We're up for a marathon but through a series of sprints: Hari Vasudev

Interview with Vice-president & Head, India R&D, Yahoo!

Internet company Yahoo! has been in the doldrums in recent years, starting from falling traffic to talks of being sold. However, since Marissa Mayer joined the Sunnyvale-headquartered company as chief executive, the company has got a new approach to address the new trends. The company has a new bouquet of products, which has reversed the declining traffic trend. India R&D Head and Vice-president Hari Vasudev spoke to Bibhu Ranjan Mishra about the company’s new philosophy. Edited excerpts:

It has been more than a year that Yahoo! has been refreshing the bouquet of products including the flagship mail website. What kind of acceptance has it seen?

Any change takes time to get accepted. But overall, the reaction has been pretty positive. It’s definitely a much clear user interface today and much prettier; and we expect the usage will go up as people get used to it. Like in any product change, you have to also train your users; you have to make sure that you are providing them with the help and support so that they are able to adapt the transition. We take user feedback seriously. That has always been the hallmark of Yahoo! products. That is very much in line with Marissa’s own philosophy.

What is Mayer’s philosophy and how are you implementing it?

Ever since Marissa has joined, the whole philosophy has been how we need to be at the centre of people’s digital habits. The whole idea is that people today have taken their existing habits from the offline world to online. If you look at various categories we offer — news, finance, sports, mails, photo sharing, messenger — these are the categories where Yahoo! is either a leader or a strong number two. So, there is no reason why we can’t be at the centre of people’s daily habits and make it more inspiring and entertaining.

What are the changes you have made internally to adapt to this philosophy?

During the last year and half, the focus has been on people, product, traffic and revenue. We have realised until you have a really engaging, competent and skilled workforce that uses our products, they can’t really focus on building the best ones. Once you start doing that, traffic will grow and advertisers will automatically come to you. So for us, the journey is like a marathon. But even if it is a marathon, it organises a series of sprints. That is what we are doing — putting out new products frequently to keep up with consumer demand.

What steps have you have taken to keep your workforce engaged?

We have done many things in the last 18 months to improve the engagement level of our employees. For example, since mobile is a big focus area for the company, we are offering every employee a smartphone, absolutely free. The idea is they should install all the Yahoo! products on it as well as the competititors’ products and use these. They can use that knowledge to make better products. We did another programme called Tech Refresh to make sure every employee had the latest laptop with a choice of going up to MacBook Pro with Retina Display. We also have an internal programme called Dog Fooding, where as we start developing an application, we make sure employees get to try it first.

Have these initiatives improved traffic?

Though traffic had been declining for a while, it has started to reverse in the past two quarters. According to comScore, we overtook Google in August and September this year to become the number one player in the US, by unique features and traffic. In some of the countries in the Asia-Pacific, particularly Hong Kong and Taiwan, we have established ourselves as a very strong player. In India itself, 60 per cent of the internet users today use Yahoo! products. Our mobile traffic in India grew 54 per cent over the past year.

 

Yahoo! mail is yet to become spam-proof like some of the competing mail platforms? What are you doing to keep spams at bay?

 

We have actually done significant amount of works in the last one year to reduce spam. We have leveraged technologies like Hadoop (an open source technology for very large scale data processing) to address the issue. Of course, spammers are also constantly changing their algorithm. So we are treating on it continuously and have brought down spam volumes considerably. But one needs to use the mail regularly so that the spam filters will also get trained.    

 

What about Yahoo! Search? Meanwhile, search has almost become synonymous with Google!

 

That is true. But I think there is an opportunity for us. For example, there is an opportunity before us to be able to offer differentiated user experience on mobile platform. We are partnering with certain key companies for this. Recently, we launched next version of Yahoo! Search where we have completely revamped the front-end experience. We are saying that search is no longer about 10 blue links on the search results space. It’s all about providing the users the information they need. To be able to do that, we are leveraging the vast depository of Yahoo-owned and operated content, whether it is from Yahoo Answers or some of the verticals like news, finance and sports to build a very rich experience for the users.

 

Which are the popular products of Yahoo among the first time mobile users? 

 

Flickr is extremely popular on iPhones. Similarly, we recently launched a weather application which won the Apple Design Award in 2013. The user experience it offers is substantially richer and even better than Apple’s own native weather apps. We have seen extremely positive engagement from the users on that since instead of just reading weather, you will actually get to experience the weather. Users can see very rich photographs of their locations which the weather application pulls from Flickr, real-time.