Robert Pogson

Losing a smart executive with a long history at Google could indicate many things:

• Google is short-sighted and didn’t offer appropriate challenges,
• Google’s new boss squeezed her out,
• She got tired of waiting for a higher positions, or
• Google has peaked in innovation and has become another old-boys-club.

I suppose not everyone can be the boss and there comes a time in every career when a personal decision has to override all the good relations with the current situation. Whatever the situation Marissa Mayer does have a challenge at Yahoo. Yahoo does some of the same things as Google and uses FLOSS but has a completely different aura.

I have met a few people who absolutely love the way Yahoo does things but I hate it. I have hated it ever since I tried to register a school’s website with their search engine and they wanted me to place it in one and only one category. That made no sense to me then and it makes no sense now. I think others felt that way and got better search from Google because Google never looked back.

To refresh my dislike of Yahoo, I did a search for “Linux Russian Schools” and found some hits, but:

• no ordering by date,
• no targeted search by date,
• and very few options.

Yahoo, a computer can do anything while searching. Why limit the choices? Even your advanced search doesn’t allow searching by date which is a crucial lever to narrow down slices of the web into relevance. You need Marissa Mayer. Don’t let her get away without changing your direction seriously.

Google’s Marissa Mayer named Yahoo’s new CEO | Executive | Financial Post.

see also SJVN’s take on the move