There are two stages to this gambit by Yahoo that must be accomplished. They have to beat out Facebook, Microsoft, and anybody else interested in the 10-digit price that Tumblr is likely to fetch in the coming days. Then, they have to let the site be as it is and make no changes at all to the platform. The Swisher/Kafka tandem over at AllThingsD have reported that the Yahoo board is going to meet this weekend to discuss buying the social blogging platform for a reported $1.1 billion in cash. Sources said that the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s CEO Marissa Mayer has decided that buying Tumblr was going…

Yahoo is quickly going the way of AOL in that it’s becoming a place that simply isn’t “cool”, at least to the emerging internet users and those 20- and 30-somethings who still want to be cutting edge (and 40-, and 50-…). Everyone knows it, even Yahoo itself. “One of our challenges is we have had an aging demographic,” said CFO Ken Goldman spoke at JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference. “Part of it is going to be just visibility again in making ourselves cool, which we got away from for a couple of years.” They started heading in the right direction by getting a hip, young CEO to run the…

As of April 30th, several of Yahoo’s products will be shuttered as part of their initiative to consolidate focus and resources around their core services. That’s the bad news. The good news is that you’re probably not using any of them. You probably didn’t even know some of them existed. Here’s the list that they announced today: Upcoming Yahoo! Deals Yahoo! SMS Alerts Yahoo! Kids (formerly known as Yahooligans) Yahoo! Mail and Messenger Feature Phone Apps It’s not exactly as earth shattering as Google’s announcement that they were killing off their feed reader. Included in the announcement…

There were many things broken at Yahoo when Marissa Mayer first took over as CEO. She has moved the company forward, consolidated vision, and set the company on a better course than its seen in years. We’ve been very positive about her decisions to date. The most recent one is idiotic. It’s the type of move that offers little potential benefit while risking a potential backwards step in the progress that has been made so far. The idea of “Physically Together” is this: an office environment is the best place for every single employee at Yahoo. As of June, all of the hundreds of remote employees will be…

The changes are cosmetic and symbolic. They’re also the most important changes that have happened to the Yahoo! homepage ever because of what they mean. This is CEO Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo! whether you notice it or not. The functionality on both the PC side as well as the mobile side are improved. It’s dramatic in that it’s quite different from the old look but not so much that people have an opportunity to complain. The same basic design is there. This is important because wholesale changes to look, feel, and functionality have proven disastrous for most who try it and Yahoo! doesn’t have a popularity…

Yahoo knew that when they brought Marissa Mayer over from Google to run their struggling company, that they would be getting a connection with their long-time adversary that could be good and bad. The good side of the relationship is starting to show as Yahoo announced a non-exclusive partnership to run Google ads on the Yahoo network. Mayer was the leader of the Adwords product for Google before being moved to a local-mobile over two years ago. She is considered one of the most influential people at Google in the development of the ad platform that accounts for over 90% of their revenue. By getting…

Imagine a search engine that truly knew you. No, not in the way that Google or Bing personalize their search results based upon your history and preferences – what if a search engine could take the information that you give about yourself as well as the information that your friends and family put in and cater your search results around your most likely goals and desires from the search? Would you use it? If Marissa Mayer, CEO at Yahoo, has her way, that may be exactly what we see in the future. The plot for the social media giant to work very closely with the former search giant is a combination that should…

Just over a week ago we declared that Yahoo had “picked a winner” by bringing in Marissa Mayer as CEO. She’s still at the top of tech boards like Techmeme, an early sign of acceptance by the tech community that she’ll be able to do something with the beleaguered online juggernaut. There is hope amongst Yahoos as can be seen in the poster they made about her (which is a top story in and of itself). The excitement level hasn’t been this high since before they were courted by Microsoft. Will it keep going? The short answer is Yes. The executive who was in charge of Google’s primary profit center for so long has…

The start is always the most important part of a new regime. With Marissa Mayer taking over at Yahoo, the scrutiny will be on her inside and outside of the company for several weeks. Everything she does (or doesn’t do) will be admired or criticized, heralded or ridiculed. Even her first memo. AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher’s knack for getting copies of internal memos paid off again as she intercepted the memo below. The gist: keep moving, you’re important, we’re going to succeed. …

Yahoo has had its share of follows over the last 4 years, particularly after passing on a huge opportunity with Microsoft. After ousting their last CEO, the company has been under a ton of pressure to bring a CEO who had the (real) qualifications, the gumption, and the presence to lead the company back to prominence. With their tapping of Google executive Marissa Mayer, we believe they have delivered on their promise. The 13-years veteran has tons of experience with the one thing that Yahoo needs to regain its once-lofty position as a top internet company: generating ad revenue. As the head of Adwords…