Google veteran turned Yahoo chief executive officer Marissa Mayer wants Microsoft to deliver when it comes to wresting market share from the Internet company she was part of for more than a decade.
During a talk before financial analysts on Tuesday, Mayer spoke of “nice gains” in revenue from Bing-powered searches at Yahoo Web sites, but pointed to a pressing need for the Microsoft engine to win users from rivals.
Yahoo inked a 10-year alliance with Microsoft in 2009 to have Bing handle the heavy lifting of mining and indexing the vast array of online data, leaving the California-based Internet pioneer to customize results for users.
“We have to make the alliance work well enough that we are gaining share from the market,” Mayer said when asked about the future of the partnership onstage at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco. “We collectively want to grow share rather than just trade share with each other.”
Echoing an oft-heard theme at Google, Mayer stressed the need for speed when it comes to delivering fresh and relevant results to online queries.
Google ruled the US market at the end of last year, handling 66.7 percent of core searches, while Microsoft and Yahoo sites fielded 16.3 percent and 12.2 percent respectively, according to industry tracker comScore.
Mayer was Google’s first female engineer when in June 1999 she became employee No. 20 at the company created by Stanford University classmates Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
She left Google in July to take the job of CEO at Yahoo, which is struggling to re-invent itself after being eclipsed as the ruling Internet search platform.
Mayer managed some of Google’s most successful innovations and influenced an array of the company’s best recognized features, such as its globally popular search engine and uncluttered home page.
“During my time at Google, I got to wear different hats; pretty much everything across the board,” Mayer said during her first investor conference appearance in her new role. “Yahoo is a tailor-made job for me.”
Getting people to spend more time at Yahoo was depicted as the company’s biggest business problem.
Mayer stressed she was focusing on staying in tune with Internet lifestyles increasingly centered on smartphones or tablet computers.
About 200 million people access Yahoo properties monthly using mobile devices, according to the Sunnyvale, California-based company.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day