It is no secret that Yahoo Inc. has seen its fair share of problems over the last few years. A floundering stock price, a noticeable void when it comes to innovative products, and a turnstyle on the CEO’s office door that just keeps on turning and turning.
Hopefully the news that hit the streets late Monday will have an impact on all of those items. Yahoo hired Marissa Mayer, one of the top executives and member of the intelligentsia at Google, to take the CEO’s position starting Tuesday.
Ms. Mayer is a long time Google-r, being hired as employee number 20 back in 1999, before any of the history of this little search engine was written and before it would become such a recognizable brand and a leader in innovation.
Have you ever come across Marissa Mayer’s work in your daily interaction with Google? More than likely, yes. She was part of the team that pioneered the plain, white page serving as the home for Google’s search engine. She also helped to fashion the user experience for Gmail, Google News and Google Images.
When asked for comment, Ms. Mayer stated “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.”
And indeed, this will be a huge opportunity. With most of the revenue for Yahoo still coming from advertisers, the company is going to need to find their niche again to attract sponsors by ensuring them that users who visit sites and use products on the Yahoo network will stay online and open their wallets.
In order to do that, Ms. Mayer is going to need to make tough decisions and shake up a company that has long been stalled in its tracks. That Yahoo has become somewhat irrelevant is not news. What she will need to do is re-brand the company in a way that pays respect to an important history as one of the pillars of the Internet at a time when everyone was getting online and eager to search and discover, while at the same time pursue a course that gives users new reasons to navigate to Yahoo on a regular basis, daily – and potentially hourly.
Reaction to Ms. Mayer’s appointment as CEO is somewhat mixed. There are those, such as Chris Sacca, a venture capitalist and former co-worker at Google, who believes that “Yahoo finally has someone who has both business acumen and geek cred at the helm.” This opinion is juxtaposed against Shar Van Boskirk, an analyst at Forrester Research: “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.”
For right now, however, the day before she officially takes the helm of this ship, there have been more news stories showing Yahoo’s prospects in a positive light than have been written in a very long time.
We’ll all be watching, Ms. Mayer. Good luck!