Wausau Native Marissa Mayer Named as Yahoo’s Chief

July 17, 2012

Google’s Marissa Mayer Tapped as Yahoo’s Chief

NEW YORK – APRIL 19: VP of Search products and User Experience at Google, Marissa Mayer poses for photos at the 2010 Matrix Awards presented by New York Women in Communications at The Waldorf Astoria on April 19, 2010 in New York City. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN and EVELYN M. RUSLI | New York Times – 1 hour 8 minutes ago

Marissa Mayer, one of the top executives at Google, will be the next C.E.O. of Yahoo, making her one of the most prominent women in Silicon Valley and corporate America.
The appointment of Ms. Mayer, who was employee No. 20 at Google and was one of the few public faces of the company, is considered a surprising coup for Yahoo, which has struggled in recent years to attract top flight talent in its battle with competitors like Google and Facebook.
Ms. Mayer, 37, had for years been responsible for the look and feel of Google’s most popular products: the famously unadorned white search homepage, Gmail, Google News and Google Images. More recently, Ms. Mayer, an engineer by training whose first job at Google included computer programming, was put in charge of the company’s location and local services, including Google Maps, overseeing more than 1,000 product managers. She also sat on Google’s operating committee, part of a small circle of senior executives who had the ear of Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.