People forget that Mayer acquired 56 companies (57 if Foursquare deal goes through). That is, 41% of all of Yahoo's acquisitions over the past 20 years happened

People forget that Mayer acquired 56 companies (57 if Foursquare deal goes through). That is, 41% of all of Yahoo's acquisitions over the past 20 years happened in the last 3 years. Think it is important to analyze this Foursquare deal the context of this yet-to-be-proven strategy. Back to this deal: Interesting possibility, for sure. Will it work out? Who knows with Yahoo. Foursquare assets: 1) Brand name with both consumers and businesses 2) 45m daily active users 3) Valuable data- Can improve Yahoo Search, Yahoo ads, etc 4) Large group of domain experts Yahoo's value add: 1) Yahoo does have a strong ad sales department, so it can bring lots of brand names to Foursquare 2) Can heavily integrate Foursquare into its search features- so Foursquare's DAU can stabilize/grow. Seems like Mayer's strategy is: 1) Buy her way out of changing Yahoo's employees + culture. This is a longer term play. 2) Try to create some constellation of a platform. Ideal world for Mayer would be: a) Get your homepage to be Yahoo b) Read the latest trending headlines via Yahoo media c) Yahoo stories pump up Yahoo-owned Tumblr blogs, Yahoo-owned Flickr photo sharing, etc d) After that, you search for things on Yahoo. The search would ideally share information coming from Foursquare. The big thing is on execution and that's why people constantly criticize Yahoo. If they do actually make a sensible platform, expect Mayer to be viewed very positively.