Google’s Marissa Mayer Will Try to Save Yahoo as CEO

by Sarah Mitroff

Longtime Google executive Marissa Mayer will become CEO of Yahoo, thrusting the prominent 37-year-old executive into a public highwire act as she tries to turn around the languishing company.

“There is a lot to do and I can’t wait to get started,” Mayer said in the official announcement.

Mayer’s eagerness aside, the move is a gamble for her. Employee number 20 at Google, Mayer became a key executive at the company, overseeing search products and user interface for five years and eventually taking over local and location services. In 2010, she ascended to Google’s elite operating committee.

Mayer’s personal wealth from pre-IPO Google stock has allowed her to buy a penthouse in San Francisco’s Four Seasons along with a home in well-to-do Palo Alto and a posh Vogue wedding.

There’s little doubt she could remain at Google, or quit conventional work entirely, and live in considerable comfort. She doesn’t need to try and revive Yahoo.

“Marissa has been a tireless champion of our users,” Google CEO Larry Page writes. “We will miss her talents at Google.”

By the end of 2011 Mayer’s influence seemed to be waning. She was among several executives pushed out of the operating committee, Reuters reported, and wasn’t visible at Google IO this past June despite having keynoted in prior years.

Still, it’s likely Mayer could have continued to make significant contributions at Google if she’d chosen to hang in. Her oversight of local put Mayer in charge of a crucial crossroads for Google.
At Yahoo, Mayer is rolling the dice on a much more daunting challenge. The company’s C-suite has been a revolving door and Yahoo has bled top talent.

“Marissa has the energy and drive Yahoo needs,” says YCombinator’s Paul Buchheit, who worked closely with Mayer during the creation of Google’s GMail. “I can’t wait to see what she does with the company.”

A former Yahoo executive who left the company in recent years says Mayer will have to move quickly to repair Yahoo’s reputation and bolster its flagging momentum. “Her joining Yahoo! is like a bomb,” this person says. “The ‘shock and awe’ will briefly destabilize the legacy elements and parties that have been holding the company back. She needs to use her first 100 days aggressively to confront entrenched interests.”

Mayer’s ascent is a sign that Yahoo will compete aggressively on technology development rather than retreating into becoming an online media company that merely sells advertising, says Morningstar analyst Rick Summer. That means going up against formidable competitors like Microsoft, Facebook — and Mayer’s former employer.

“Yahoo has had declining use in its communications services and not much mobile success,” says Summer. “It is the polar opposite from Google…. She’ll need to lead a team that creates a few strong technology products that will engage users and stem the loss in Yahoo’s search business.”

Mayer certainly has the chops to lead tech product development. She helped oversee the development of GMail, Google News and Google Images. She has a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford and is famous for her data-driven approach to product decisions.

But in other ways the job will be an odd fit. For one, Mayer has no real professional experience outside of her six different jobs at Google, a sort of parallel corporate universe where the gusher of profits from contextual advertising has subsidized virtually all of the company’s operations for more than a decade.

Also, Yahoo has for the past decade operated not like Google, which is obsessed with software development, but as a sort of media company. Since Terry Semel took the reins in 2001, Yahoo’s leadership has focused on advertising and marketing initiatives over technical advancement (with the possible exception of Jerry Yang’s brief stint as CEO). In 2009, Yahoo ceded  its once-core search engine to Microsoft, whose servers began powering Yahoo searches.

Restarting Yahoo tech development might have great long-term potential, but in the meantime it’s relatively low-tech display ads that keep the lights on at Yahoo. Mayer will need help to keep that lifeline strong.

If she does pull off an unlikely turnaround, of course, Mayer’s reputation in Silicon Valley will be sterling. She’ll join turnaround Gods like Steve Jobs at Apple and Louis Gerstner at IBM in the top tier of tech’s pantheon.

Former Yahoo employees say Mayer needs to get climbing now if she’ll ever reach those heights.
“It’s not like she needs the money,” one wrote in a closed Facebook group for Yahoo alumni. “She has to honestly feel like she can turn this ship around after it’s already hit the iceberg, which is a pretty monumental challenge.”

Report: Half a Million Yahoo User Accounts Exposed in Breach

By Kim Zetter

Hackers have published half a million login credentials for what appear to be Yahoo Voices user accounts that were stolen from a server.

More than 453,000 login credentials were posted by a hacking group calling itself D33Ds Company, who say the credentials were stored in plaintext, an amateur security blunder. The hackers said, in a note posted online, that they used a SQL injection attack to grab the credentials, but did not say from which Yahoo service they were taken “to avoid further damage.”

But based on a domain hostname that the hackers left in the data (dbb1.ac.bf1.yahoo.com) they posted, researchers have concluded that the credentials appear to have been stolen from Yahoo Voices, a user-generated content service and blogging platform that was formerly part of Associated Content. Yahoo Voices claims on its website that it has “more than 600,000 contributors and growing.”

“We hope that the parties responsible for managing the security of this subdomain will take this as a wake-up call, and not as a threat,” the hackers wrote in a note accompanying their disclosure. “There have been many security holes exploited in webservers belonging to Yahoo! Inc. that have caused far greater damage than our disclosure. Please do not take them lightly. The subdomain and vulnerable parameters have not been posted to avoid further damage.”

The page where the hackers originally published the credentials is not currently available, but the credentials have also been posted in a searchable format at Dazzlepod.com, with the passwords redacted. Users who find their credentials on the list can send an email to Dazzlepod requesting that their credentials be removed from the online list. A spokesperson at Dazzlepod, which published the credentials early Thursday morning, says their site has received more than 120 removal requests from account holders so far.

Yahoo said in a statement that it is investigating the breach claim. The breach is the latest in a rash of credential breaches that have occurred in the last few months involving unsecured servers and unencrypted credentials. LinkedIn, eHarmony and Last.fm have all been victims of similar breaches lately.

The attacks highlight the danger of re-using passwords at different websites, as hackers can mine the data and attempt to use the same credentials with more sensitive accounts that users may have, such as online banking and e-mail accounts.

Here comes Yahoo's own Web browser -- Axis

Yahoo's search group attempts to take control of its destiny by launching its own browser. Surprise: It's good.

By Rafe Needleman

Yahoo is announcing tonight that it's getting into the browser business with its new Axis browser. There are versions for iPad and iPhone, and plug-ins for the desktop browsers Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Safari.

 The design goal, according to Ethan Batraski, head of product for the Search Innovation Group at Yahoo, is to eliminate the middle step in the usual Web search process: Enter a query, see the results, go to a page. With Axis, you're supposed to be able to go directly from query to page, skipping the step of surfing a sea of links.

The implication that Axis entirely bypasses the need to pick from search results is false, but Axis does nonetheless have a much better way of getting you from searching to visiting a Web page. The browser works well. This is an aggressive product for the struggling Yahoo to launch out of its search group.

Here's why: Yahoo, which still generates more than a billion dollars a year in revenue from its search division, makes a lot of that money from that second step in the search process. It runs ads on search result pages.

On Axis, there are no search result pages.

Instead, what you get when you search, at least 80 percent of the time, Batraski says, is a horizontal display of Web page thumbnails. (The other 20 percent of the time you get text boxes with results in them.) It's easy to see if one of the pages is what you're looking for, and then you can go there directly. To see the tiles again and go to other results, you just pull down the page from the top. To move forward or backward in the list of results directly from a page you're on, you drag your finger from the right or left. bypassing the results list entirely.

So, to be clear, there actually is a list of search results. It just looks a lot better because it's integrated into the browser. Ads will get inserted into the list of search tiles eventually, assuming the product is a success with users. But for the time being, the more successful Axis is, the more it will drive Yahoo traffic away from search revenues -- which only this last quarter began to recover after years of sliding.

As a tactic for launching the browser, focusing on the user experience above all and forgoing search revenues is probably very wise, since it may be difficult for the browser to make a dent in the market. I asked Batraski about other alterna-browsers that struggled to win major market share, and mostly failed: Flock, Rockmelt, Opera, AT&T's Pogo, and others. Why does Yahoo think it can pull a Chrome with its product?

Distribution, says Batraski. There are 700 million people using Yahoo, and they can all be marketed to. Also, Yahoo distributes browsers (mostly IE with the Yahoo embedded toolbar) to 80 million people a year. The company knows how to get browsers out there, at least on desktop operating systems. But Axis on the desktop is actually not its own browser, but rather a plug-in that works with the browser a user already has. If you use the plug-in's URL and search box in the lower-left of your browser, you'll get Yahoo's results. If you forget it's there and use the browser's standard URL/search box, you get whatever you've already been getting.

One gets the feeling that the desktop versions of Axis exist primarily as accessories to the mobile versions, so users can move between platforms and keep their open tabs and histories intact. When you're logged in, Axis knows what you do on each device and makes it easy to pick up on one where you left off on another.

Mobile is where the action is, so it makes sense that Yahoo threw the bulk of its development love into the tablet and smartphone versions. On the iPad, Axis is simply a great browser. The integrated search feature is intuitive, and being able to move through search results without having to go back to search makes sense. After only a few minutes using it I thought, Why hasn't Google done this yet? It's that good.

Although mobile devices like the iPad come with embedded browsers, Batraski says the product has Apple's blessing. He also said that Apple reps have told him they're not throwing many resources into Apple's own iOS browser, Safari. Axis takes the best that Safari has to offer -- its core rendering engine, Webkit -- and really does make it better. But no matter what Apple says, it's not yet fully behind alternative browsers like Axis: On iOS, you can't change your default browser (unless you jailbreak your device). Click a link in an e-mail message or another app, and your device will open it up in Safari, no matter how in love with Axis you are.

Batraski is convinced this will change eventually, and that if it doesn't, Apple will have a Microsoft-scale antitrust issue on its hands.

What about Android? The Android version of Axis is still in development, and while it's much easier for a user to get an alternative browser installed and embedded in an Android product, it's a pretty safe bet that Google isn't exactly going to roll out the welcome mat for Yahoo's browser. Google already has two of its own browsers for mobile, the Android browser and the still-in-beta Android version of Chrome. And those drive traffic to Google's ads, not Yahoo's. (Firefox, by the way, defaults to using Google for search, so even when people use it instead of Chrome, Google still wins.)

The Axis browser may not conquer the world, but it is a very strong mobile product with an important new design concept for search. It's also a gutsy business move from Yahoo. It's rather refreshing.