Yahoo at 20

Noted journalist Steve Levy highlighted on Medium the accomplishments and focus of Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) CEO Marissa Mayer on the 20th anniversary of the company. Some of the key takeaways from his story are noted below:

• 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 Inc (NYSE: FB) has said that the worst mistake he ever made was originally using HTML 5 for mobile apps.
• 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."