On Monday, The New York Times broke the story that Marissa Mayer, employee No. 20 at Google, had suddenly resigned by phone to become the CEO of Yahoo. Yahoo’s gain is Google’s loss, as Mayer was personally responsible for some of Google’s most iconic products. Here are just some of Mayer’s accomplishments over her years at Google.
Mayer oversaw the user interface design of these Google properties used daily by hundreds of millions of people:
- The blank, white search page that is synonymous with Google
- The Gmail inbox
- Google News
- Google Images
She was the vice president overseeing the company’s location services and local business products, critical to the company’s mobile future. In that position, she oversaw over 1,000 product managers.
She was on Google’s operating committee as one of the senior executives most trusted by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
She was Google’s first female engineer. She has a B.S. in symbolic systems and an M.S. in computer science from Stanford University. She specialized in artificial intelligence. She also has an honoris causa doctorate from the Illinois Institute of Technology for her unprecedented work in search. Unlike previous Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson, Mayer’s computer science degrees are real.
She has been one of the most publicly visible spokespeople for the company, giving press interviews and speaking at events.
A wayward company like Yahoo could use the executive expertise of someone responsible for forming and shaping one of Silicon Valley’s greatest successes. All the better that it’s Google, one of the primary disruptors of Yahoo’s former dominance.
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