Yahoo's $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr is already being hailed as a brilliant move, securing a younger Internet demographic and a fertile field for native advertising, an innovative business model where content from brands lives side by side with users' contributions.

In buying Tumblr, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer made a nod to the company's past missteps in promising to "not screw it up."

But in one crucial way, she already has.

That $1.1 billion is a lot of shareholder cash. And so Yahoo is promising investors that Tumblr will contribute to the bottom line next year. An understandable promise—but it's the wrong strategy for Yahoo and for Tumblr.

A Different Strategy

Instead, Mayer should follow the lead of Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Google's Larry Page, who have shown that they're willing to lose money for years on projects like Amazon Prime and YouTube, and build Tumblr into a lasting asset.

Yes, Yahoo has a big salesforce. And yes, Tumblr has a large audience. And yes, the idea of encouraging marketers to first create Tumblr sites and then pay to distribute their posts throughout Tumblr makes sense on paper.

But Tumblr still has a lot of growth ahead of it, particularly on mobile, where the landscape for ads is less well-formed.

Instead of trying to juice revenues in the short term, Mayer should be using all of Yahoo's assets to help Tumblr grow—to make it far and away the most popular way to create content for the Web.

One way to do this is to move Yahoo's media properties away from their clunky, homegrown content-management systems and onto Tumblr.

Another is to use all those salespeople to encourage their clients to start posting interesting material on Tumblr. Before they use Tumblr for advertising, marketers need to understand its quirky, distinctive culture. And the only way to do that is to dive in as participants.

Tumblr Needs Long-Term Goals, Not Short-Term Thinking

Mayer should declare that she's not going to focus on monetizing Tumblr until it hits some big number—say, 500 million monthly users. At that point, marketers will be clamoring to get in, and Yahoo can dictate the terms of their access in a way that won't turn those users off.

Look at how Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion last year, then left it alone. From the time the deal was announced to its closure, Instagram's user base tripled, and continues to grow. In short order, it surpassed Twitter in mobile users. No one's worried about how much money Facebook will make off Instagram. Instead, investors are relieved that Facebook staved off a potential threat and kept it out of competitors' hands.

What Tumblr doesn't need is short-term pressure to deliver a lot of results to advertisers and to investors. As a startup, it had to start making money. As part of Yahoo, it has the luxury of long-term thinking. Or it should—if only Mayer hadn't promised otherwise.

It's great that Mayer has brought an urgency to Yahoo. The Tumblr deal happened in a short time frame—reportedly just six weeks. But now Mayer should be thinking about what Tumblr—and Yahoo—will look like in six years.

If we needed an event to wake people up to the power of native advertising, it's surely Yahoo's $1.1-billion purchase of Tumblr.

We'll be talking about this a lot at AdNatively, a one-day conference I'm emceeing in New York on Thursday, May 23.

So what is native advertising? A quick, simple definition: It's an ad whose form and delivery is identical to the content environment in which it is served.

The opposite, in other words, of interruptive advertising: billboards, takeovers, and big banners that take up space on the page but don't otherwise relate.

Tumblr's Real Value

So why did Yahoo buy Tumblr? People talk about the hip, cool vibe of Tumblr's network of millions of blogs. Or the younger demographic Tumblr has attracted, which Yahoo desperately needs.

But Yahoo doesn't need blogs and young'uns for their own sake: It needs them because marketers need them. And the only way marketers can reach Tumblr users is through Tumblr posts, which advertisers will pay to feature on Tumblr users' "dashboards" - the stream of posts from accounts they follow.

That's more theory than practice at this point. Yahoo hopes to turbocharge Tumblr's revenues through its large sales force, which has been itching to have more native advertising formats to sell. 

Tumblr investor Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures is delivering a keynote address at AdNatively. I'm keenly interested in what he'll have to say.

Wilson is also an investor in Twitter, which has a similar native model: Advertisers can pay to promote a tweet so it's seen by more people, or on Facebook, where sponsored posts get more prominent play in users' News Feeds.

Fuck Yeah, Native Ads

Native advertising is not without its controversies. A big one is the learning curve: Marketers must master each potential advertising environment and learn its intricacies, from Tumblr users' love for animated GIFs and the phrase "fuck yeah," to Twitter's peculiar language of retweets and replies to Facebook's maddening algorithms.

It's no wonder that some give up and just buy banner ads, which can be bought and sold by machine, almost like stocks. Native-ad environments are catching up, opening up their ads to automated buying and selling through application programming interfaces, but there's no question that native ads add complexity.

Native ads seem inevitable, though, as content consumption goes mobile and social. Back in 1994, when Wired's HotWired website sold the first banner ad, that little rectangle was arguably a native format adapted to the new medium of the Web. But Web browsing has evolved. If we're changing how we design interactive experiences for touch interfaces and screens of all sizes, shouldn't we change how marketers fit in, too?

Full disclosure: ReadWrite and its owner and publisher, Say Media, are actively thinking about the native-advertising question. ReadWrite runs ad formats, like sponsored posts, which some observers include in the native-advertising mix. So we're not just curious bystanders. But I promise you that ReadWrite will do its best to cover native advertising objectively and disclose when we have a stake in the game.

The conversation at AdNatively promises to be a rousing debate. If you're in New York for Internet Week, please join me, Fred Wilson, and others - ReadWrite readers get a 50% discount on attendance.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

It wasn’t that long ago that Yahoo stood accused of letting Flickr decay beyond repair. 

Today, under the guidance of new CEO Marissa Mayer, the company has given the oft maligned image-sharing community a major facelift. Yahoo’s announcement promises a Flickr that’s “more spectacular, much bigger, and one you can take anywhere.” 

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the grid. Here’s what’s new on your Flickr account:

Room To Grow

As recently as yesterday, free Flickr users could upload and display 200 images at a time. Now every user has one terabyte of storage space. For those of you playing along at home, that’s enough for roughly 200,000 photos. Or as the Flickr staff puts it even more dramatically, “you could take a photo every hour for forty years without filling one.”

Following Flickr’s consistently freemium model, you can get even more perks by going pro. Fifty dollars will remove all advertisements. And for the serious professional, $499.99 will double your storage space to two terabytes per year. Or, you know, more than 400,000 photos. 

If you already had an original Flickr Pro account, priced at $24.95, you’re getting a heck of a deal. Yahoo has upgraded you to the $49.99 option until August 2013, free of charge. Pro user Aaron Brazell sent us a screenshot of his pro account, pictured below:

Introducing The Grid

The most instantly noticeable change is an aesthetic one. Your photos have enlarged themselves to jaw dropping size and now dominate the screen. Taking a cue from Instagram, your home page is now an infinite scroll through your contacts’ recent photos.

Your profile page has also gone the way of Pinterest and Windows 8, filling the page with a grid of images. Just like Facebook and Twitter, your profile page includes a background photo to offset your profile picture. 

I found that Flickr had already put one of my Favorites as my background image, a photo I didn’t even take myself. As it’s not credited, I certainly hope the photographer doesn’t take issue.

Wait, What’s Going On?

A lot here has changed and Flickr power users are still trying to figure out what’s new. Flickr’s most active discussion forum, Flickr Central, is abuzz with comments about the change. Given that these are the people that continued to daily use Flickr even as the rest of the Internet complained it was dead, it’s no surprise they’re unhappy with the change.

“I signed on Flickr to post a story about Yahoo vowing not to screw up Tumblr … and then I see the clusterfuck that is the new homepage,” one user wrote. 

Meanwhile, confusion abounds at Flickr’s official Help Forum. I’d be amazed if the staff can answer all 1,100 plus questions that were added in the last hour. It looks like Yahoo might want to update Flickr’s FAQ guidelines, which still link to old news like the ability to pay $24.95 for a pro subscription.

If you're confused, don't add to the backlog. I have reached out to Yahoo for details on when the new FAQ will be up and will update when we know more. 

Update May 21 at 8 AM Pacific: a Yahoo spokesperson informed me the Flickr FAQ has been updated with new information about the redesign. 

The Tumblr acquisition may give Yahoo the young, hip audience it’s always wanted — assuming it can keep them. Because Tumblr users aren’t happy, and they’re letting it all out. 

“Yahoo is buying Tumblr guys THIS IS NOT OKAY THEY’LL RUIN OUR HOME,” blogged one user in a sentiment repeatedly echoed on the #yahoo, #tumblr, and #yumblr tags on Tumblr, all of which are currently experiencing an overload of activity. 

Via the 5EXi Tumbr

Tumblr users’ greatest fear? Change, of any kind. Many have vowed to leave at the first sign of Yahoo involvement. One Tumblr user-generated photo shows a purple, spammy nightmare of what many bloggers fear Tumblr may soon become. 

Via the castielmalotovedlucifer Tumblr

These concerns aren’t exactly unfounded, either: Yahoo has a track record of botching its acquisitions. It’s telling that Yahoo’s press release on the acquisition notes that it “promises not to screw it up.” (You read that correctly — that's in the press release.)

(See also: Buying Tumblr Will Leave Yahoo With The Same Old Identity Crisis)

Tumblr CEO David Karp assured users in an announcement that “We’re not turning purple.” (Of course, Tumblr has been purple before — back in 2010, it went purple for Pride Day. When it reverted to traditional blue, well, users complained about that, too.)

There are some obvious conflicts a-brewin'. Yahoo is a self-described family friendly brand while Tumblr is infamous for its uncensored pornographic content. As a result, some users worry about a culture clash. "Yahoo buying Tumblr is like having a house party supervised by your Grandma," one user blogged.

Yahoo is already working to defuse such fears, though it's far from clear how successfully. In addition to the company's promise "not to screw it up," CEO Marissa Mayer made a point of offering this reassurance on a call with analysts and press shortly after the acquisition announcement: "We really want to let Tumblr be Tumblr and let Yahoo be Yahoo."

Via thefrogman.me Tumblr

Some of Tumblr's competitors say they smell blood in the water. WordPress CEO Matt Mullenweg, for instance, wrote on his personal blog Sunday that “normally we import 400-600 posts an hour from Tumblr, last hour it was over 72,000.” (Full disclosure, I’m currently a trial employee at WordPress.com.)

Of course, social-media outrage is often transitory. On Quit Facebook Day in 2010, organizers planned to lead a mass exodus from the site in protest of Facebook privacy policy. In the end, fewer than 2% of American users left after all.

Mayer has already begun addressing the culture clash on her brand new Tumblr, which spells “Mayr” without the “e” as a nod to Tumblr’s quirky spelling. Her latest post speaks Tumblr’s language — a spot-on GIF that depicts Mayer and Karp battling it out through netspeak. Mayer's rallying cry: WFH [Work From Home]. Karp's? NSFW [Not Safe For Work].

When Karp announced the acquisition, he signed it with a nod to one of Tumblr’s most viral (and NSFW) memes, “Fuck Yeah.” Even if Yahoo is planning to change an aspect of the site, Tumblr’s salty language and aversion to censorship don’t seem to be one of them.

Lead image via the tinsoftware Tumblr

Yahoo has officially announced the all-cash acquisition of blogging site Tumblr, picking up the six-year-old company for a cool $1.1 billion.

The move, which was telegraphed by the major tech sources over the weekend, comes as no real surprise, and ReadWrite's Owen Thomas already has insights on the potential directions for the deal. But details are coming out this morning on what -initially - Yahoo has planned.

(See also Buying Tumblr Will Leave Yahoo With The Same Old Identity Crisis.)

Rather interestingly, Yahoo will be moving its official blog to Tumblr. And in the very first blog post, right out of the gate, Yahoo explicitly affirms the question that was on everyone's lips this weekend when the news was first leaked:

"I'm delighted to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Tumblr!," wrote Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, "We promise not to screw it up."

Mayer's post was the epitome of how the two content companies should be able to work together.

"In terms of working together, Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love. In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences. The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance user experience," Mayer continued.

Given the type of content produced in some of those 50 billion daily blog posts on Tumblr, it will be very interesting to see how that seamless mesh of advertising opportunities will work, since advertisers are sure to be all over NSFW blog posts.

Image courtesy of Yahoo.

Yahoo is expected to announce the acquisition of blogging site Tumblr for $1.1 billion on Monday, with both companies' boards having agreed to the deal, according to reports in AllThingsD, which first broke the news of sale talks, as well as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

If it goes through as planned, buying Tumblr would be a signature deal for new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer in her effort to transform the aging Web-media company into a producer of habit-forming online experiences. Tumblr has some 100 million monthly visitors, and its users publish 90 million posts a day. Those are some mighty habits, and they promise to offer considerable room for Yahoo's advertising sales team.

Selling can't have been an easy decision for Tumblr founder David Karp. When we last saw the youthful CEO in early April, he was on the campus of Facebook on the same day that the social network launched its Android Home software. As we left, we saw him locked in an intense conversation with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg, early in Facebook's life, also famously wrestled with a billion-dollar buyout offer from Yahoo. We have to wonder what they talked about.

One thing Karp and Mayer will have to figure out is the relationship the combined companies have with their users. Tumblr's users, a young, cool demographic Yahoo has fairly openly admitted it lacks, identify closely with the service.

Unlike Facebook, Tumblr is a place where they can reveal themselves without revealing themselves. The tolerance for provisional identity (and racy content) is a core part of Tumblr.

Yahoo is a muddle. While it was one of the first sites to let users log in and personalize experiences, it has faded as a source of online identity. The fact that you can use a Facebook or Google account to log in to Yahoo is telling.

The one notable exception is Flickr, the photo-sharing site that has seen a renaissance since Mayer became CEO. Yahoo is expected to announce significant upgrades to the service on Monday as well, and one source who has seen the new version of Flickr described it as "stunning."

Will Tumblr become part of Yahoo like Flickr—a distinct service with its own user culture? Or will it become part of the muddle of indistinct Yahoo services like Sports and Weather, more notable for their utility than their expressive nature?

Yahoo nearly crushed Flickr as it first integrated the photo-sharing site and then neglected it. To be useful to Yahoo, Tumblr will have to somehow fit into the rest of the operation. No amount of promises of hands-off treatment will change that reality. (Here's one way Tumblr could help Yahoo: Junk Yahoo's overcomplicated in-house publishing systems and move all of the media operations onto Tumblr.)

Even the question of how users log in to Tumblr, post-Yahoo, will be key. Will they retain a provisional identity, unlinked to their real name and the rest of their online activity? Or will it get folded into everything else they do on Yahoo? That question is crucial, and as Yahoo learned with Flickr, it's easy to screw up.

The difference is that Yahoo spent a few tens of millions of dollars on Flickr. Screwing up Tumblr would be a far more expensive mistake.

I’ve seen the future of Facebook, and it is... Yahoo!

Between 1994–2000, Yahoo! dominated the consumer Internet industry and much of the world’s attention. The company’s exclamation mark (sometimes called a "bang") cast a long, purple-hued shadow across the globe, as users flocked to its ever-expanding array of services, and online and offline companies of all sizes threw money at it (almost literally) to gain prominent visibility among its massive, segmentable audience. Yahoo!’s page views rocketed; revenue rocketed; profits rocketed; stock price rocketed; market capitalization rocketed. Yahoo!, it seemed, could do no wrong.

Then, the world changed. Radically.

What Happened To Yahoo!

Consumer behavior shifted, with individuals the world over flirting with, and then devoting themselves to, myriad other online services. The business cycle changed and companies chose/were forced to reduce or eliminate their online advertising budgets. Then, when Internet advertising budgets returned a few years later, business behavior adjusted again, with marketers broadly diversifying their spend across the Web (following those same migrating users). And, perhaps most significantly and most representative of both of the previous issues, Google emerged, presenting consumers with a slate of invaluable (and competitive) services and companies with a nearly perfect mechanism/venue through which to market their offerings.

Needless-to-say, the 2000–2013 period has not been nearly so kind to the purple giant-of-yesterday — not to its metrics, its business, its stock or its market capitalization.

Throughout its rollercoaster-of-a-life, however, Yahoo! has remained shockingly static at its core, with a (still) massive, segmentable audience consuming an enormous volume of free content and services, surrounded by advertisements of all shapes and sizes. That those content/service offerings now include Fantasy Football and photos from Flickr, rather than, say, news and NASDAQ quotes, is nice, but irrelevant, as is the fact that the company now offers rich media and video ads, as opposed to just sponsorships and banners.

Those are incremental changes to the story — variations on the theme; because, the fact of the matter is that — apart from its early days of minimal competition and “easy money” — Yahoo! has struggled mightily to engage its users in fundamentally new ways; unlock the true value of its global user base for its advertising clients; and, bring to market any lasting innovation that even hints at shaking the status quo all over again.

In not so subtle ways, this reminds me of Facebook. A lot.

What Facebook Is Doing

Like Yahoo! in its early phase, Facebook hit the ball out of the park from the outset, and, it seems, hasn't yet stopped running the bases. From the ivy covered confines of Harvard University, Zuckerberg & Co. now attracts more than one billion users to its site globally; has enabled hundreds of billions of friend connections; sees hundreds of millions of photos uploaded daily; and, generates several billion dollars of revenue annually. Not bad for its first nine years, right?

And yet, since its astounding opening act, Facebook has bestowed upon us:

• Gifting - blah.
• News Feed algorithm changes - yawn.
• Suggested Posts - meh.
• Messaging - join the club.
• Sponsored Stories - ummm.
• Graph Search - niche.
• Poking (again) - ha.
• Timeline - zzzzz.
• News Feed design changes - argh.

What's next, a new color scheme? A new font?

What Could Happen To Facebook

Suffice it to say, the company is not exactly setting the world on fire with these efforts; more importantly, these are not (individually or collectively) doing much (if anything) to materially enhance Facebook's relationship with its users; substantively increase the level of dependency felt by its advertising clients; and/or fundamentally alter the trajectory of its franchise or business. Said differently, where is Facebook’s second act, like Android (acquired, transformed and massively scaled by Google) or iPad? Where is its money-printing AdWords product? Where is its PayPal (acquired, and massively scaled by eBay)? Where its its quantum leap forward? Where is its disruptive force?

None of this is to suggest that Facebook has, in any way, “failed;” nor is it meant to take anything away from the extraordinary space that Facebook has carved out for itself in our collective universe. Similarly, I do not mean to imply that Facebook is necessarily destined to follow in the path of Yahoo! (after all, it would be damned near impossible to repeat all of those mistakes).

That said, it is, hopefully, a wake-up call, because — at least to this observer — the company and its business seem far too focused on tweaking the edges of its past creation(s) instead of changing the world all over again for both its users and advertisers. And that, as history might suggest, is a very risky path to enduring success on the Web.

Beware the “!,” Facebook. Beware the “!”!

Yahoo's new iOS app launched this morning, bringing to the table the results of its $30 million acquisition of news summary app Summly last month. It's basically a full overhaul of Yahoo's flagship app focused on providing news via algorithmic summaries that originated with Summly founder and 17-year-old tech wunderkind Nick D'Aloisio.

Bottom line: The app has a solid design, a barebones interface, and works very much as designed. Its simplicity, however, may limit its attractiveness relative to more established news readers that skillfully weave in social media. 

Even worse, Yahoo News is still too full of celebrity and viral trash to become anyone's foremost news hub. (Excepting those who live for celebrity and viral trash, that is.)

Yahoo Finally Catches Up In The Design Race

The app, simply dubbed "Yahoo!," is basic in the extreme. But that simplicity is consistent with Yahoo's new mobile approach, which aims for stripped down functionality that offers users the essentials and nothing but the essentials.

Designed much like its companion apps — Finance, Mail, Messenger, Sportacular, and Weather — the app has just one main screen that constantly updates at the top with new stories. There's also a sidebar that offers you Web search via Yahoo's search engine, which still ranks as the third most trafficked behind Bing and Google, and the ability to set preferences. Which gets a little complicated because it forces you to sign into Yahoo; more on that in a moment.

The remaining two thirds of the sidebar is dedicated to plugging the rest of Yahoo's mobile suite, as well as sharing and rating tools.

From a design standpoint, the simplicity is great. The app couldn't be easier to use, and doesn't require you to log in to use its most important functions. In true Summly fashion, the news summaries are no longer than four sentences and typically feature a full image with the text overlaid. Clicking through takes you to a full-page version of the article.  

Some Difficult Tradeoffs

There are a few less-than-happy tradeoffs, though. Switching between story categories remains buried in the sidebar under the "All Stories" tab. That certainly limits the app's versatility for news junkies looking for a quick and easy way to navigate trending tropics. On top of that, Yahoo's comment section, which in the browser can feature thousands of comments on any given story, is inaccessible from the app at the moment. 

Similarly, to tell the app which news topics you're most interested in, you not only have to sign into your Yahoo account, then you have to create a Yahoo Profile as well. If you haven't done so before, which happened to be the case for me, the process is easy, but it's all handled in a weird Web client within the app that is terribly slow.

Then, once you're signed in, you have to maneuver to the settings section to access preferences, which are now mysteriously called content preferences and not topic preferences. To make matters worse, clicking that forces you to link your account with Facebook — and that didn’t even work for me until I opened that page in my laptop’s browser. Apparently, any kind of preference over what kind of stories you’re seeing is all routed through this terribly clunky social media integration that you can't even set up within the app itself.

Banking On News Summaries, For Good Or Ill

The core of the app's usefulness lies in how effective Summly's summation algorithm can help users quickly digest Yahoo News stories. It's the main reason Yahoo reported shelled out $30 million for a company that barely had a million users and no monetization model, besides the 18-month contract it nabbed with D'Aloisio. 

It's worth noting that by buying Summly, Yahoo was primarily acquiring IP, code and technology from SRI International, a nonprofit research institute that has helped develop technologies in fields as varied as education systems and national defense. SRI purchased equity in Summly after D'Aloisio created the summation algorithm and basically evolved it into a valuable product by providing him "artificial intelligence expertise in machine learning and natural language processing," as Business Insider's Nicholas Carlson reported.

SRI also held equity in Siri Inc. before Apple bought it in 2010. Within Yahoo, Summly is even reportedly known as "Yahoo's Siri."

Gossip And Viral Videos

So it's easy to see how Yahoo is banking on summation technology as the future of mobile news consumption. But even with the smartest, leanest "organic" algorithms in the consumer tech industry, the company still faces a big problem: The sour reputation of Yahoo News, which covers as much celebrity gossip and viral Internet videos as it does hard news of substance.

Granted, Yahoo News generates enormous traffic, and a story on a subject of national interest, like the Boston bomber being charged, can generate more than 4,700 comments in a matter of hours. But right next to that in Yahoo's homepage pinwheel — and by extension below or above it in its new mobile app — is a story on Jennifer Lawrence's haircut or a piece titled "Surprise under woman's car."

That's some truly broad coverage, which doesn't necessarily bode well for users who might otherwise be interested in making Yahoo their one stop shop for news. That's especially the case on mobile, where huge news reading players like Flipboard, Pulse, and Zite have built intensive environments with social media integration and large numbers of curated categories.  

If Yahoo can leverage the effectiveness of the Summly algorithm to build a base around quick-and-easy mobile reading and flesh the app out a bit more to let users avoid all the trash, this mobile overhaul could be a huge win. For now, while it looks and reads great, it doesn't come close to besting the competition even with its news summaries. 

Guest author Julia Gifford works at DeskTime, which makes time-tracking and productivity software.

The Internet went crazy when Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer decided to ban remote working at the company, a decision that drastically affected more than 500 employees. Debate raged over the merits of remote working. Many thought Mayer's move was uncalled for and archaic, and predicted it would end up backfiring, while other saw her move as a last-resort attempt to re-focus Yahoo after a decade of falling behind its competitors.

(See also Forget Trends, Is Yahoo's Workplace Policy Right For Yahoo?)  

A Deeper Look: No One’s “Right”

Statistics are being offered left and right, and it’s becoming difficult to keep track of what’s “correct.” The fact of the matter is, there’s no one “right” answer. It’s more a process of deciding your own company's values, priorities and strategy.

On average, based on many studies, most people are actually more productive working independently from home. However, further study identifies certain types of workers who may be much more productive working in the office. It's important to look not only at the average statistics, but also at how the numbers break down.   According to a study done by economist E. Glenn Dutcher, summarised in The Wall Street Journal, mechanical and repetitive tasks were performed better in the office, whereas creative tasks had a higher success rate when employees were outside of the office.  

Marissa Mayer’s Argument: Favoring The Office

Mayer’s stated rationale for stopping remote working at Yahoo was that if everyone is to work as a team, they have to be in the same physical space. It’s clear that there are obvious benefits to a unified working environment – brainstorming with colleagues, random conversations that spark valuable idea, even simple teambuilding and camaraderie. This is what Yahoo management sent to employees:  

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.

Yahoo seems to think impromptu team meetings in a shared environment will bring the company closer together, and that the increased social interactions will stimulate new ideas that will benefit the company. That remains to be seen, but over the 8 months that Mayer has been in charge, Yahoo stock has risen 50%, and has continued to rise since the announcement in February. But the new policy doesn't kick in till June, so it's too early to measure its true impact.

(See also Why Banning Telecommuting Is A Sign Your Company Is Screwed.)

The Case For Remote Working

Over the past few years, many studies have brought to light various benefits of working from home. Let's look at a few of those benefits.

Many studies have shown that remote work leads to happier, more productive employees. Remote employees tend to work longer hours and are on average much healthier, taking fewer sick days (which saves money in variety of ways).

A Standford study followed a Chinese travel agency with more than 12,000 employees that experimented by having 200 employees telecommute. The findings showed the telecommuting employees had better working statistics than their office-bound colleagues. They took more calls, worked more hours and needed fewer less sick days.   Interestingly, though, only half of these 200 successful telecommuters expressed the desire to continue telecommuting once the experiment concluded, preferring the social interactions of the office.   In another study, British telecom giant O2 experimented by instructing 3,000 of its employees to try working from home for a day. More than a third (36%) of them reported being more productive from home. The employees nabbed an extra 1,000 hours of sleep, and 14% said they saw more than their families.

In addition, 1,000 hours usually spent commuting was instead spent working, saving 2.2 tons of CO2 emissions (equivalent to about 42,000 miles of diesel-car driving).

Remote working can be especially beneficial for young parents, and can be a great way for company's to burnish an image as an accepting and flexible organization looking to bridge the gender gap.     Remote working also makes it easier for employers to shop the global talent pool, and to hire physically disabled workers who might find it difficult to make it into the office every day.    What's best for your company? That depends on the company's culture, type of work, location and many other factors. But despite Marissa Mayer's best efforts, it's clear that remote working remains a growing trend supported by increasingly powerful technology solutions.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Yahoo has made another bold move in the mobile space by acquiring news reading app Summly. While the deal is not yet closed, sources tell AllThingsD that Yahoo ponied up $30 million in cash.

That hefty sum is notable because Yahoo is also killing the Summly app, but holding onto its creator Nick D’Aloisio, who built it in his London home two years ago when he was just 15. Yes, you read that right. The charismatic English entrepreneur is only 17 years old, and he's managed to put his creation in the hands of nearly a million users since its December 2011 launch while raising $1.5 million from big names like Horizon Ventures.

The app's secret sauce involved a unique algorithm that summarized articles from all over the Web, automagically condensing news stories and blog posts into bite-sized summaries intended to save readers time.

Summly No More, Though D'Aloisio Stays... For A While

Yahoo made it clear that its sights were set on the backbone of the app — its team and its algorithm. "While the Summly app will close, you will see the technology come to life throughout Yahoo!’s mobile experiences soon," wrote Adam Cahan, Yahoo’s senior vice president of mobile and emerging products, on the company's blog this morning. 

D'Aloisio and his team, which numbers below the double digits, will join Yahoo, but the young founder has reportedly signed on for only 18 months — a smart move considering his potential. Yahoo's decision to ax the app could suck for users, assuming Summly was on a path to turn into the next Flipboard or Zite or Pulse (which we'll now never know). But it's great news for Yahoo, which couldn't care less about even a fast-growing, though still relatively small, news reader app.

The acquisition of Summly follows Yahoo's purchase of Jybe, a social recommendation company, just last week and New York City-based app Stamped, which similarly let users build recommendation lists, last fall. It's all part of CEO Marissa Mayer's plan to revitalize the ailing Yahoo brand and update its services for a new, mobile-centric generation.

Education Of An Entrepreneur

D'Aloisio required a few at-bats before he connected with Summly. The most important was Trimit, a bookmarklet and iOS app that acted as a text summariser in much the same way that Summly would later, albeit with a much more rudimentary interface and level of design. It was popular, but not quite as pervasive as D'Aloisio had hoped. And he apparently went a bit nuts trying to gin up coverage as a result.

This culminated with a lesson in email etiquette from Gizmodo writer Casey Chan, who titled a post in August 2011 "How I Made A 15-Year-Old App Developer Cry." Chan related how D'Aloisio's intense fervor — read, non-stop barrage of pleading emails — resulted in Gizmodo deciding to make Trimit the blog's featured worst app of the week (a "dick move," as Chan later put it). Though Gizmodo didn't know D'Aloisio's age at the time. 

Two years and $30 million later, D'Aloisio appears to have survived just fine. Watch and listen to him charm you into thinking Summly is the coolest thing on the planet in the video below. It gives you a good sense of the kind of marketing buzz he might bring Yahoo in the coming months. 

Lead image screencapped from Summly Launch from Summly on Vimeo

Yahoo’s first major acquisition since Marissa Mayer took over as CEO could be the French video site Dailymotion, of all things. If the talks pan out, Yahoo will be joining a long list of companies hyped up by the booming digital video industry. And if anyone can upset Google’s hold on online video, it’s Mayer.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting Yahoo wants to buy as much as 75% of the French site, valued at roughly $300 million, in an apparent bid to diversify Yahoo's revenue stream.

"One of the challenges in Yahoo's business is that we are primarily domestic and we don't have enough of our business running it from an international basis," Mayer said at an analyst conference in February. More than 70% of Yahoo’s $5 billion in revenue is from the U.S.

Dailymotion, the twelfth-most trafficked video site in the world, was already looking for an U.S. partner, so it could potentially be a match made in heaven.

But Yahoo and online video? Really?

“It's interesting, or should I say 'telling' that as Yahoo! seeks to reinvent itself, it's first real, bold step (other than a somewhat yawn-inducing homepage redesign) is to try and capitalize on video” Jay Miletsky, the CEO of MyPod Studios, the StumbleUpon of curated online video, wrote in an email.

“I think after Google + failed to make any real splash, Yahoo! wisely decided to skip trying to launch the next pretender to the Facebook throne, and looked to video as the best opportunity for improving their brand among Web users,” added Miletsky.

AOL was able to rebrand itself as a media company, so it is certainly a transition that can be made. AOL, which used to provide Internet to households, now owns the Huffington Post and operates a slew of hyperlocal news sites through its Patch initiative.

Yahoo could feasibly rebrand itself with a strong online video portfolio, too. Its Yahoo! Screen program is already a step in that direction.

Original series like the critically acclaimed Burning Love and Anthony E Zuiker’s Cybergeddon are a higher quality than any of YouTube’s offerings. This year's Streamy Awards noticed, giving both series trophies.

Yahoo's original programming targets a much older audience than YouTube's teen and tween demographic, which gives the company another edge in the online video sector.  There's even a technical advantage to be gained: The only thing that prevented me from watching Yahoo! Screen content over the last couple of months (namely to watch Tom Hank's animated original Yahoo series, Electric City) was their bad video player. If Yahoo acquires DailyMotion, that obstacle dissolves.    

It will take time for these talks to firm up, and have the two companies' operations integrated. But if this is indeed a match made in heaven, there will be a major new content player on the scene, diversifying the growing video realm even more.

First Yahoo. Then Best Buy. In the last two weeks, two high-profile but seriously troubled companies have made very public crackdowns on employees who telecommute or work remotely.

(See also Forget Trends, Is Yahoo's Workplace Policy Right For Yahoo?)

Telecommuting Is Never The Real Problem

I'm not saying the moves weren't necessary to help the struggling companies recover, but everyone knows that telecommuting per se is not the problem here. The problem, in both cases, is a company culture of negativity, "coasting" and lax management.

How can you tell? Easy.

Lots of companies - probably including yours - have sensible policies allowing telecommuting for certain workers under certain conditions. Heck, increasing numbers of companies are run totally virtually, with no central offices at all - people work from wherever they are, and get together whenever and wherever they need.

In those kinds of companies, people mostly work remotely to avoid long commutes or to work for companies where they don't happen to live. Companies save money on office space and other fixed costs and get access to talent they might not otherwise attract.

It's a win-win situation for everyone. And they have productivity studies and management consultants by the bushel to prove it.

That's what happens in a well-run company, one with a future, and one where the vast majority of employees are committed to the company's success. No doubt, that's what it was like for Yahoo and Best Buy. In the beginning.

Telecommuters Get Blamed When Things Go Bad

But Yahoo's and Best Buy's fortunes soured and management clearly lost control over their increasingly disillusioned workers - who often wanted nothing more than to spend as little time as possible at the office. According to a New York Times story on Tuesday, many Yahoo telecommuters were working harder on side projects than their actual jobs. The Times claims that new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer "made the decision not as a referendum on working remotely, but to address problems particular to Yahoo."

That's exactly it. "Problems particular to Yahoo." And Best Buy. And whatever company announces a policy like this next.

(See also Another Reason Best Buy Is Doomed - And Why That's A Problem)

If your company starts to make noises about banning telecommuting, you can be competely confident that it's not about telecommuting at all. You can also be confident that your company has some serious cultural and productivity problems that it feels powerless to fix without drastic action.

They Had To Do Something

Do Yahoo and Best Buy know that their Draconian new policies will turn off some of their best workers unfairly targeted by telecommuting bans? That they won't be able to hire some valuable people who desire or require more workplace flexibility? That the polices will make them look technologically backward and borderline incompetent? That the policies actually mean they are technologically backward and borderline incompetent?

Of course.

But they've decided that things are so bad that they don't have a choice. That if they don't do something about their real problems, things will only get worse. These companies aren't in trouble because they banned telecommuting. They're in trouble because they had to ban telecommuting.

You could look at this as smart management taking required corrective action. Or you could look at it as a giant, lit-up red flag that the company is reeling out of control, sacrificing its long term reputation and success for a short-term shakeup.

Either way, one thing is certain: If your company bans telecommuting, your company is screwed. After all, do you really think a little thing like banning telecommuting is going to fix a company so messed up it had to actually ban telecommuting?

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

The Yahoo evolution continues - this time with a few more swings of the axe.

Friday, Yahoo announced that it would be sunsetting a handful of its products in a move consistent with CEO Marissa Mayer's plan to aggressively prune the unruly conglomerate.

Out With The Old, In With The Cool

Yahoo will be terminating some of its more vestigial products, which is exactly what it needs to do. Cleaning out the old, rotten stuff will help rid the company of its unhip World Wide Web-esque vibe. These soon-to-be-dead products will join the ranks of some of Yahoo's mobile apps, which are next for the chopping block. Here's the list of what the big Y! will jettison:

• Yahoo! Message Boards website
• Yahoo! app for BlackBerry
• Yahoo! Avatars
• Yahoo! Updates API
• Yahoo! Sports IQ
• Yahoo! App Search
• Yahoo! Clues (beta)
• Yahoo! Updates API

R.I.P. It's hard to say what, if anything, will be missed on that list. Yahoo's Message Boards seem like they might still show some signs of (protozoan) life. But Yahoo Avatars might have been singlehandedly perpetuating the company's out-of-touch, mid-1990s image. (Seriously, have you seen those things?)

On Yahoo's Yodel Anecdotal blog (which I really wish had made the list), Jay Rossiter, the company's Executive Vice President of Platforms, explains the culling with a shout out to recent updates on Flickr and Yahoo! Mail, two Yahoo products people actually use. According to Rossiter, Yahoo wants to hang onto only products that are a "daily habit that still resonates." The goal is to sharpen the company's focus on its brand new Mayer-era direction.

Yahoo Is Now A "Technology Company"

In another decisive move that bubbled up quietly Friday via an SEC filing, Yahoo now fashions itself as a "global technology company." For the past few years, Yahoo had been resolutely calling itself a "digital media company," so the change is a bit curious, though the timing isn't. Here are the old and new Yahoo boilerplate excerpts, with the updated language highlighted:

Old: Yahoo! Inc., together with its consolidated subsidiaries... is a premier digital media company. Through our proprietary technology and insights, Yahoo! delivers personalized digital content and experiences, across devices and around the globe, to vast audiences."

New: "Yahoo! Inc., together with its consolidated subsidiaries... is a global technology company focused on making the world’s daily habits inspiring and entertaining. We provide a variety of products and services, many of them personalized, including search, content, and communications tools—all daily habits for hundreds of millions of users, on the Web and on mobile devices."

Between the quiet rebranding and these ancient products galloping off into the sunset, Yahoo is increasingly focused on the one thing that certainly needs the attention - the company itself. 

Image of axe courtesy of Shutterstock.

Yahoo's plan to bring all work-at-home employees back to the office starting in June was not meant to be a statement on the viability of telecommuting, but that's what happened. Now a company that's trying to pick itself up off of the ground is smack dab in the media spotlight, even though company insiders say that this move was something Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer telegraphed almost from Day One of her taking the helm at Yahoo. But is this the right move for Yahoo?

Let's get this out of the way up front: this is a story because a lot of people in the technology industry, which has a higher-than-average share of work-at-home bodies, are freaking out. The idea that a long-held industry practice enabling them to work outside the workplace and gain some measure of flexibility in their professional-personal balance is about to regress back to the 1980s is pretty damn alarming.

That was certainly my initial reaction. Having worked from my Indiana-based home office for almost 15 years for various employers and clients in the media and technology sectors, I can unequivocally say that there would be no way I could do what I do and still live in my native state without the Internet and telecommuting policies. I have turned down job offers from companies that would not budge on office workplace requirements. I have kids in college, high school, and middle school. Relocating, and uprooting my younger kids, is not something I want to do unless there's no other option.

Watching the reaction to Yahoo's leaked HR memo that was initially reported by AllThingsD, I can tell I am not alone.

Probably caught off-guard by the visceral reaction, Yahoo declined to make any statements about the new policy until just yesterday afternoon, telling the media, "This isn't a broad industry view on working from home. This is about what is right for Yahoo right now."

Fair enough. Mayer and her team are trying to pull Yahoo together and get the company back on track. I would imagine, given the revolving door of CEOs at the company, that she doesn't feel like there's a lot of time, so worrying about the broader impact on telecommuting is the last thing on their minds.

But even if Yahoo is not trying to start an industry trend, the question still remains, if their plan isn't meant to be a plan for everyone, is it still the right plan for Yahoo?

A Long Time Coming

Sources within Yahoo have told me that the new policy was actually not that new at all. The possibility of curtailing or even halting work-at-home policies was discussed last fall.

"She's made it clear right from the get-go that this is something she wanted to do," one staffer said, referring to Mayer's plan to reduce telecommuting practices within Yahoo.

Sources close to the situation spoke anonymously, as they are not allowed to discuss internal Yahoo matters.

Indeed, soon after Mayer came on board as president and CEO of Yahoo in July 2012, work from home on Fridays was strongly discouraged, with some teams required to implement mandatory meetings within Yahoo's office late in the day on Fridays.

So, if this change was a long time coming, was the reaction within Yahoo more sanguine as some media reports seemed to indicate?

"People are pissed off about it," one source related. "But, they know you have to go along if you want to work at Yahoo."

There's been a lot of speculation that Mayer may be revisiting her Google roots, implementing policies that encourage working from the office, just as Google does. But sources I spoke with didn't care to speculate about this.

A Step Too Far?

Even as Yahoo employees are struggling with this change in policy, some are wondering if such a drastic move was even warranted. Some internal sources commented that Yahoo might have tried to better manage remote workers.

While nearly everyone in the company relies on the Yahoo Messenger client for text-based chats and messaging, one source confided that they observe little to no use of the software's video chat functionality within the halls of Yahoo's offices. Nor are outside videoconferencing tools like Skype or GoToMeeting actively employed.

While videoconferencing is not an exact substitute for in-person meetings, it would seem to be an effective interim step to try when concerns about productivity arise. Especially when Yahoo already has the tool to perform such meetings in place.

This could have been a question of time. It is possible videoconferencing and other managerial procedures to handle a mobile workforce were considered, and rejected because of the pressures of delivering a better bottom line fast.

There is also the very tangible benefit of pulling together in a crisis. By physically coming closer, the human social connections will kick in even further and (hopefully) deliver the innovation and productivity Mayer and her team are seeking.

If anything, Mayer's decision is not so much a comment on telecommuting as a clear signal that Yahoo sees the months ahead as put-up-or-shut-up time. The leaked memo may have created a meta-discussion right now, but the bigger pain in the butt for Yahoo has to be that all of this media attention will have investors and partners alike watching the company even more intensely to see if Mayer and the work-in-office plan will work.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

A homepage redesign would hardly be noteworthy when it comes to most sites on the Web - but for Yahoo, It's a revolution.

Yahoo - long in the tooth among its rivals - doesn't change early or often, historically speaking. But Wednesday the company rolled out a much-needed update to its cluttered Web hub, Yahoo.com. Marissa Mayer, the company's refreshingly bright-eyed new CEO, just keeps picking up the pace.

Yahoo's Homepage Enters The Social Era

Since taking the top role at the troubled company, the former Googler has overseen a handful of small acquisitions aiming to bolster Yahoo's set of mobile apps. Now, the iconic purple Yahoo homepage cleans up its look with a flatter, more modern design while adding endless scrolling, stealing a page from the social media playbook of sites like Tumblr and Twitter. Yahoo also updated its core apps today to reflect the changes on Yahoo.com.

In a blog post on Yodel Anecdotal, Yahoo's somewhat obscure and unfortunately named company blog, Mayer writes:

"Designed to be more intuitive and personal, the new Yahoo! experience is all about your interests and preferences. Since streams of information have become the paradigm of choice on the web, we’re introducing a newsfeed with infinite scroll, letting you experience a virtually endless feed of news articles."

True to form, Mayer's mission to inject Yahoo into social and mobile relevance plays out in the redesign. The new homepage cleans up the site's interest channels (Entertainment, Finance, etc. are moved onto tabs) and allows users signed into Facebook to browse a socially rethought version of the news stream.

Back when Facebook's Timeline first launched, Yahoo was an early partner of the social reading experience, which allows users to passively share the stories they see across the Web. The company continues its evolution in this direction, without sacrificing too much of its DNA. 

Messing With Imperfection... And An Old Formula

Blame it on Internet Explorer defaults or less-than-savvy Web surfers, but Yahoo's homepage is still one of the Web's most trafficked sites. Yahoo.com currently ranks as the #4 most popular website in the U.S. according to Alexa, trailing only Google, Facebook and YouTube.

But Yahoo is unique among the top slots - Google's spartan homepage is a search engine, of course, and YouTube and Facebook are both social platforms. Yahoo's homepage remains a busy hub of all things Y!, from its curated front page news carousel to Yahoo Mail and everything in between. It might not be pretty, but the Yahoo.com we know keeps vast amounts of traffic churning and ad revenue pouring in. Considering the scale of traffic it drives, tinkering with the homepage formula even a little bit entails significant risk. 

After all, if it ain't broke don't fix it - but if you ask Marissa Mayer, socializing it a little couldnt hurt.

Savvy – and even not-so-savvy – mobile and online users know that most Question & Answer platforms aren't worth the time and effort it takes to scan them.

But the good folks at the Butler University Business Accelerator set out to learn exactly how bad they are, and which ones suck the least. 

The Butler University Q&A Intelligence Index aims to measure how accurately and quickly various mobile Q&A apps could provide quality answers to a variety of questions. The idea was to measure "the likelihood that a user could expect to receive a correct answer in a timely manner to any random query using natural language."

The contenders included Ask.com, Answers.com, ChaCha Google, Quora, Siri and Yahoo Answers, among others. Questions covered advice (“What if a girl doesn’t want to talk to you?”), objective (“What are the 10 most common names?”), and subjective (“Who would win in a fight, The Hulk or Superman?”).

The winner – or, if you ask me, the least terrible – was ChaCha, while the ultimate loser was Quora. Apple's Siri was second worst, while the oft-reviled Yahoo Answers came in a respectable fourth – which certainly makes me wonder about the strength of the competition.

Here are some highlights from the research:

ChaCha Rocks: “ChaCha delivered the highest-quality responses consistently across the largest group of categories and question types,” Trent Ritzenthaler, operating director of the Butler Business Accelerator, said in a statement.

Objective Questions: Ask.com did best on objective/temporal questions, such as “When does summer end?”

Tough Questions: Quora was best able to answer "difficult questions that require expert and extensive explanations," but answered only 24% of all questions and consistently failed to answer at all – and often presented matches that did not include a viable answer.

What Is Siri For? Siri accurately answered only 37.5 percent of the questions posed, but Siri’s biggest strengths are considered to be in local discovery and operating system commands, which were not highly represented in Butler’s study of more mainstream questions.

100% Google: Google’s response rate was 100%, but the first organic result was correct only about half the time.

Yahoo's mobile gameplan is shaping up fast - or its stable of mobile apps is, anyhow. Yahoo has now acquired Alike, a mobile location-based suggestion engine app à la Foursquare. The news broke on the same day that CEO Marissa Mayer took the stage of the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference to repeat her clarion call for Yahoo's new direction.  

Paring Down Yahoo's Mobile Mess

At the conference, Mayer took a verbal machete to Yahoo's existing tangle of apps, announcing plans to cull Yahoo's ridiculous current mess of 60 to 70 apps down to around a dozen core mobile products. 

At the same time, though, Mayer also keeps adding apps. In her tenure at Yahoo so far, she has already brought two other mobile apps with social tendencies on board: Stamped, a social-suggestion network that could be interwoven with Alike's DNA, and OnTheAir, a livestreaming app that facilitates video chat.

There's no word yet on how much Yahoo paid for the small Seattle-based company, which will integrate into Yahoo's San Francisco and Sunnyvale offices. In a statement on its website, the team behind the now-discontinued Alike app announced the big news.

Alike To Join Yahoo In The Sunshine State

"We’ve always been passionate about the growing power of intelligent mobile experiences," read the statement from the Alike team. "We believe that distilled information, deeply personalized and made accessible anytime and anywhere, is what makes mobile experiences a part of our customers’ daily lives. In Yahoo! we've found a team as excited about this vision as we are, and who are serious about making it real."

While pruning Yahoo is no small task, Mayer is making decisive moves toward her roadmap for the ailing internet giant. With a trio of nimble mobile teams under her wing and a clearer vision for a company recently known for trying to do everything at once, she just needs to stay her own course.

If you're a Flickr user, you may want to dig through that bulk inbox for an important heads-up from the photo sharing site. Reports have emerged that between Jan. 18 and Feb. 7, a portion of Flickr users' private photos were made public due to a software bug discovered during routine maintenance. While the photos wouldn't have shown up in a search, they were visible on affected users' photo streams during that time. 

Scope Of The Breach Remains Unclear

Rather than reporting this on its company-wide blog, Flickr opted to selectively notify individuals affected by the mishap. The company has only admitted that the issue impacted a "small percentage of photos," so the scope of the privacy breach remains unclear for the time being. For compromised accounts, the bug only exposed photos uploaded between April and December 2012. 

To mitigate further damage, Flickr locked down affected users' photos with additional privacy settings, requiring some users to manually re-adjust the privacy settings on their entire Flickr photo collections - no small task for a longtime user.

Between a slick new iPhone app and a lot of Instagram malaise, Flickr got a major shot in the arm late last year. We don't yet know how many users were affected, but it's certainly triggered a wave of negative sentiment for the Yahoo-owned photo site.

If you had any relatively naughty Flickr activity last year, now's the time to go through your privacy settings with a fine-toothed comb.

Yesterday In its fourth quarter earnings call, Yahoo reported its first revenue growth spurt in four years. The company saw 2% year-over-year growth for the first time since 2008, with a net income of $272.3 million in the fourth quarter. The numbers beat out Wall Street estimates by 30%, with shares opening at $20.87 - the highest point Yahoo's stock had seen since its 2008 era highs.

All eyes are on CEO Marissa Mayer, former Google engineer and executive, who is widely credited with jump-starting Yahoo's stock into late 2012. Confidence in Mayer has inspired a much-needed morale boost for the company, which is still struggling to find its footing among massive, savvier competitors like Google and Facebook. 

On the call, Mayer focused on the changes she's enacted since taking the helm of the ailing web giant. Emphasizing speed and change - two of Yahoo's enduring conceptual hurdles - Mayer noted that the company has been implementing a new major corporate initiative every other week. She admitted that the Yahoo's bureaucratic roadblocks have made it "confusing and cumbersome" for clients to do business with the company, and that breaking down the existing bureaucracy will be an ongoing challenge.

Mayer put a strong emphasis on bringing new talent into the fold and her desire to make Yahoo the "absolute best place to work". In December, Yahoo named PayPal cofounder Max Levchin to its board, and has all intentions of revamping its image and attracting more big name industry players.

Mayer and the new Yahoo crew have an uphill battle on their hands - but if you ask Wall Street, the company looks more alive than it has in years.