&gt; <i>But that’s the trouble: Marissa Mayer wasn’t hired to do the safe thing. She was picked to be bold, and so far, she has failed.</i><p>While I agree that Mayer&#x27;s term hasn&#x27;t been great...I never got the impression that she was hired to do move fast and break things until Yahoo was back in the game with Google...wasn&#x27;t the hot take that she could be counted not to screw things up as Yahoo&#x27;s investors struck it big on the Alibaba investment? Was there ever the implication that the board would be cool with it if she decided to go for broke in such a way to spoil the Alibaba windfall?<p>However things end up for her, I hope we get to hear a little more about their acquisition strategy. Tumblr seemed like a reasonable thing (though sure, Yahoo doesn&#x27;t seem to have done much to capitalize on it)...but what about all the other acquihires that were ostensibly done to bring in engineering talent? How many of those engineers stuck around to become pioneers within the company? I think shoveling out millions to bring in unique talent is a great idea...but I&#x27;m guessing there&#x27;s a huge difference between giving a suitcase of $30M in cash to bring in someone like Peter Norvig&#x2F;Jeff Dean&#x2F;Guido&#x2F;etc, versus bringing in a 17-year-old entrepreneur [1].<p>Yahoo did receive a lot of attention for the money it used to bring in <i>media</i> superstars such as Katie Couric and David Pogue...but speaking as someone who has worked in journalism...that&#x27;s not a viable strategy for turning around a tech company.<p>I hope one acquisition Yahoo makes is Foursquare&#x2F;Swarm...I hear so little about 4SQ that I have to wonder if it&#x27;s on life support (though maybe I&#x27;m vastly underestimating how popular it is in NY compared to SF?)...having another location-based social service between Google and Yelp seems as vital as keeping Tumblr around in the fight between the web and Facebook...and location data and engineering seems like it could find an easier fit into whatever Yahoo&#x27;s tech strategy is (versus, say, buying Path&#x2F;TaskRabbit&#x2F;Lyft&#x2F;Quora&#x2F;Evernote, etc)<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;allthingsd.com&#x2F;20130325&#x2F;yahoo-paid-30-million-in-cash-for-18-months-of-young-summly-entrepreneurs-time&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;allthingsd.com&#x2F;20130325&#x2F;yahoo-paid-30-million-in-cash...</a>