Yahoo switch to third CEO In A Year

Yesterday  Marissa Mayer takes over as Yahoo's new CEO. She comes directly from Google, and she provides the hope and capability to turn the company around.


Marissa Mayer was the vice president of location and local services at Google. She was one of the search giant's top executives. Regardless of her shifting roles and titles, Mayer has been one of Google’s most public faces for years. She’s one of the few recognizable personalities at the company besides founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and has appeared everywhere from insidery trade shows like TechCrunch Disrupt to the pages of Glamour. She’s best known as a meticulous — some say over-controlling — product designer who blossoms in the spotlight.Yesterday  she started as the CEO of Yahoo. She is 37 years old and is pregnant with her first child.


In confirming her pregnancy to Fortune, Mayer said she will be taking a few weeks off for maternity and getting right back to work.

“My maternity leave will be a few weeks long and I’ll work throughout it,” she said.

Mayer also added that the Yahoo directors did not have an issue with hiring a pregnant chief executive: “They showed their evolved thinking.”

Mayer now faces an almost impossible task. She must restore Yahoo’s ability to innovate, repair its image with advertisers and customers, and inject some energy into the depleted work force, which has been bruised and battered by layoffs and a cratering stock price. And while she’s doing all that, she’ll have to manage restless shareholders such as Daniel Loeb, who recently joined the board and controls two other seats as well, and fend off Yahoo-obsessed bloggers who seem to have a direct pipeline into the Yahoo boardroom.

She joined Google in 1999 as the 20th employee, and she was the company's first female engineer. Over the 13-year span she engineered and designed products, and led whole divisions. She has been described as a strong product visionary and perfectionist when it comes to product design.

She plans to focus on the company's leading products, including email, finance and sports. She also wants to focus on mobile and video broadband.


Mayer hasn't directly answered to a question "Why go to Yahoo from Google?"  but said in an interview with the New York Times that she "had an amazing time at Google." She also added that "it was a reasonably easy decision" as Yahoo is "one of the best brands on the Internet."