Google’s Marissa Mayer named Yahoo CEO

By David Goldman and Julianne Pepitone

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Yahoo has a new CEO — again! And this time the selection came completely out of left field.
Marissa Mayer, a Google executive and one of the first two dozen employees at the search giant, will take the reins of the struggling Yahoo.

Mayer held many jobs in her 14 years at Google and most recently served as vice president of location and local services. For years she was one of most public faces of Google (GOOG, Fortune 500), appearing in numerous media interviews and delivering keynotes on behalf of the company.
She had been considered one of the search company’s most powerful executives when Eric Schmidt was CEO, but when founder Larry Page took the helm and reorganized the company back in April 2011, she didn’t land one of the top jobs.
Many analysts viewed her most recent position as step down from her previous role as the Google’s search product head.

Mayer resigned from Google via telephone on Monday, according to a report in The New York Times. In addition to her role as CEO, she will become a Yahoo board member. Mayer also sits on the board of Wal-Mart (WMT, Fortune 500).
Mayer’s choice as Yahoo’s CEO is an upset. Interim CEO Ross Levinsohn was widely considered to be the leading candidate for the job.
She takes over at a tumultuous time for a fading Web icon: She is the company’s fourth CEO in less than four years.
“There’s a lot to do,” Mayer told Fortune’s Patricia Sellers moments after Yahoo announced her appointment. She is starting her new job on Tuesday, just hours before Yahoo is slated to release its latest quarterly earnings report.

Yahoo had been in need of a leader since May, when Scott Thompson was ousted after just four months in the wake of a scandal over his embellished college degree.
Now, it’s Mayer’s turn to answer the age-old question: What, exactly, is Yahoo?
A company in transition
The company calls itself “the premier digital media company,” and its news properties attract loads of traffic. But Yahoo’s brand now has lots of baggage and a sprawling product portfolio.
Meanwhile, Yahoo has lost two of its former business strongholds. The company once led the search market, but it gave up on that sector three years ago. It’s also losing ground with its other cash cow, display advertising, to newer entrants such as Google and Facebook.
Thompson took a stab at defining Yahoo during his few months at the company. In April, he reorganized the company into three groups: consumer, ad-focused “regions,” and technology.

Thompson didn’t get to see that vision through.
Yahoo’s recent CEOs weren’t able to pull off the turnaround, and their tenures were rocky. Before Thompson, Carol Bartz’s phone firing followed a tumultuous relationship with the board. Her predecessor, Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) co-founder Jerry Yang, stepped down after shareholders were angered by his snubbing of a buyout offer from Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500).

On the positive side, most of Yahoo’s previous directors were wiped out in a board shakeup in February. Three nominees from Third Point — the activist shareholder fund that exposed Thompson’s resume lie — have instead joined the board, and a new chairman is in place.

_______________________

Marissa Mayer
VP Local, Maps, and Localisation at Google

Marissa Mayer is the Vice President of Local, Maps, and Location Services at Google. She oversees product management, engineering, design and strategy for the company’s suite of local and geographical products, including Google Maps, Google Earth, Zagat, Street View, and local search, for desktop and mobile. She also curates the Google Doodle program, celebrating special events on Google’s homepage around the world.
During her 12 years at Google, Marissa has held numerous positions, including engineer, designer, product manager, and executive, and has launched over 100 well-known features and products. Prior to her current role, she played an instrumental role in Google search, leading the product management efforts for more than 10 years, a period during which Google Search grew from a few hundred thousand to well over a billion searches per day. Marissa led the development of some of Google’s most successful services including image, book and product search, toolbar, and iGoogle, and defined such pivotal products as Google News and Gmail. She is listed as an inventor on several patents in artificial intelligence and interface design.
Joining as the company’s first female engineer in 1999, Marissa has played an important role in developing Google’s culture. Her contributions have included overseeing the look-and-feel of the company’s iconic homepage and founding the Associate Product Manager program, which has hired over 300 of the company’s future leaders.
Prior to joining Google, Marissa worked at the UBS research lab in Zurich, Switzerland and at SRI International in Menlo Park, California. She graduated with honors from Stanford University with a BS in Symbolic Systems and a MS in Computer Science. For both degrees, she specialized in artificial intelligence. While at Stanford, she taught computer programming to more than 3000 students and received the Centennial Teaching and Forsythe Awards for her contributions to undergraduate education. In 2008, the Illinois Institute of Technology awarded her an honorary doctorate of engineering.
She has been honored with the Matrix Award by the New York Women in Communications, as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, as a member of the “New Establishment” by Vanity Fair, with the American Art Award by the Whitney Museum of American Art, and as “Woman of the Year” by Glamour magazine. For 4 years running, Fortune has named her one of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business, including when at age 33 she was the youngest woman ever included on the list.
Marissa serves on the boards of various non-profits, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Ballet, the Smithsonian National Design Museum and the New York City Ballet.