It seems Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer has a 3-year strategy for resurrecting Yahoo from the dead. Initially, we owed the strong stock performance following her arrival due to her leadership/brilliance, but as time wore on, it became increasingly obvious that Yahoo’s core business hasn’t gone anywhere with the exception of launching various mobile ad products via the Yahoo Gemini Platform. By the middle of 2015 the conversation had shifted to how effectively Yahoo can return capital from Alibaba and Yahoo Japan to shareholders. Many buy side analysts were becoming increasingly wary of Marissa’s strategy to return Yahoo back to growth given the acquisition of Tumblr and various other tech start-ups. Many thought the spending spree to acquire mobile start-ups was excessive and investing into R&D to return the company to a tech franchise rather than a media franchise should have been given higher priority. However, corporate M&A’s have a way of masking the cost of an acquisition through the addition of goodwill on the balance sheet. Instead of increasing investment into R&D by a significant amount, Yahoo ended up over-paying, as many of the acquisitions didn’t provide a compelling return, which Marissa had alluded to in her Charlie Rose interview. Quoted from the Wall Street Journal:Ms. Mayer: I take one lesson away, I think that pacing and time is always really important. I think there are some things that we probably did too quickly. I think there are some things that we probably did too slowly. And, you know, not enough. But I think that we learn from all that and are constantly getting better. And I think when I look at the strategic plan we just rolled out, that is the culmination of a lot of that learning, of saying, OK, one of the things we should do is we should walk away from declining revenue more quickly and get more focused on areas of revenue and areas of the business that can grow really substantially to get us to return to growth more quickly. Clearly speaking, Marissa could have done better on executing a turnaround, but sometimes turnarounds take time. It’s not like the investor base can blame everything that went wrong over the past couple years on Ms. Mayer. But, at the same time, I’m curious as to why activists like Starboard are so certain that they have a better strategy. In my honest opinion betting on Marissa over a group of managers at some hedge fund still makes more sense. Replacing a former Google Exec with a conventional executive with years of experience hasn’t solved any of YHOO’s past problems, and another round of guillotines to the current executive team will then take Yahoo down a completely different strategic path. It’s the fact that Yahoo is constantly retrofitted with different management teams that the company has never executed on a long-term strategic turnaround. Marissa will need to buy herself as much time as possible. But, it’s not yet clear if she will fend the sharks off.