Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) said Marissa Mayer will become chief executive officer, appointing a vice president from competitor Google Inc. (GOOG) to stem user defections and market-share losses that have fueled three straight years of revenue declines at the biggest U.S. Web portal.
Shares of Yahoo rose in extended trading after the announcement.
I bet Yahoo did a due diligence on her college degree this time around…
Wendy you must be irate at the fact that an “attractive white woman with a good haircut” was named CEO. Those were your exact words when that average looking Investment Analyst named Derocher or something similar was on TV. She’s only 37 as well so her father must have got her the job.
She was something like employee #20 at Google, so I’d say she knows what she’s doing. She usually led the most important division at Google throughout her career there. i.e. VP of Search in the beginning, then mobile, etc.
I repeat, if she’s so important, why didn’t she get promoted last year to SVP? She was moved off to a new division “local and maps” and Alan Eustace was tapped to lead the division. True, she is a celebrity, and the media has trumpeted Mayer as being the one who “built” Google’s search advertising business when these core functions have always been handled by Larry and Sergey.
I think you are choosing a very arbitrary and unreasonable standard for people… Plus, higher corporate rank does not mean that a person is suitable to run a different business like Yahoo. Plus, you are confusing “important to Google” with “being suitable to work at Yahoo”. Clearly, Google has a very deep executive team. Even if you don’t lure out Larry or Sergei, you can still get a pretty good person out of Google.
So, she started early at Google, led many departments, rose to VP, but is not important because last year in one instance she wasn’t promoted to SVP? I think you’re missing the forest for all the trees here.
Google has many many people like that, as ohai pointed out, an extremely deep management team and she is short on experience in top level management (Search is headed by someone else), and the departments she headed were really under the tight control of S&L. What sets her apart from the others at Google who were more influential?