In the biggest shock in the Valley since…well since I don’t know when, Marissa Mayer – aka Google employee #20, most recently Vice President for Location and before that for Search at the big G – is taking the Chief Executive Officer job at Yahoo, becoming by some counts the fifth CEO in a year (including interims).
Thought one: she’s 37. FML.
Thought two: this is not another Carly or Meg. In addition to being young, Mayer brings to the table two Stanford degrees in computer science. She’s not an MBA or a marketing android (rimshot) or a business turnaround artist – she’s a geek. More to the point: she is a technical individual taking over a company that has long lost its technical edge. And this is important.
Contrary to what they might want you to think at B-school at Wharton or Harvard, an MBA is not a universally fungible guarantee of managerial acumen. What Google became, Yahoo once was, but the big purple exclamation point has long stopped being the company that got an onstage slot at the iPhone launch – in the last five years, they’ve managed to botch the best photo-sharing site on the web in Flickr, throw half-a-dozen shit sandwiches at social networking and miss with all of them (Yahoo 360? Yahoo Buzz? Yahoo Meme!?). A former Warner Brothers CEO was probably not the guy to have in charge in the post-boom era, and Jerry Yang proved that you can’t go home again unless your name rhymes with Sleeve Knobs. Carol Bartz was entertaining for a while, but it appears that Yahoo could not, in fact, merely cut-and-cuss its way to viability. More and more it looks like Scott Thompson – who famously didn’t have the claimed degree in CS – was CEO just long enough to make the mass purge…and now?
It’s not for the money. Mayer presumably has more money than she could burn through in a lifetime at this point. Part of it may just be the challenge – between Bartz, Whitman and Fiorina, the strong female CEO has had a rough few years in Silicon Valley, and maybe Mayer just wants to be the one to break the cycle before Sheryl Sandberg stages a coup at Facebook or leaves to take over something else. If Mayer can bring Yahoo back to relevance, that would be a turnaround for the ages, and not just for the Valley – it would be the biggest comeback since the 2004 Red Sox at a minimum.
Because let’s face it, there are five companies that matter in this industry right now: Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, in order of significance. You’d probably have to dig down another ten or twenty names before you hit Yahoo – hell, the CS department at Stanford probably beats Yahoo in terms of industry impact right this second. Which then leads to the question: what’s Yahoo going to do?
They don’t do hardware, and they don’t do a mobile operating system, and they’re not selling anything in terms of digital media or even physical goods – which means they’re not playing against four of the five names on that list up there at all. They are the old-school “pure Internet play” and the only thing like that right now on the list is Facebook, which is itself scrambling to adjust to the post-PC future (and starting by throwing way too much money at Instagram). So the obvious question is: what’s out there for Yahoo to acquire/sponge from?
Well, there are some interesting independent players out there. Foursquare is the industry leader in location-based social networking, and location was Mayer’s last billet at Google. SAYMedia is out there, holding TypePad and MoveableType and a good bit of the blog infrastructure of the web. For that matter, Automattic is still out there even if they’ve mostly given WordPress over to the eponymous foundation. There are other smaller players in social networking, like Tumblr or the tech-hipster darling Path. There’s Evernote, which I quite frankly find indispensable for cloud-based notetaking and general bit-bucketing. There’s Loopt, there’s Smugmug, there’s all sorts of small companies doodling around Mountain View ripe for the picking if you think you could make something of them.
But that’s not a vision. What Yahoo should probably be looking at is a future where they’re offering the sorts of things Google or Facebook do, albeit with more privacy, granularity and user control. After all, most folks over 25 still have a Yahoo account, and there’s some equity in the brand. And there’s one name that hasn’t come up yet, one which would place Yahoo right in the hot seat of social networking and mobility in one stroke.
Y!Tweets.
Dare to dream, Marissa.