The golden girl of the Googleplex, Marissa Mayer, announced yesterday that she would be leaving the ranks of Google to join the somewhat forgotten Yahoo.
Oh and last week we found out she is six months pregnant, making her the first woman in the fortune 500 to be so… ever.
And back to the main news. If you are in silicon valley or anywhere near by the question is simply “why?” well lets take a look at this in detail.
Marissa, the gatekeeper of the Google Styling, may simply be seeing a chance to clean up where others have failed (the former CEO left in May, Mayer will be the third CEO in less than 12 months). Mayer has been with Google since 1999, she was their first female hire and employee number 20. Since then she has been an integral engineer and spokesperson for the company. Mayer, now 37, becomes CEO of Yahoo as of today (17th july 2012) as announced in a Yahoo! Press Release.
At Google, Mayer was part of many great projects and managed projects including Google Mail and Google News. As mentioned above she was also the gatekeeper of design, once remarking that “the design [of google] should be robotic to show there is no human involved in the algorithm” – this is no doubt what the Yahoo! board of directors are hoping to see from Mayer. Lets just hope she gets the capital and the team to do so.
Mayer said, “I am honored and delighted to lead Yahoo!, one of the internet’s premier destinations for more than 700 million users. I look forward to working with the Company’s dedicated employees to bring innovative products, content, and personalized experiences to users and advertisers all around the world.”
There are a few huge questions, mainly why Mayer would make this move. I believe it’s simply a new challenge after a long time with one company, I also think Marissa wants a chance to prove who she really can be and who she can become. Marissa is a self motivated lady who wants to be at the top, but LSE at Google just wern’t going to let her move further than she was already. The next clear question is will she try to remove the Bing search engine in favour of resurrecting Yahoo search or perhaps using Google search – time will tell. One thing is for sure, Marissa will shake things up and I don’t think it will take too long!
Thank you for reading Marissa Mayer, Leaves Google and Is Pregnant!, originally published on TechDrink. Ben Greenwood is the founder and editor of TechDrink. You can follow him on Twitter and Google+. You can also follow TechDrink on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
