Marissa Mayer's ultimate goal at Yahoo is to get the company back to growth, a vision she shared on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt this afternoon. It'll take three or so years to reach a positive spot, she added, but Mayer appears up to the challenge.
After defending the company's new logo as a design that came from "a very authentic place," Mayer laid out a few company highs. Chief among them was an announcement that Yahoo has passed 800 million monthly active global users, and that figure doesn't include Tumblr.
That's a 20% boost since Mayer joined Yahoo in July 2012 as CEO. She didn't, however, specify what constitutes a monthly active user or provide context in relation to competitors.
Mayer said growth is multi-pronged, but mobile sees over 350 million monthly users while its core properties, like the Yahoo homepage and search, pick up the rest. The mobile team has grown by a factor of 10 since she took over, she said.
Though she misses some of the features found in Gmail, the email client of her former employer, she said Yahoo Mail loads faster than Google's email.
"It's just email. It doesn't have video chat and a lot of these other things, which we may experiment with but I think can ultimately can get in the way in terms of using mail every single day and wanting to be really fast and efficient with it," she said.
Mayer on Microsoft
Mayer was pushed about her thoughts on Steve Ballmer's impending exit from Microsoft and whom she thinks should take over at the Windows maker.
She noted her admiration for the work done by Ballmer and Bill Gates, and pointed to Microsoft's strength in the enterprise space.
"I think consumer executives and enterprise executives have different traits and different instincts," she said.
"So I would hope that they are looking for someone with strength on the enterprise side of the business. A strong Microsoft is good for the industry overall and I think that's really helping to build on their strengths and core competencies."
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