guardian.co.uk,
Dominic Rushe and Charles Arthur, Monday 16 July 2012
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| Marissa Mayer said: 'I am honoured and delighted to lead Yahoo, one of the internet's premier destinations.' Photograph: Oliver Lang/AFP/Getty Images |
Marissa
Mayer, one of Google's top executives and its first female engineer, will be
the next chief executive officer of Yahoo, making her one of the most prominent
women in Silicon Valley and in corporate America.
Mayer will
start immediately, with her first day being Tuesday 17 July. The fact that she
was a candidate had been kept completely secret – with no indication from
Google's top managers that she was about to leave.
The
appointment of Mayer is a surprising and impressive coup for Yahoo, a company
that has been racked by internal turmoil as it has struggled to compete with
Google, Facebook and Twitter in the online display advertising market. Mayer
will be Yahoo's fifth chief executive in five years, and its second woman.
"I am
honoured and delighted to lead Yahoo, one of the internet's premier
destinations for more than 700 million users," Mayer said in a statement.
"I look forward to working with the company's dedicated employees to bring
innovative products, content, and personalized experiences to users and
advertisers all around the world."
Yahoo said
that Mayer's appointment "signals a renewed focus on product
innovation", indicating that the company aims to compete on the
technological – and not just the content – front.
Mayer, 37,
has a degree in artificial intelligence. In 1999, when Google was barely a year
old, she became its 20th employee, going on to spend 13 years there. She had
become one of its most prominent voices. More recently, Mayer has also begun to
forge a wider role in corporate America, recently joining the board of retail
giant Walmart.
She is sixmonths pregnant with her first child, due in October, and said her maternity
leave would be "a few weeks long and I'll work through it".
Mayer joins
a very short list of women in top jobs in Silicon Valley, alongside Meg
Whitman, the chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, Virginia Rometty, the head of
IBM, and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer.
She takes
over at a company that has been roiled by scandal and argument. In May, Yahoo
lost its last chief executive, Scott Thompson, after only four months. The
former PayPal boss was ousted after it emerged that he had padded his resumé,
leading to angry shareholders demanding that he go. Thompson's departure also
led to a board reshuffle and the resignation of chairman Roy Bostock.
Thompson's
exit followed the even more tempestuous firing of his predecessor Carol Bartz,
who left in a foul-mouthed tirade, calling the board "doofuses" who
had "fucked me over."
Yahoo has
struggled for years to keep up with Google in search ads as Facebook has
eclipsed it in display advertising. Yahoo is now worth just over $19bn, less
than half the $44.6bn Microsoft offered for the company in 2008.
The company
stock jumped 2% in after-hours trading to just over $16.
Colin
Gillis, a tech analyst at BGC Partners in New York, said Mayer was a great
appointment and a loss for Google. "She is in a different league," he
said. "She is very widely respected and she really knows this
business."
At Google,
Mayer had been responsible for many of the company's key products, including
its famous search homepage, Gmail and Google News. More recently, she has taken
on responsibility for location and local services, including Google Maps.
She was a
popular Google prosleytiser, often sent out to talk about Google's services,
and she also sat on Google's operating committee, a cadre of close advisers to
Google's co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Shortly
after her move into local services in 2010, Google made another executive, Jeff
Huber, senior vice-president of local and commerce, one level above Mayer's
post.
Gillis said
she Mayer's career path appeared to have been blocked at Google. "I think
she got so far but they were moving her sideways," he said. "I don't
think they will be happy about this. It's a blow."
Yahoo
co-founder David Filo said: "Marissa is a well-known, visionary leader in
user experience and product design, and one of Silicon Valley's most exciting
strategists in technology development. I look forward to working with her to
enhance Yahoo's product offerings for our over 700 million unique monthly
visitors."
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