Marissa Mayer, one of the top executives at Google, will be the next chief of Yahoo, making her one of the most prominent women in Silicon Valley and corporate America, report Andrew Ross Sorkin and Evelyn M. Rusli on Tuesday in The New York Times.
The appointment of Ms. Mayer is considered a coup for Yahoo, which has struggled in recent years to attract top talent, and whose executive suite has been a revolving door. Ms. Mayer will be Yahoo’s fifth chief executive, two of them interim, in under a year. On Monday Ms. Mayer also wrote on Twitter that she is pregnant.
One of the few public faces of Google, Ms. Mayer, 37, has been responsible for the look and feel of some of the search company’s most popular products. Despite her pedigree, though, the big question is whether Ms. Mayer — or anyone — can help Yahoo regain its former stature, as Nicole Perlroth reports, also in The Times.
Ms. Mayer’s most important job will be to articulate a vision for Yahoo. The company has struggled to shape a distinct strategy, even though its audience remains among the largest on the Internet. Although it was an Internet pioneer that helped shape the industry in the 1990s, it has failed to understand that Internet users have moved from an online world to mobile phones and social media. And it has lost ground to Google and Facebook, which have both built mobile and social networks that attract users and lucrative advertising.
Now, the company is moving to lay off thousands of employees, in the face of slumping profits and a lackluster stock.