Yahoo's mobile strategy and future

2 years ago.

Yahoo's mobile and emerging products Adam Cahan recently received a VB interview about what Yahoo has done in the last two years on mobile, what it has accomplished, and Yahoo's acquisition strategy.

2 years ago Adam Cahan was appointed as the head of mobile and emerging products, and he had to do seemingly impossible tasks. But today, Yahoo has completed more than 30 acquisitions in mobile, and its monthly mobile traffic has grown from 150 million to 430 million. The size of the mobile team increased from 60 to more than 500 people. The most obvious is that Yahoo launched a number of popular apps, such as Yahoo Mail, Yahoo weather and so on.

Yahoo believes that the use of mobile terminals to do things mainly focused on three areas: communication, understanding of news and access to information. Cahan has focused on two aspects of Yahoo's mobile work in the past two years. First of all, to reinvent the imagination, to reshape Yahoo's product experience, the mobile ability into the original product. Second, recently began to consider from the user point of view to integrate different experiences. Yahoo, for example, acquired the launch-bar tool Aviate, and using the latter's technology, Yahoo unveiled a unified application that integrates weather, finance, sports, e-mail, news and information applications.

For e-mail, Yahoo found that users use their mobile phones to process e-mail primarily for quick browsing and then classified for later processing. Another interesting discovery of Yahoo is that users often use their mobile phones to open their messages because of boredom. So Yahoo believes that instead of allowing users to constantly find information, it is better to actively push information, rather than let users constantly switch between the app, in the launch bar to provide the required core elements. The effect is obvious, the unified application launched after the user on the mobile phone to use the average time to improve the e-mail 1 minutes.

Yahoo's mobile strategy can be summed up in these two points:

1 Motivate and entertain users
2 Create a beautiful experience for everyday habits

Cahan also talked about a Yahoo acquisition Tumblr proposed a concept called reblogging. The so-called reblogging is a bit like the user commenting on blogs that others have published. In other words, what I want to say is closely related to your blog, but it is not only a comment so simple, it belongs to the feeling, but can be independent. Will this thing become a new trend for future blogs or microblogs?

In the end, Cahan also answered the strategic issues behind Yahoo's more than 30 acquisitions in recent years. He said the acquisitions could be grouped into 3 categories:

1 start-ups with innovative capabilities, such as Tumblr
2 has the core technology, such as Iqengines, Summly
3 for the talent team. In fact, Yahoo's acquisition of these teams often allows them to develop new Yahoo products, and let these team members to launch their own friends to expand the Yahoo team.