It"s been a very odd last 12 months over at Yahoo. In September 2011, they fired their CEO Carol Bartz over the phone. In January, the company hired a new CEO, Scott Thompson, but he resigned in May after it was discovered he did not have a computer science degree from Stonehill College, as his official bio at Yahoo claimed. In between, the company saw its co-founder Jerry Yang depart Yahoo, and it laid off 2,000 employees.
In July, Yahoo hired former Google executive Marissa Mayer to be its new CEO. Mayer has already made some cosmetic changes, including offering to pay for a new smartphone for all full and part-time employees. Now a new report claims that Mayer is about ready to reveal her grand strategy for Yahoo.
AllThingsD.com reports, via unnamed sources, that Mayer was in two days of meetings with Yahoo’s board of directors last week to discuss her plans for the company. She is also supposed to have a company-wide meeting with employees on Tuesday.
One of the things that Mayer may change is Yahoo"s relationship with Microsoft. Yahoo entered into a deal with Microsoft in December 2009 that put in Microsoft"s Bing search service as the core technology behind Yahoo"s search engine. The deal has allowed Bing to slowly take away some search engine market share away from Google.
This new report doesn"t give specifics on what Yahoo"s new search deal with Microsoft will be like under Mayer. However, a separate AllThingsD.com report claims that Yahoo will likely stick with Microsoft for its search technology. For one thing, if Yahoo were to set up a contract for search with Mayer"s former employer at Google, it will likely raise some eyebrows from federal regulators.
For another, breaking the Bing search technology contract with Microsoft would cause its own set of legal issues. The story quotes an unnamed Microsoft official as saying, "They can try to get out of the deal. But that’s a lot easier threatened than done."
Source: AllThingsD.com | Image via Yahoo