Yahoo's new CEO, Marissa Mayer.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET)
Now we know why Yahoo chose not to appoint interim CEO Ross Levinsohn as its full-time leader: The company got Marissa Mayer instead. Mayer, the head of the Google Search group and the 20th employee at the search company, will start immediately at Yahoo.
Google and Yahoo started as similar companies. Both were search giants, but at different points in their respective histories they diverged. The subsequent tale of the tape shows that Google's direction, and leadership, was the more successful path.
Here's what we can expect Mayer will bring to Yahoo.
The engineering culture that Mayer helped build at Google. Google has historically been run with an engineering mindset. The best Google services are fast, functional, and continually tested and improved as time goes on. Mayer herself was proud of talking about how even a tiny change in the position of an item on the Google Search page would be tested and evaluated over and over again. The company's main products were driven by data, not art.
Over time this has changed (see the Nexus Q, for example), but for its main products, Google is still driven by the numbers.
Mayer will likely bring this same rigor to Yahoo's products, in particular, the home page, Yahoo's portal to the Web. Her expertise in relentlessly tweaking products to extract maximum util... [Read more]
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