Yahoo at 20

Steve Levy from Backchannel highlights the accomplishments and focus of Yahoo

CEO Marisssa Mayer on the 20th anniversary of the company. Some of the key takeaways from his story are noted below; Ms. Mayer coined the term MaVeNS to define her vision of Yahoo- "And for us, mobile, video, native and social—I use the shorthand MaVeNS—is the future." Mayer zeroed in on a potentially fatal flaw in Yahoo's move to mobile: most of its apps were being written using a web technology called HTML 5 that ran on multiple platforms, but performed much worse than a "native" app written specifically for either iPhone or Android. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook

has said that the worst mistake he ever made—in the entire history of Facebook—was originally using HTML 5 for mobile apps. In an instant Mayer prevented Yahoo from proceeding further down that dead-end path. Yahoo moved from 50 to 550 mobile engineers, creating new weather and news apps, and built a successful mail app to retain the 225 million Yahoo mail users as they transitioned from desktop to mobile. Purchased Tumblr in May 2013 with 400 million users Focused on building a new Yahoo business centered around native ads in place of search ads. These are different from display, or banner, ads in that they reformat the assets an advertiser provides—text, images and maybe a button to buy something or head off to a link — in the style of the "organic" content that people had initially come to view.