So who is Yahoo’s new CEO Marissa Mayer?
"Marissa is a well-known, visionary leader in user experience and product design and one of Silicon Valley's most exciting strategists in technology development,” described Yahoo! Co-Founder David Filo last night in announcing his platform’s new CEO.
The coup of luring one of Google’s mainstays, Mayer, was the 20th employee of Google and its first female engineer, will certainly be seen a feather in Yahoo’s cap after the misery it has suffered with her recent predecessors. Mayer has built a heady reputation within the tech sector and posted the news of her appointment at Yahoo on her Google+ account, alongside the message; “I'm incredibly excited to start my new role at Yahoo! tomorrow.”
Mayer graduated from Stanford University with a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and a M.S. in Computer Science, specialising in artificial intelligence for both degrees. This led her to work for UBS Research Lab in Zurich, SRI International in California, and then Google from 1999.
Directly prior to joining Yahoo, Mayer was vice president of local, maps and location services at Google, charged with overseeing product management, engineering, design and strategy for Google Maps, Google Earth, Street View and local search on desktop and mobile.
During her 13 years at the company she is also said to have curated Google’s Doodle programme, which has become synonymous on a daily basis with the search engine’s home page.
For over 10 years, Mayer led the product management for Google, instrumental in growing its search offer from hundreds of thousands to a billion search each day, while also developing services such as product search, iGoogle, image and book and has been listed on several design patents by the company.
Mayer has also picked up the Matrix Award from the New York Women in Communications and been named ‘Woman of the Year’ by Glamour Magazine.