If Yahoo! Inc. were still a high-profile company, CEO Marissa Mayer would not have lasted this long. It’s almost like falling up, the way Mayer survives as Yahoo becomes less and less relevant.

Nothing she has done seems to have helped the company do more than stay afloat, but that may be all that is possible for Yahoo. Maybe she’s a stellar CEO.

Last month, Mayer told Yahoo’s developer conference that the company is catching up in mobile, where the she is hoping to make a stand. There is a big effort to woo developers onto its mobile platform — explaining the $300 million it paid last summer for Flurry, the app analytics firm.

Note that Yahoo wants to be a mobile platform, something I don’t see happening. At least not in the sense that iOS and Android are mobile platforms, and the distinction is important. Yahoo can offer technology and an ad sales revenue split, but that does not a defensible platform make.

Meanwhile, Yahoo is going to extreme lengths to hold on to talent, according to media reports.

“Marissa Mayer is paying people mind-boggling salaries to stay at Yahoo,” reads a recent Business Insider headline. It talks about an ad sales rep making $2.5 million-a-year, how a former exec had a $100 million comp package, about programmers regularly brought in for $1 million over three years.

My sense is you could run a second-tier web portal with second-tier, less expensive folks. You’d think these high-paid underperformers would have enough self-respect to either make Yahoo a success or leave. OK, that’s too much to ask, but why don’t shareholders demand more?

Yahoo is not rocket science and part of the problem is there is not very much in the way of “special” that a web portal can do these days. Who cares about a Yahoo home page? I’ve got Google News and search as my starting points. Likewise Yahoo search, which I also don’t need. I’d take Bing over Yahoo.com.

I already have more than 100 apps on my iPhone, none of them from Yahoo. I don’t see that changing. It’s news, sports and finance apps have gotten good reviews, but I’m really not in the market. I used to use Yahoo Messenger, but that has been pretty well replaced by Facebook. Only Yahoo Groups, which I like tremendously, still links me to the Internet pioneer.

Whatever attempts Yahoo is making at original journalism don’t seem to be taking the world by storm. I have not spent any time on Yahoo’s home page in forever, but recently went over there and didn’t like the mish-mash of what passes for content that Yahoo delivered. It’s sort of like the Internet had to puke and Yahoo’s home page was the result.

When I visited, “Global News Anchor” Katie Couric’s byline was on a 400-word “for dummies” level explanation of net neutrality. Couric’s only value is if the audience can see her perform, but that isn’t what I saw. Below that was a David Pogue piece on how to get free conference calls. A click takes me to a self-starting video and a short pitch for freeconferencecall.com, apparently excerpted from one of his books.

So much of Yahoo seems to be just that: Promoting other people’s content. Even mixed in with “news” content on the home page. I get that Yahoo is aiming at “low information” users, but this home page dives even below that.

Does Mayer have any more tricks up her sleeve? High-priced talent doesn’t seem to be doing much that I can see. Or maybe it will, as she makes mobile Yahoo’s next stand. I say next, instead of last because Yahoo will surely hang around for a while. How long Marissa Mayer will stay is likely tied to her success — of failure — making Yahoo a mobile platform company.

photo credit: Marissa Mayer via photopin (license)