Yahoo Turns To Google's Mayer For Revival

Yahoo Inc picked Google Inc’s Marissa Mayer to become its new CEO, turning to an engineer with established Silicon Valley credentials to turn around the struggling former Internet powerhouse.

Mayer, 37, edged out front-runner and acting Chief Executive Ross Levinsohn to become Yahoo’s third CEO in a year. She hopes to stem losses to Google and Facebook Inc - which her high-profile predecessors failed to do.

Her hiring signaled the Internet company is likely to renew its focus on Web technology and products rather than beefing up online content.

Mayer, Google’s 20th employee and first female engineer, has led a number of its businesses, and was credited for envisioning the clean, simple Google search interface still in use today, a major selling point for Web surfers.

Also known for her love of fashion and a regular on the society pages, she joins the extremely thin ranks of female Silicon Valley CEOs and told Reuters that she was immediately interested when Yahoo’s board reached out to her in mid-June.

“This is a very competitive and a tough space. I don’t think that success is by any means guaranteed,” she said. “My focus is always end-users, great technology and terrific talent.”

Mayer will start on Tuesday, when the company is scheduled to report its quarterly financial results, but she will not join the post-release conference call.

Last responsible for Google’s local and location services, she joins fellow female tech chieftains Meg Whitman of Hewlett Packard Co, Virginia Rometty of International Business Machines Corp and Ursula Burns of Xerox Corp.

“A lot of people did not believe that Yahoo could get someone of the caliber of a Marissa Mayer to become the CEO at this stage,” said S&P Capital IQ equity analyst Scott Kessler.

A Year Of Turmoil

But Mayer’s ascension comes as her profile at Google appeared to have diminished in recent months. Shortly after Larry Page took over the helm from Eric Schmidt, she was excluded from a group of top executives reporting directly to the CEO and granted oversight over major strategic decisions.

Her appointment caps a tumultuous year at Yahoo. In May, Scott Thompson resigned as CEO after less than 6 months on the job as a controversy flared up over his academic credentials.

Thompson replaced the controversial and occasionally foul-mouthed Carol Bartz, fired in September after failing to revitalise Yahoo.

“She’s going to bring in a different perspective. It’s pretty clear Yahoo needs a new direction and really a new vision,” said Paul Buchheit, a Google engineer who helped create Gmail and now a partner at startup-incubator Y-Combinator.

Yahoo had been widely expected to go with Levinsohn, who in his few months at the helm tried to push a strategy of forging media partnerships to beef up the company’s online content.

Mayer told Reuters Yahoo can excel as both a media and tech company. She said, “There’s a very uninteresting debate happening around Yahoo between technology and media and it doesn’t really make sense to me. Because you look at most major technology companies, media is a big part of its business.”

She said it was too soon to talk about restructuring, but was “sensitive to the fact that there has been a lot of change recently at Yahoo, so I don’t want to make unnecessary changes.”