Marissa Mayer is Yahoo’s latest hire as its CEO and of course this is indeed yahoo’s latest strategy which is adopted to save its own sinking ship. Question is whether she will be able to revive Yahoo from the downfall or not? And the answer to which is still unknown and the few years down the line will only provide us the answer whether the strategy worked or not.
So what has actually happened to Yahoo? All I remember is I created my first account with Yahoo and I am sure most of us did the same and once upon a time, in late 90’s and early 2000s, Yahoo used to rule the internet. We started browsing the internet with yahoo as far as I remember. We started chatting with yahoo and most importantly Yahoo used to be the no.1 web portal then, i.e., a decade back. But in mid 2000’s things started changing and Google came in picture and within a span of years Yahoo lost its share of users to Google. Now we prefer Gmail over yahoo mail and for chat we prefer Gtalk, Facebook, Skype over yahoo messenger and we don’t search the internet nowadays, the terminology is “we google it” and this shows what was the impact of Google on the internet. So yahoo is leaving no tables unturned to get that status back and all set to taste success by employing Marissa Mayer as the CEO who was once behind the success story of Google, that too at a luring pay package of $70 million.
Marissa Mayer, a computer science graduate from Stanford got her job offer back in 1999 from a tiny search engine company which had just 7 people as its employees. The name of which company, we all know it as Google and gave that small company a huge success with in the next 13 years. And after the 13 years time she decided to move on and held the hand of Yahoo in a genuine quest to give Yahoo its old fame back by becoming its CEO. The final years of Marissa Mayer did not go well with Google and perhaps that may be the reason of her leaving the company and join its nearest competitor. In final years she was in charge of Google local, maps, location services and prior to that she was the vice president of Google Search and User Experience.
Lately Yahoo has adopted many strategies before hiring Marissa Mayer and none seem to have worked in their favor and people or biz gurus are still not confident whether Marissa Mayer can pull it off or not. Rather many are criticizing the fact that hiring Marissa Mayer when she is already 6 months pregnant is not a good idea. Some even brought up the fact of her past relationship with Google chief Larry Page which might not go in yahoo’s favor as well but little do we realize that she was the same woman when Google was trying to make its mark on the internet and I feel it is really a good move indeed. Even though with Google, under Marissa’s reign, only the User experience and search engine areas did well but even if that expertise can be used for Yahoo, I am sure we might see some improvement. Marissa Mayer was mainly responsible for iGoogle and we can’t miss out on this fact as nowadays people are more into social world rather than just internet. With the popularity of smart phones worldwide who knows what Marissa Mayer will come up with next in order to save Yahoo.
All I can say is be prepared to be surprised anytime now on as I have a pretty good feeling that Marissa Mayer can do some wonders for Yahoo if not the major ones.
Hi Madhusmita,
I think it will be an extreme uphill battle, but Marissa is certainly qualified and capable. It wouldn’t hurt to have another company capable of competing with Google since Google seems to pretty much own and control the internet these days. Unfortunately I think Google may be too far ahead at this point to be caught unless Yahoo can come up with something truly revolutionary. However, if they do, I suspect Google will simply come out with something to compete with whatever it is so they don’t lose ground….just like Google + came out on the heels of Facebook.