Yahoo! Googling a new boss
Marissa Mayer takes on one of the toughest jobs in tech
Jul 21st 2012 | SAN FRANCISCO | from the print edition

SHORTLY after news broke on July 16th of her appointment as the new chief executive of Yahoo!, Marissa Mayer revealed that she is expecting her first child later this year.
Long-suffering shareholders are hoping that Ms Mayer, who left a senior job at Google to take up her new role, will produce a new Yahoo! as well. But that will not be easy.
After losing their mojo, formerly high-flying tech firms rarely recover it—with a few notable exceptions, such as Apple after
Steve Jobs’s second coming as boss in 1997. Often, ailing companies lurch from one leader and rescue plan to another while their fortunes fade. That has been the fate so far of
Yahoo!, which is now on to its fifth chief executive, including two interim ones, in three years.
The size of the challenge facing Ms Mayer was highlighted by the company’s second-quarter results, published on July
17th. Overall revenue, at $1.2 billion, was stuck at last year’s level and net income fell slightly, to $227m. The firm’s share of online-ad revenues in America has also plummeted, falling from 15.7% in 2009 to 9.5% in 2011, according to eMarketer, a research firm.
Can Ms Mayer stop the rot? Her fans in Silicon Valley claim that the 37-year-old has the talent to do so. She brings know-how from Google, where she was the 20th employee and was involved in many areas, from its search engine to gmail and Google Maps. She is also a software engineer by training, which should lend her credibility among Yahoo!’s geeks. Throw in that she is an über-networker whose schmoozing skills can charm ad clients, and she seems a good fit.
But not a perfect one. Although Ms Mayer ran a sizeable team at Google, she has never had to turn round an ailing corporate juggernaut with 700m users. Nor has she overseen a huge ad-sales operation and managed a complex international alliance like the one
Yahoo! has with Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce behemoth. This is in the process of being unwound, but still needs careful handling.
Small wonder, then, that Yahoo!-watchers were stunned by news of Ms Mayer’s recruitment. Many had expected Ross Levinsohn, the firm’s interim boss and global media head, to get the top job. “Yahoo!’s choice is perplexing,” says Brian Wieser of
Pivotal Research Group. He thinks Ms Mayer will try hard to