Yahoo appoints Google exec Marissa Mayer as new CEO
Jeremy Hobson: Yahoo has a new CEO. 37-year-old Marissa Mayer will become the company’s fifth chief executive in five years. She’s a longtime Google exec and an architect of what the tech world calls the ‘Google User Experience.’
Marketplace’s Scott Tong reports.
Scott Tong: Marissa Mayer’s design fingerprints are on Google’s clean, white homepage, and signature search box, and Google’s brand new local feature which suggests nearby restaurants — in my case Sushitaro, $59 for dinner. Navigating Google is pretty smooth. But Yahoo — not so much. Is it a place for email? Chat? Mortgage rate shopping?
Lindsey Turrentine at CNET Review says Mayer could fix that.
Lindsey Turrentine: Yahoo’s assets are sort of all over the place, and she has experience connecting different parts of a business. She’s been very involved in the Google doodles that show up on the Google homepage. She can bring a lot of that type of skill to Yahoo, to sort of humanize what’s going on there.
And, hopefully monetize. Yahoo trails Google and Facebook as an online billboard for advertisers. Mayer says advertising will stay Yahoo’s ‘main revenue source.’ Optimists hope she’ll copy some of that Google innovation and paste onto her new page.
I’m Scott Tong for Marketplace.
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