Jason Pan

    Jpan09@gmail.com

    NEWLY hired Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer faces a monumental task in revitalizing the struggling company back to its glory days of the late 1990s and early 2000s, a task so weighty that it made news before her first day on the job.

    Yahoo’s hiring of Mayer from Google last week caught analysts, investors and even some employees by surprise. Mayer, 37, edged out presumed front-runner and acting CEO Ross Levinsohn to become Yahoo’s third CEO in a year, Reuters reported.

    Her new job comes with huge assets and equally huge liabilities.

    Aside from being a once dominant Web search engine and advertising medium, Yahoo still boasts the world’s second most popular e-mail service, Yahoo Mail. Unfortunately, other than that service — which offers less mobile capability than Google’s Gmail — Yahoo holds little else to its name.

    Since Yahoo’s peak, party crashers, most notably Google, have slowly dwindled Yahoo’s market share. What was once a high, healthy stock price of US$118.75 diminished to US$15.70 last week. With the company laying off 2,000 workers three months ago and going through four CEOs in the past four years, Yahoo has fallen far from the top of the mountain.

    Yahoo’s future hopes are now placed on Mayer, who was a key part of Google’s success from its beginning. Although some analysts remain skeptical about the hire, remember that in Mayer’s 13 years at her former company, she spent plenty of time dissecting the competition, including Yahoo. She is nothing if not qualified for the job.

    A look at her track record indicates changes could be coming.

    While Yahoo’s home page is cluttered with many different products — Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Movies, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Group, Yahoo Music, Yahoo Dating, Yahoo Autos and more — Mayer was one of the main orchestrators of the beautiful simplicity of Google’s home page, a blank, white field simply adorned with only the Google logo and a search bar.

    With a master’s degree in computer science and artificial intelligence from Stanford, Mayer is more than proficient in product development. However, according to analyst Shar VanBoskirk of Forrester Research, Yahoo already has its fair share of products. If anything, VanBoskirk said, Yahoo may need to kill some of its lesser, irrelevant products. The source of Yahoo’s dilemma is that unlike current Internet giants such as Google and Facebook, it lacks an identity. Boskirk recommended that Yahoo find a clear vision and then market it heavily, so consumers understand why they should use Yahoo instead of something else.

    Yahoo needs to move away from its cluster of sites — their Rivals.com site, for example, is purely dedicated to high school sports and college recruiting — and begin innovations to find a clearer identity.

    Future-oriented evolutions of Facebook and Google, such as constant developments of mobile technology and access, are a good example of innovating to stay ahead. Those companies recognized that people are constantly on the move and engineered ways for people to carry Facebook and Google with them.

    The same cannot be said for Yahoo in the past decade.

    Success in the technology industry is and always will be driven by innovation, especially in today’s world, when new, cool products are always right around the corner. Yahoo knows this firsthand — being the newest and coolest was how it came to be the giant it was back in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

    Innovation is created by talent, so Mayer needs to bring in the same quality of staff that made companies such as Google and Apple what they are today. Continuing its filler sites and products is only going to keep Yahoo lagging like it has for the past decade.