Yahoo raids rival, gets Google’s Mayer for CEO

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Yahoo
Inc. on Monday surprised Silicon Valley and
the tech sector by naming longtime Google
Inc. executive Marissa Mayer as its new
chief executive at a time when the Web
portal is looking for stability after years of
growing competition and market-share
losses.
Yahoo YHOO -0.60% said Mayer was also named
company president and will take a seat on its
board of directors. She will start Tuesday, the
same day Yahoo is scheduled to deliver its
second-quarter earnings results.
In a statement, Mayer called Yahoo “one of the
Internet’s premier destinations,” citing the
company’s more than 700 million unique monthly
users. Mayer said she intends on working so that
“Yahoo’s products will continue to enhance our
partnerships with advertisers, technology and
media companies.”
Google
Marissa Mayer
Herman Leung, an analyst that covers Yahoo for
Susquehanna Financial Group, said Mayer’s
appointment suggests that Yahoo knows it needs
to do more than try to promote itself as an online-
content powerhouse.
“It highlights that Yahoo is focused more on
becoming a technology and product company
than a media company,” Leung said. “I think they
realized that you need a lot of technology and
products to remain successful online.”
In a note, Citigroup’s Mark Mahaney lauded
Mayer’s organizational skills, industry knowledge
and “her ability to focus efforts of a large team of
engineers on product innovation.” Yet he said he
was “a bit worried” about the executive choice.
“By selecting Mayer, Yahoo is explicitly pursuing
an aggressive and bold growth strategy, whereas
we believe a value strategy might be more
appropriate,” he wrote. “Yahoo continues to be a
wait-and-see story.”
Mayer was the 20th employee hired at Google
GOOG -0.28% . She holds a bachelor of science
degree in symbolic systems and a master’s in
computer science from Stanford University,
specializing in artificial intelligence in both.
At Google, Mayer was in charge of the company’s
local, maps and location services, and managed
the launch of its Gmail service.
Mayer comes to Yahoo during a protracted
turnaround effort that has seen it lose market
share to both Google and Facebook Inc.
FB -8.06% Yahoo also has faced scrutiny for not
accepting a buyout offer from Microsoft Corp.
MSFT +0.17% that valued the company at as
much as $33 a share. Yahoo’s stock closed
Monday at $15.65 and is down 3% this year.