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Why Marissa Mayer, Google’s star, failed at Yahoo
Marissa Mayer was heralded as the saviour of Yahoo when she came from Google in 2012. So what went wrong?
When the former Google executive Marissa Mayer arrived to run Yahoo four years ago, she was greeted with posters of her face emblazoned with the word "Hope", says the Financial Times. But she failed to transform the fading 1990s internet star.
Worth $125bn at its peak, Yahoo agreed to be sold to Verizon last July for just $4.8bn. Mayer is reportedly set for a $55m pay-off if the deal goes ahead but now there's talk that it may fall apart. The latest revelation of another giant hack of Yahoo users' data, dating back to 2013-2014, doesn't say much for Yahoo's security or corporate transparency and will surely give Verizon pause for thought.
Mayer has sometimes attributed the barrage of criticism she has faced during her tenure at Yahoo to "gender-charged reporting". She has a point. "I groaned when I read that the Google hotshot had been made chief executive of Yahoo," wrote Eleanor Mills in The Sunday Times in 2012. "I knew the announcement that she is seven months pregnant would create an explosion of Can women really have it all?' comment." And so the ensuing press frenzy proved.
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The consensus was that she arrived well equipped to cope. Summed up by Businessweek as "vivacious, hyper-intelligent and resilient", Mayer was seen as an Alpha achiever a female geek who could deliver. Having enjoyed what she calls "a well-rounded childhood" in Wausau, Wisconsin ("My mom set out to overstimulate me as a result, I've always been a multi-tasker"), she studied symbolic systems at Stanford, joining Google as Employee Number 20 in 1999 and going on to lead many of its key products, including the search engine and Google Maps.
Numbers really are her thing, noted Vogue in 2013 she talks about them "as if they were people". She can be awkward when talking about business. "But when she gets onto technology, she turns effortlessly articulate."
Mayer got off to a bad start at Yahoo by abruptly banning employees from working remotely: not many could afford her own gold-plated nanny service. A big splash in Vogue reclining like a Hollywood star in a skin-tight blue sheath holding an iPad reflecting an image of herself didn't improve her Lady Muck image.
So what went wrong? She failed "to provide clarity of vision", says The Economist, but in the end it came down to numbers. Mayer overspent on "big, flashy deals" (most of the $1.1bn spent on social network Tumblr has been written down) and couldn't halt the decline in Yahoo's core online advertising business.
Mayer took on a "Sisyphean task" at Yahoo, says BreakingViews, and failure there "shouldn't have spelled career disaster". But the cyber-hack and, crucially, her failure to come clean about it may change that. Plenty of CEOs mess up, and Mayer may yet "be courted again". But she has "probably squandered her chance of another prominent corner office".
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