I've always admired her, she seems to be very smart and has her finger on the pulse on what the Internet is all about, so if anyone can turn Yahoo around it's her.
I sincerely hope she has the intestinal fortitude to do WHATEVER it takes to revitalize Yahoo. The first thing I would do is get rid of the entire board of directors, they need a complete reboot as well.
Do you really believe that? I mean, of all the potential candidates out there, she has the best pedigree?
I think the negative commentary stems from there. You think this is a coup. To me, it's sort of a ho-hum, predictable hiring. Yahoo! needs an overhaul as a business, and to do so they hired someone with SV name power.
I 100% believe that she has the best pedigree of any person out there.
Think about it, who would you have as CEO of Yahoo? John Chambers? Larry Ellison? The CEO of Hulu? Mark Hurd? Jerry Yang? Tim Cook?
I think Mayer is better qualified than anyone else that is available because she is an expert on the space. When she joined Google, the mainstream Internet was less than 5 years old. Her entire career has been built on the Internet. If she went to any large company like IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Cisco, EMC, you name it, I would think it wouldn't be a good fit, because she wouldn't be an expert on the space.
Mayer has been with Google since practically the beginning, and as an executive, she has participated in the decisions and actions required to create and maintain a world-class engineering organization. As well, being an early employee and not just surviving but thriving, I'd be willing to bet that Mayer has done more as an engineer than most engineers at Yahoo, except maybe Filo, so that gives her incredible technical legitimacy. So, yes, I believe she is extremely qualified to run a company like Yahoo.
You can't just stick a "turnaround expert" in the shoes of Yahoo CEO and expect a great result. You need someone that understands the space, and can make the tough and right decisions that can put Yahoo back on track. Everyone that they've chosen as CEO since Yang just felt like they were trying to salvage as much of Yahoo as possible, and sell it to some other company or PE fund, and give up. By choosing Mayer, it means they are serious about trying to put Yahoo back on the right path again, and not just selling it off. I'm pretty sure this will motivate the current troops at Yahoo.
The only other interesting choice for CEO might be Reed Hastings, but he's taken already. The Yahoo board could have elected to try to acquire Netflix and put Hastings as CEO of the combined company, which would have been interesting. I still prefer the choice of Mayer though, because it shows a lot of guts, both on the part of Yahoo and Mayer.
>"I think Mayer is better qualified than anyone else that is available because she is an expert on the space. When she joined Google, the mainstream Internet was less than 5 years old. "
You do know there's a world of business outside the Valley, right? I'm not implying that she wouldn't be a good fit and very capable at many jobs or positions. But Yahoo!'s days are becoming numbered. When I think about what she could have possibly experienced at Google versus what Yahoo! needs as a company (which is a corporate and strategic overhaul), I can't understand where she'd have obtained anything remotely like "turn-around" expertise. Yahoo! is going to require some outside-the-box thinking, and this hiring is about as inside-the-box as it could be (along with every other name you mentioned would have been).
But this is just one man's opinion. I hope she can pull it off; it'd be a great story.
>"You can't just stick a "turnaround expert" in the shoes of Yahoo CEO and expect a great result. You need someone that understands the space"
Why can't you? What exactly is Yahoo!'s "space"? Of all the poor decisions made by Yahoo! of late, why do you trust that this was suddenly a stroke of genius?
Thank you for the positive attitude. Most comments here are focused on how much of a challenge this is for her and why would she leave security for something that could possibly become bigger. Well, maybe she wants something bigger in life. Can that be possible?
Yes. But if an incoming CEO has a lot of political capital, they can try and demand that certain board members leave as a condition of taking the job. It's unusual, and takes an unusual person to pull it off, but it happens. (For example, this is what happened when Steve Jobs was made interim CEO of Apple.)
Mayer is a big coup for Yahoo, and the investors may back her if she wants to clean house with the board, but I wouldn't necessarily expect it to happen; it's unclear if Mayer really sees the board as part of the problem, and as Mayer is coming from outside of the organization, she may lack the close ties to other Yahoo execs that would be necessary to pull such a move off.
I've always admired her, she seems to be very smart and has her finger on the pulse on what the Internet is all about, so if anyone can turn Yahoo around it's her.
I sincerely hope she has the intestinal fortitude to do WHATEVER it takes to revitalize Yahoo. The first thing I would do is get rid of the entire board of directors, they need a complete reboot as well.