As a top executive at Google for the past 13 years, Marissa Mayer played an instrumental role in developing many of the services that have tormented Yahoo as its appeal waned among Web surfers, advertisers and investors.
Now, Yahoo is turning to its longtime nemesis to fix everything that has gone wrong while Google has been cementing its position as the Internet’s most powerful company.
Mayer, 37, will tackle the imposing challenge Tuesday when she takes over as Yahoo’s fifth CEO in the past five years.
The surprise hiring announced late Monday indicates Yahoo still believes it can be an internet innovator instead of merely an online way station where people pass through to read a news story or watch a video clip before moving on to more compelling Internet destinations.
“I just saw a huge opportunity to have a global impact on users and really help the company in terms of managing its portfolio, attracting great talent and really inspiring and delighting people,” Mayer said.
Like her predecessors, Mayer will have to come up with an effective strategy to compete against the juggernaut that Google has become and the increasingly influential force that Facebook is turning into as more people immerse themselves in its social network.
Both Google, the internet’s search leader, and Facebook have been beating Yahoo in the battle for web surfers’ attention and advertisers’ marketing budgets. As Yahoo has lagged in that pivotal race, so has its financial performance and stock price. The stock has been slumping since Yahoo balked at a chance to sell itself to Microsoft Corp. for $47.5 billion, or $33 per share, in May 2008.
Yahoo shares closed Monday at $15.65, and haven’t traded above $20 since September 2008.
This will be the first time that Mayer has run a company as she steps out of the long shadow cast by Google’s ruling triumvirate – co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, along with executive chairman Eric Schmidt.
Although she had her responsibilities at Google narrowed two years ago, Mayer is still widely considered to among the internet industry’s brightest executives. A Wisconsin native, Mayer is a mathematics whiz with a sponge-like memory and a keen eye for design.
Mayer joined Google in 1999 as its 20th employee and went on to play an integral role in helping Page and Brin exploit their online search technology to outmanoeuvr Yahoo at a time when it was still the larger of the two companies. Now, it takes Google a little more than a month to generate as much revenue as Yahoo does in an entire year.
During Google’s rise, Mayer helped oversee the development and design of the company’s popular e-mail, online mapping and news services. She also became a topic of Silicon Valley gossip during Google’s early years while she dated Page for three years. They have since gotten married to other people.
“We will miss her talents,” Page, now Google’s CEO, said in a statement.
In another statement, Schmidt hailed Mayer as “a great product person, very innovative and a real perfectionist who always wants the best for users. Yahoo has made a great choice.”
Mayer becomes one of the most prominent women executives in Silicon Valley, a place whose geeky culture has been dominated by men for decades. This is Yahoo’s second female CEO, though. Silicon Valley veteran Carol Bartz, 63, spent more than two-and-half years as Yahoo’s CEO before she was fired last September.
Within a few months, Mayer expects to be on a maternity leave. In another interview late Monday, Mayer revealed to Fortune magazine that she is pregnant with a boy. Her due date is Oct. 7. She said she had informed Yahoo’s board about her pregnancy before the 11 directors unanimously voted to hire her.
Yahoo picked Mayer over an internal candidate, Ross Levinsohn, who had been widely considered to be the front-runner for the job after stepping in to fill a void created two months ago when the company dumped Scott Thompson as CEO amid a flap over misinformation on his official biography.
Thompson’s bio inaccurately said he had a college degree in computer science _ an accomplishment that Mayer can rightfully list on her resume. She earned a master’s in computer science at Stanford University, the same school where the co-founders from both Google and Yahoo honed their engineering skills.
This marks the second time that Yahoo has snubbed Levinsohn, 48, who previously had been best known for overseeing the internet operations for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.
