Research, said the Yahoo conference makes a “certain amount of sense.”

“And it is partially [in the realm] of the companies it wants to be,” Miller told Benzinga. “But it is also acknowledging that we live in a developmental world. If they're gonna survive [they'll] develop APIs and tools for people to bring their content and their properties into other people's applications. It's worth a shot, for sure.”

One Of Many Steps

Yahoo is starting to look a little more like Google. In addition to its upcoming conference, the company recently announced that it had became the default search engine in Firefox. Not everyone is sure this transition will last, however.

“Firefox lives off the kindness of strangers,” Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group, told Benzinga. “They've been living off the kindness of Google for a long time. I think that money's been running out anyway. I think Firefox has been touting this as much as they are in the hopes that Google will come back and buy out [Yahoo's deal] and try to get the money up again.”

Related Link: Is Yahoo's Firefox Deal A 'Big Loss' For Google?

Disclosure: At the time of this writing, Louis Bedigian had no position in the equities mentioned in this report.