Yahoo today issued its annual 10-K report to the Securities And Exchange Commission. These kinds of forms have a lot of boiler plate language that is reused again and again — often, companies just change the relevant revenue numbers and leave everything else the same for years (come to think of it, isn’t that the excuse former Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson made for the errors in his official bio?)
But with this latest 10-K, its first with Marissa Mayer at the helm as CEO, Yahoo switched up its language in a small but very telling way. Yahoo is now labeling itself first and foremost as a “global technology company,” where it used to call itself a “digital media company.” It seems that Mayer is helping to put an end to that long-running debate as to whether Yahoo is was primarily a media firm or a tech firm.
Here is the first sentence of today’s 10-K, followed by the first two sentence of its 10-K from a year ago:
“Yahoo! Inc., together with its consolidated subsidiaries (‘Yahoo!,’ the ‘Company,’ ‘we,’ or ‘us’), is a global technology company focused on making the world’s daily habits inspiring and entertaining.”And here are the first two sentences of the 10-K Yahoo filed last year and the year before, respectively:
“Yahoo! Inc., together with its consolidated subsidiaries (‘Yahoo!,’ the ‘Company,’ ‘we,’ or ‘us’), is a premier digital media company.”
“Yahoo! Inc., together with its consolidated subsidiaries (‘Yahoo!,’ the ‘Company,’ ‘we,’ or ‘us’), is a premier digital media company that delivers personalized digital content and experiences, across devices and around the globe, to vast audiences.”We’ll be going through the document more, but this initial change is just the latest example that Marissa Mayer means business when it comes to turning Yahoo around.
