The New York Times surprised the world on Monday by breaking news of executive intrigue at the world's largest and third-largest search companies, Google and Yahoo. Google Employee No. 20 (the 20th person it hired) has become No. 1 at Yahoo, inheriting an iconic yet troubled corporate legacy.
In a way, Marissa Mayer's meteoric rise in the software world was accidental. She originally wanted to be a neurosurgeon, but she switched her major to computer science at Stanford. (Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are two other notable Stanford grads.) Before she wound up at Google, Mayer's path took her to research positions first at the Swiss financial firm UBS and then at Stanford's nonprofit SRI.
But it was at Google where Mayer came into her own. The company's first female employee has been credited with designing the layout of its minimalist homepage, Gmail, and Google Images. The accidental computer scientist had become the queen of search.
Mayer's final position at Google was in location services -- both a critical operation and a controversial one. Google Maps are much, much more than mere atlases. They serve as steppingstones for location-aware advertising.
So here's the big question: Why Yahoo?
The answer may be the attraction of the top spot. At Google, Eric Schmidt just finished a 10-year campaign as CEO. Mayer had to wonder how long it would be before a young Larry Page, the current CEO, decided to move on. And that's not to mention new rising stars at Google, such as Android chief Andy Rubin, whom Google enlisted with its 2005 purchase of Android Inc.
Mayer faced a tough choice: Should she stay with a proven winner, where she would be limited, or should she gamble on an old, haggard former champion? For Mayer, the choice was likely made easier by her strong confidence, knowing that she deserved much of the praise for making Google the winner it is today.
It's hard to say where Mayer will take Yahoo, a company at a crossroads. After bidding farewell to co-founder and long-time CEO Jerry Yang, the company has endured a disastrous experiment with former Autodesk CEO Carol Bartz, along with the bizarrely short-lived appointment of Scott Thompson.
Mayer is the kind of leader Yahoo desperately needs. Now comes the hard part: She must assemble talent around her and repurpose Yahoo's scattered pieces.
A recent hacking aside, Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Finance remain strong properties. Many people read Yahoo News, even if it has been eclipsed by Mayer's own creation, Google News. On the other hand, Yahoo took on a good deal of extra baggage when it replaced its indexing service with Microsoft's Bing two years ago.
In short, picking up the scattered pieces at Yahoo is a tough task, even for a superstar. But among the few brave souls who might be up to that task, Mayer certainly is a prime candidate. She built an empire for the kings of search. Now it's time for her to rule her own kingdom, for better or worse.
A conspiracy theory? I'm really not buying it. There was too much collateral damage in the way Thompson left -- to other board members as well as to Thompson himself.
The first reason that comes to mind? They got a Marissa Mayer, and no longer needed a Scott Thompson. His falsified resume was just smoke-and-mirrors, and just embarrassing enough to keep him from speaking out and upsetting the apple cart. I do have to admit, though, I fail to understand the maneuvering and arm-wrestling that goes on behind the scenes on the boards of major corporations. Perhaps someday I will get the opportunity to learn. And I expect pigs to fly, about 3:30 PM that same day.
Um, BTDTGTTS (Been There, Done That, Got The T-Shirt). I guess everybody has forgotten Yahooligans, the first web portal "just for kids!" I'm getting the impression that it was not as successful as could have been hoped. Maybe a better name would help....
a man got hired as a CEO that anybody worried that his wife might get pregnant at any time and what that might do to his focus and how maybe he'd be able to do a better job once the child was a year old and so maybe we should only hire CEOs whose wives were over 40?
I had a child in April (2000), took eight weeks of maternity leave (because I had a C-section) and got an achievement award from my company in October because of my performance. Honestly, it's easier when they're little.
Up to this point everyone had the idea of she being one of the greatest executives at google, going to Yahoo! will determine if she is the "real deal" or not.
Maybe Yahoo is too big to change... is it making profits? whats its financial status?
I was listening to an interview with Ivanka Trump, and that's basically what she was saying. She was saying that while it was true a normal mother couldn't handle being CEO and mom all at once, she'll have a whole team of people to help her with her child care needs, so it's a far different situation.
I think Yahoo will be in good hands. You can't get much closer to a sure shot than Mayer, though Yahoo has the kind of luck that even a "sure shot" could fizzle. The company needs some good news for a change. Hopefully Mayer can restore it, and we can have some real competition in the search market again.
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Civil libertarians are outraged at the revelation the NSA is reportedly spying on more than one-third of Americans -- obtaining phone records from phone companies, in case it might need them for later use. Edward Snowden, the man who leaked details of that program, also revealed a second effort dubbed “Prism,” which represented a more aggressive grab of email and other communications. (See: Prism Exposes Unwritten Privacy Rules.)
While outsourcing can initially appear to deliver massive cost savings, some firms are starting to wake up to its hidden costs -- shipping, production latency, and quality control. But perhaps the biggest hidden cost of outsourcing is intellectual property (IP) theft.
The version of Windows 8.1 that Microsoft previewed this week is a step in the right direction, but it shows that Microsoft is still missing the boat in some ways.
Whether you’re an engineering firm that uses CAD for parts design, or an e-business that leverages Photoshop for user-interface graphics, you likely require a modest graphics-processing unit. In the old days, this was a daunting hurdle to innovation, but today, the situation has improved thanks to technologies like NVIDIA’s GRID and Microsoft’s RemoteFX. Such virtualized graphics protocols allow you to load-balance graphics-intensive workloads from virtual desktops on a server-side graphics card.
Take a trip down memory lane and imagine, if you will, a system-on-a-chip with Apple IIe-like specs -- 4KB of RAM and 32KB of flash. Add some modern niceties like an ARM Cortex-M0+ 32-bit pipeline, 12-bit DAC, and low-power UART, and you have Freescale's recently unveiled Kinetis KL02, which the company calls "the world's smallest ARM Powered MCU."
In the final episode of this series about the death of Internet anonymity, Saunders describes how the Internet of the future will start to attain a level of intelligence that requires no human intervention. Scary.
What can users today do to protect their online privacy? The simplest and most obvious option is to not use the Internet – at all. However, once all digital information is consolidated over the Internet, trying to protect digital identity by simply unplugging from the Internet becomes impossible – a fact that has manifest implications for civil liberties, Saunders says.
By 2011 the number of Internet-connected sensors will exceed 1 trillion, making your chances of doing anything or going anywhere unnoticed pretty much zero. Saunders talks about how the 'sensortization' of the Internet is eliminating the traditional divide between online and offline populations.
The 20th Century Internet was characterized by the ability to interact with other people and information on the Internet largely without anyone knowing who you were. The Internet of this century, conversely, will be defined by identity. Saunders explains how Internet users are unwittingly contributing to the demise of the anonymous Internet.
The quest for Webpage clicks and ad impressions is creating a market for sensational truths and lies in equal measure. How are we going to get to the bottom of any real issue online – like what's really going on with Carrier IQ, for example – if we can't separate hype from reality?
Google’s Android@Home is the first step in its plans to create an Android-powered "life fabric," where appliances lead us through changing, controlling, and, yes, maybe monitoring our lives. Are we ready to sort out the bad from the good in this?
Steve Saunders talks about the risks inherent in uncontrolled, widespread profiling of Internet users, and how one day this practice could form the basis of a new industry, the Outernet, which in economic terms will have outgrown the commercial value of the Internet itself.
Search companies and social networks are collecting incredibly detailed information about their users, says Steve Saunders, who predicts that these 'profiles' could one day become commodities to be bought and sold by companies on 'profile markets' or 'identity exchanges’ – the digital DNA equivalents of the financial and commodities exchanges on which stocks, oil, and gold are traded.
One of the most important Internet issues of all time is being ignored by the media. In this three-part video series Steve Saunders explains how search companies are turning the tables on their users by creating user profiles for financial gain, and how soon this trend will explode into full scale profiling.
Big-data and analytics tools enable marketers to understand customers as individuals, identifying unmet needs and addressing each customer as a "segment of one," says John Kennedy, VP corporate marketing, IBM.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
So here we are, the last day of the 2013 US Open Golf Championship at Merion, and Phil Mickelson -- who has been a US Open runner-up five times now but never taken the trophy -- is right up there at the top of the leaderboard.
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