SAN
FRANCISCO (AP) — 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 Inc. 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 during a Monday interview with The Associated Press.
Like
her predecessors, Mayer will have to come up with an effective strategy
to compete with the juggernaut that Google has become and the
increasingly influential force that Facebook Inc. 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 Inc. 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 Inc. balked at a chance to sell itself to Microsoft Corp. for
$47.5 billion, or $33 per share, in May 2008.
Yahoo shares haven't traded above $20 since September 2008. The announcement came after the market closed Monday. On Tuesday, Yahoo shares slid 5 cents to close at $15.60.
"If she can pull this off and turn around Yahoo, it will make her legacy," Gartner Inc. analyst Allen Weiner said of Mayer. "Yahoo's iconic yodel has been missing for a long time. Her mission will be to bring that yodel back."
This
will be the first time that Mayer has run a company as she steps out of
the long shadow cast by the 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 outmaneuver 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 email, 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.
Other
prominent female executives in Silicon Valley include Hewlett-Packard
Co. CEO Meg Whitman and another former top Google executive, Sheryl
Sandberg, who defected to a rival when she joined Facebook as that
company's chief operating officer in 2008. Other female CEOs running
major technology companies include IBM Corp.'s Virginia "Ginni" Rometty
and Xerox Corp.'s Ursula Burns.
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 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.
Levinsohn had been vying for the CEO job after Bartz's firing, only to be passed over when Yahoo lured Thompson away from eBay Inc.
Mayer told the AP that she wasn't looking to leave Google Inc. when Yahoo first contacted her June 18 about the job.
Her hiring threatens to alienate Levinsohn at a time when he has been steering Yahoo's
recent emphasis on producing more original content and highlighting
material provided by other media outlets in an effort to persuade its
website's 700 million monthly visitors to stick around longer. Recent
partnerships include those with ABC News and the financial news channel
CNBC.
"Marissa's first order
of business should be convincing Levinsohn to stay," Gartner's Weiner
said. "If he leaves, there will be an exodus" among the Yahoo employees working on the content for the company's website.
Mayer declined to comment on any discussions she might have planned with Levinsohn.
Even if Levinsohn and his allies leave, Yahoo
should still benefit from the connections and reputation that Mayer
built during her years at Google, predicted J.P. Morgan analyst Doug
Anmuth.
Mayer may "be able to
attract more high quality engineering talent to Yahoo, which we think is
needed after several years of strategic and leadership flux," Anmuth
wrote in a research note late Monday. Yahoo decided to lay off about
2,000 employees, or about 14 percent of its workforce, in April while
Thompson was still CEO.
Anmuth
also expects Mayer to bring in new managers as she shapes her team.
Mayer will be greeted by at least one familiar face on Yahoo's senior
management team. While serving as Yahoo's interim CEO, Levinsohn last
month lured away another Google executive, Michael Barrett, to be
Yahoo's chief revenue officer.
The terms of Mayer's contract have
not been spelled out yet. Mayer is already wealthy from stock options
that she got before Google went public in 2004.
Yahoo
reported its second-quarter earnings Tuesday afternoon, just a few
hours after Mayer reported to work. The numbers showed Yahoo's revenue
growth remains sluggish even though advertisers have been spending more
money on the Internet.
Mayer skipped Yahoo's Tuesday afternoon
conference call to discuss the results with stock market analysts so she
can start to get a better grasp on the task ahead of her. She already
has canceled vacation plans for next month.
"For
me work is fun, and fun is work," Mayer said. "I am very excited about
the big challenges here, and I can't wait to work on them. It's going to
be very, very energizing."
Resource : Yahoo News
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