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leadership Management Opinion technology

Yahoo! and Daily Habits

I don’t remember which stage it was. It was just after Marissa Mayer took over the helm of Yahoo. She was being asked – “What is Yahoo!”. It was true. Yahoo was going through a bad identity crisis. Yahoo was tottering aimlessly. It was the poster brand. And now, no one knew what it was doing.

It took a while, but I think Marissa has a repeatable answer to that question. There are two messages that are coming out.

Identify daily habits of Y! users and take them Mobile

Make the daily habits so damn good, that users would love it and be delighted.

I think this is a great mission. Mobile is so ubiquitous now. So much so that, there are people who are forming habits using mobiles. Alarm clocks. Foursquare check-ins. Twitter. Figuring out where to go for lunch. Checking their calendar. Folks cannot do without their mobile for some of these tasks, or should I say habits. If you are able to focus on a handful of Y! apps which have become habits, and make the experience fantastic. That makes a lot of sense.

There is some criticism that, she sounds like a broken record, but I disagree with that completely. If she was not doing that, then the press would be saying that she does not have a cohesive strategy. At the point in time, where Yahoo! is, I think what they need is a well defined cohesive mission. And repeating it a 100,000 times is not a bad thing at all.

Way to go Yahoo!. I have always been a Y! fan. Would hate to see it going down.