Farhad Manjoo
STATE OF THE ART
When Marissa Mayer was offered the chief executive job at Yahoo in the summer of 2012, she had a script for returning the pioneering Internet company to the tiny club of Silicon Valley powerhouses.
To many in the tech industry, the very thought of Yahoo regaining prominence was a reach. Its revenue had been flat or declining for the previous five years. Google and Facebook had long taken the lead, and a new generation of tech start-ups was starting to elbow its way into the spotlight. Yahoo? It was an afterthought.
The turnaround plan created by Ms. Mayer, a celebrated, though recently sidelined, executive at Google, was simple: Stop the downward spiral and increase Yahoo’s revenue within two or three years. After that, Ms. Mayer said she believed she could achieve double-digit annual growth by five years.
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“There are pieces of the puzzle coming into place,” said Brian Wieser, an analyst at the Pivotal Research Group who follows Yahoo and has long been skeptical of Ms. Mayer. “It’s clear that lessons have been learned.”
Mr. Wieser, though, remains skeptical. Ms. Mayer’s future depends on how investors react to her plans for the Alibaba investment, which she may disclose in an earnings call next week. She also has yet to make good on her main ambition of releasing groundbreaking new products.
But fixing broken tech companies is notoriously difficult. It took Lou Gerstner, IBM’s legendary turnaround artist, nearly a decade to remake that giant. Apple’s revenue was mostly flat for about six years after Mr. Jobs returned in the late 1990s. If Ms. Mayer is to follow in their footsteps, she ought to at least be given enough time to try on the sneakers.
Email: farhad.manjoo@nytimes.com; Twitter: @fmanjoo
