Yahoo! Inc. Needs More Mobile Engineers to be on Same Level with Competitors

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO)’s CEO, Marissa Mayer, revealed her new 3 year plan to turnaround the company’s fortunes. She revealed her plans on the Charlie Rose Show, last week.

The CEO rarely appears on public shows like these, but when she does do them, it is with well respected, senior and tech related interviewers. This is her second time being interviewed by Charlie Rose. He is not a technology professional but he definitely carries some weight in the media business. Therefore, in the interview there were some points that if technology was his area of expertise, he could have countered some of Mayer’s claims.

Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer has done sort of an okay job since she started at Yahoo three years ago. To some, her efforts have been disappointing to others she has done okay. She can’t really be faulted because Yahoo was in a challenged position already before she came along. Some investors defended her through this point. What she inherited needed time to change.

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) has been a driving force in technology that is probably why there are still many users who flock to its emailing website. Therefore, in equal measure they were supposed to create a mobile app that would also entice members to come and use it just as much as they did for the website. Popular applications do not just come about from nothing. A lot of money, efforts and expertise are required to create a world class app. Mayer certainly did not have them, with just 100 engineers at the time, it was an impossible job.

When Marissa Mayer mentioned that the number of engineers has increased to 500 the rise did not seem that significant. Considering that Yahoo has 12,000 workforce, the engineering department is a bit low. Most shareholders agree that the mobile app department is the one which is most pressing and in need of immediate improvement. Having just 4 percent of the workforce dedicated to it is a worrying case.

It’s no surprise then, of the 1,500 laid off under Mayer’s direction recently, none were from the new mobile search product that Yahoo has been working on. The strange thing is that Mayer did not mention it as one of the new and exciting projects at Yahoo.

It turns out that there is no such thing as a mobile engineer because all of their engineers are involved in mobile app engineering. If the investigations are true, there is no reason for Ms Mayer to boast about a 4 percent workforce in mobile engineering. To be on par with other tech giants like Facebook and Twitter, Yahoo should get at least 3,000 engineers to function well. There is a huge gap, and there is so much more to be done.