A protester shouts as Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer speaks in conversation with Salesforce chairman and CEO Marc Benioff at the 2013 Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. Photo: Justin Sullivan
Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer was targeted by protesters during a speech in which she was to articulate the company's grand vision.
Just six minutes into a conversation with Salesforce boss Marc Benioff during the Dreamforce annual conference in San Francisco on Tuesday afternoon, Mayer and Benioff appeared anything but cosy as a group of protesters rose from their seats and chanted at the Yahoo boss in front of a full house at the Moscone Convention Center.
The group was protesting against Mayer's role as a director of controversial American supermarket giant Walmart and the company's labour practices.
Mayer has previously turned down requests by Walmart employees to meet and discuss the company's policies.
Employees are fighting for improved wages and working conditions. Two thirds of Walmart employees reportedly earn less than $US25,000 per year and 60 workers are currently taking legal action against the company after they were fired or disciplined for taking part in activities that brought attention to Walmart's contentious conditions.
After the protesters were removed by security, Benioff said: 'If you want to protest, first go outside. That's number one. Number two, it's also better to split up because less people get arrested... I'm just saying. If I were to do it that is how I would do it.'
With the conversation experiencing a touch of reality to the common tech term 'disruption', Mayer said that, like Apple hardware, the design of Yahoo products had been a key consideration since the former Googler took over as CEO but that the company had consciously reinvented itself with a focus on mobile platforms.
'We don't think of ourselves as design first, we think of ourselves as mobile first,' Mayer said. 'When you look at what is happening in the mobile trend overall in the industry, it is clear that it is really large enough that you can ride it to reinvention.
'Yahoo, like many companies, has to constantly reinvent itself and the scary part of reinvention is that it happens fastest with platform shift. Salesforce made a platform shift to the cloud and with Yahoo the platform shift was to mobile.
'If you look at what people do on the phone and set aside voice and text, then it is mail, maps, news, weather, stock quotes, games, share photos - the list goes on and on.
'If you list all those things out you are looking at Yahoo products or something that Yahoo has done from the beginning. So it is a little back to the future.'
'Mobile took a lot of people by surprise. It is really is amazing at how quickly it happened.'
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