Can Marissa Mayer make Yahoo relevant again?
For the first time in a while, I've actually been able to use impressed in a sentence about Yahoo without an accompanying eye roll and the inflection of a 15 year old being sarcastic. I'm pleasantly surprised by the choice of Google employee #20, Marissa Mayer, to be the new CEO of Yahoo. Suddenly Yahoo has someone whose resume is both impressive AND accurate, which is a nice improvement, and she just happens to have been head of search products at Google. I would think that being able to say you are head of search products at Google would be about as impressive of a conversation starter as you could ever come up with when interviewing for a CEO position. Mayer is clearly someone who understands how a successful internet company operates. Maybe she can pull off a Miracle Max with Yahoo. So, what can she do to keep Yahoo from becoming completely irrelevant, as opposed to its current status of mostly irrelevant?
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Well, I'd like to think so but I doubt it very much. Yahoo's glory days are over as far as I can see. What exactly do they have to offer that will let them compete with Apple, Google or even Microsoft? Not much at this point.
Perhaps she can turn things around, we'll have to wait and see. But I'm very skeptical about it.
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Well, she can't do worse than Yahoo's corporate "leadership" has recently. Then again, I could say that about myself.
I think that Mayer is probably as good of a choice for CEO as Yahoo could make. She has a lot of knowledge about how Google operates, she is used to success and probably has a few ideas that were never put into play at Google that she now has the opportunity to green light. She also probably has some insights as to where Google has a weak market presence, and can attempt to exploit that to Yahoo's benefit.
The main challenge she faces is determining exactly what Yahoo is. Just thinking off the top of my head, I can't come up with a concise definition, unlike Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, et al, which are easy to sum up in a few words. Yahoo, um, let me try: vulnerable email company that uses Bing for search functions. Not too catchy. If Mayer can make it so that it is easy to complete the sentence, "Yahoo is....,"than I think she will have gone a long way towards showing me Yahoo is relevant again.