Struggling internet giant Yahoo has hired Marissa Mayer as its new chief executive officer, luring her away from rival Google where she spent the last 13 years overseeing such popular products as Gmail and Google News.
Mayer, 37, is Yahoo’s fifth CEO in the past five years. In addition to a rotating roster of senior level executive, Yahoo has been struggling to compete with the likes of Google and even Facebook for eyeballs and ad dollars.
What can Yahoo and the industry expect from Mayer? Here’s the chatter on Yahoo’s new hire.
Dan Crow, a former product manager who worked with Mayer @ The Guardian
“The first and lasting impression of working with Marissa is of someone incredibly smart. She loves new ideas and finding better ways to do things. She is also extremely intolerant of sloppy or poorly prepared work. She makes decisions based on data, not intuition, so you need strong data that shows your proposal is good for users.”
Shar Van Boskirk, Forrester Research analyst @ DealBook (NY Times)
“I wish I was more excited about it. Yahoo has too many products. I fear the challenge is that by putting a former product person in the C.E.O. role they won’t have somebody who has the ability to create a clear, unified vision and strategy for the Yahoo brand.”
[I]f Mayer can play to her strengths – helping engineers build and scale great Web software – and to Yahoo’s – selling Web advertising on one of the world’s biggest sites – the turnaround might work. (Mayer, unlike ousted Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson, is actually a computer scientist: She has a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and an M.S. in Computer Science, both from Stanford.)
“I’m taking a wait-and-see approach. She certainly has the intellect. She certainly has the desire, the drive and the credibility. But I’m not sure if the strategic direction of Yahoo is going to change from what [interim CEO, Ross Levinsohn] would have articulated.”
Amir Efrati and John Letzing @ The Wall Street Journal
“Ms. Mayer is known as a talented manager with an occasionally brusque style that can make her difficult to work for, according to people who have worked under her. She has an obsessive attention to detail, often micromanaging details down to the shade of colors in new product designs, these people say.”
