Latest Yahoo boss facing a tough task

Yahoo!’s new chief executive knows she has a tough job ahead of her.

“It’s going to be a lot of hard work,” said Marissa Mayer, a technologist who has managed some of rival Google’s most popular products. “My focus has always been on users and creating innovative and compelling end-user experiences — and being very focused on excellent technology and great design.”

She takes the helm at Yahoo as it prepares to report second-quarter results. The company is in its third successive year of decline.

Ms Mayer, 37, replaces Ross Levinsohn, who ran Yahoo after Scott Thompson resigned in May over inaccuracies in his CV.

In hiring Ms Mayer, online portal Yahoo turns to the company that unseated it as the web-search leader and played a central role in Yahoo’s decline. Ms Mayer is an engineer skilled at designing and tailoring products to customers’ tastes, yet lacks experience in running a large business.

Benjamin Schachter, an analyst at Macquarie Securities, said: “What she did at Google was really focus on the user experience more than anything else; Yahoo does need that. But it needs many other things as well. The fact that she had not been a CEO before certainly raised some eyebrows.”

Ms Mayer, who became Google’s 20th employee and its first female engineer, is credited with maintaining the company’s Spartan home page for a decade and overseeing such products as Gmail, Google News, and image, book and product search. In 2010, she became vice president of local, maps and location services.

Yahoo’s biggest challenges include adapting the web company to a shift toward mobile devices and getting users to visit its pages more often, Ms Mayer said.

She said she will draw on experience that ranges from developing products to helping start AdWords, the business that helps companies insert ads alongside Google’s search results.

Ms Mayer will also juggle her role as chief executive with being a new mother. She said on her Twitter page that she and her husband, Zachary Bogue, are expecting a baby boy.

Bloomberg