Good for Yahoo
And good luck to her… She'll need it.
In a surprise move, Yahoo! has named top Google exec Marissa Mayer its new president and CEO – the fifth in five years. "I am honored and delighted to lead Yahoo!, one of the internet's premier destinations for more than 700 million users," Mayer said in a statement. "I look forward to working with the Company's dedicated …
Luck will help, but this makes sense on a lot of levels for Yahoo! and for Ms. Mayer. Yahoo! gets to steal a key contributor from a nearby competitor. She gets a challenge that never would have been available at Google, given that they have passed over her before for higher level positions. She had to leave to get a shot at a C-level position and there's a real opportunity at Yahoo!, despite the obvious skepticism that all of us should have. Yes, she'll need a lot of luck, but hopefully she's prepared to kick ass and chew bubble gum, as it were.
She's a multi-millionaire and certainly doesn't need to work, so why shouldn't she take a break and have a go at raising the dead? It's probably more fun than just doing the same-old same-old at Google. If she succeeds it'll be one in the eye for Larry&Sergey, and if she fails it'll be blamed on Yahoo! anyway. Either way she'll still be marketable in a year or two, whatever happens.
Yahoo is giant mess, but she is by far the best CEO they have had since Wang the Elder (the first time around). They finally have a proper technologist instead of one of these media/advertising world types that doesn't know anything about building products of interest to anyone or someone with totally irrelevant "management" experience. First time in a long time that anyone has thought Yahoo might turn it around. Take note, HP.
The former self-proclaimed "GooGirl"[1][2] has absolutely zero business sense ... all of her education is in technology. I seriously doubt any tech-knowledgeable person with an MBA would touch that position with a barge-pole. I certainly wouldn't.
[1] Warning ... not safe to google from work!
[2] No, she had nothing to do with the site ... but in theory she should have had enough of a clue to google the term before applying it to herself :-/
"You mean, she should get an MBA first to be competent for the job?"
Uh ... If I were a Yahoo! stockholder, them hiring a Chief Executive Officer without any real concept of how multi-billion dollar, several decades old[1], international businesses are run would give me pause to reconsider my portfolio.
Why the kid with Management aspirations hasn't slept thru' an MBA is beyond me ... Quite honestly, it was the easiest degree I ever received.
[1]Which google & yahoo decidedly ain't ...
Yahoo needs someone technical at the helm, their value has been dropping as various non-technical management decisions interms of what to buy into and sell have come back to bite them on the arse.
Have a look at this if you want to see how bad their situation is
http://www.scores.org/graphics/yahoo/
That might suggest she has been given a kind of shepherding role to manage portfolio divestitures prior to Yahoo being rolled into another company. This is no slight on her ability or commitment but the board would be mad not to consider the risks involved in terms of her availability over the next few months. Credit must go to them for taking it into consideration and still going ahead. I sincerely hope it is successful.
Yahoo has been foundering about for years now. Totally directionless while halfheartedly trying to add me-too social media functions. They basically gave up on search, gave up on being a directory, and now hang on mostly out of the momentum of people over the years who use their free web email accounts, which Google is now chipping away at with the superior Google mail.
She's no doubt a smart girl/woman now looking squarely into the mouth of middle age and eventual retirement, so she has to be doing her spreadsheets on how to maximize her earning potential to provide for herself and her offspring. She has also concluded that she has no further promotion opportunities at Google, so why not take the position at Yahoo. She finally gets to be the big cheese with the best parking spot, office and perks and only has to suck up to and charm a board, who most typically are completely clueless and more often a simple challenge of massaging overblown egos once a month.
She has never impressed me as the vision type, more the office politics corporate ladder climber, so other than cementing her political house within Yahoo staff and board, I doubt she will make any significant improvement to Yahoos value. Yahoo lacks vision, they simply have no clear objectives.
All that Yahoo needs is focus.
Many companies have diversified themselves into obscurity, WH Smith comes to mind, once a great place to buy stationary and quality writing equipment, now just another newsagent/cd shop/video shop/card shop/... and not particularly memorable for anything in particular.
If she can give them focus then she might be onto a winner.
Perhaps a product-focused techie can bring that to Yahoo where a corporate suit cannot. It's not like Steve Jobs didn't do that for Apple is it?
Either way, I wish her success.
Good luck to the new CEO and board members now the only question is whether I should add any YHOO to my portfolio. Why not (Y! ?), might as well go in for a few shares and trade out a known slug that's back where I started in October. Yes, I'm looking at you F, if only I had sold in the spring.
Being CEO is not like ditch-digging work.
She doesn't need the money and she doesn't need a better CV, she can afford financially to ever work again. She wants to work for the challenge of producing something excellent.
Thank heavens she doesn't have an MBA. Way too many people in Y! already have...... and look at everything in numbers with absolutely no idea what the numbers mean. Like big worry over reduced page-views, when caused by finally blocking illegal scrapers. Like thinking 20,000 new accounts a day is good business when 19,000 of them are spammers. Like thinking closing data centres will save money, when the same number of servers will cost the same whether in 2 centres or 4 (but cost a fortune to move).
A CEO many in the company are looking at with hope, not fear.