Is Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer sprinting too fast?

Marissa Mayer's acquisition spree at Yahoo has made everyone sit up and take notice.

Marissa Mayers acquisition spree at Yahoo has made everyone sit up and take notice. Since taking over as the CEO in July she has completed 12 acquisitions,which is remarkable by any standards. While critics have been quick to note that she has picked up many also rans in the process,it is difficult not to get impressed by the way in which she has responded to Yahoos free fall. But is she running too fast?

When she announced the acquisition of mobile gaming firm Loki Studios,a week ago,it was the fourth acquisition by Yahoo in a month. Of course,the most impressive of them has been the Tumblr buyout,the blogging platform which has a revenue of just $13 million. Yahoo bought it for $1.1 billion. Its decision to buy streaming video site Hulufor around $800 millionwas not a cheap deal either.

Mayer had made known her ambition of growing inorganically at the beginning of her stint,but no one expected such a hot pace. Mayer wants to bring top engineering talent back in Yahoo,because she believes one has to get great people first to become a great company. No great people,no great products seems to be her motto. Over the years Yahoo had lost its innovation edge and Mayer wants to fix that issue quickly. It needs the right minds in right positions.

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Yahoos decision to buy Tumblr was perhaps the best move so far. Tumblr will be operated as a separate business and it will be good that way because Yahoo is lost to the new generation of Web users. Mayer knows that Tumblr is ahead in the mobile space,and wants to take advantage of it. She wants Yahoo to be a mobile first company.

More than half of Tumblrs users are said to be in the age group of 18-34 and thats something tremendously attractive for Yahoo. Mayer desperately wants a bite of the social play,something it never had a good grip on,even as Facebook and Twitter kick started a revolution.

Tumblr generates 75 million blog posts daily and Mayer is looking to integrate this with Yahoo. The plan is to offer

personalised Yahoo home pages alongside Tumblr blogs and provide suitable content from Tumblr on Yahoo search.

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Yahoo has more than 700 million unique visitors a month,while Tumblr claims it has 300 million of them. Together,Mayer wants Yahoos audience to grow by 50%. But then there is this following issue. Is Yahoo trying to reinvent the wheel here? Why is it trying to become this mega portal again,which has something for everyone? By acquiring companies of all sizes and shapes,is it going back to its original form? Google,where Mayer had made a name for herself,has effectively proved that the future belongs to those with a focused approach,deviating sharply only when confronted with a massive opportunity. It stayed focused on search for a long time,before looking elsewhere. It was never a portal,in the conventional sense. It has a long history of botching up acquisitions,but Mayer has vowed not to repeat the mistakes of her predecessors.

While the path is risky and quite in the fast lane,Mayer is making progress. The upgrades that she has offered photo-sharing social network Flickr is a great example of what she intends to do. Flickr has released,under her leadership,a redesign of its iOS application,and the traffic is already up 25%. Yahoo also says there are more applications for a job in the company. Many former Yahoo employees have come back to its fold.

A stable Yahoo that sprints,is what the lady wants.

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