It is all over for the CEO of Yahoo!, Marissa Mayer. The Internet group has confirmed on Monday the departure of its patron saint, once sold its core business (online advertising, e-mail, wire information, etc) to the telecom operator Verizon for $ 4.8 billion. This amount may however be revised downwards after the revelation, last month, a hacking massive hit over a billion customers of Yahoo! 2013.
Marissa Mayer had no intention to stay : a former giant of the Silicon Valley, Yahoo! will in effect be reduced to a mere investment company, once separated from its Internet activities. It will only manage a few financial assets, the first of which the 15 per cent stake in the chinese group Alibaba. This new entity will take the name of Altaba. It will reduce the size of its board to five members. The other six members of the council, including Marissa Mayer and the co-founder of Yahoo!, David Filo, have announced their next departure.
The fall is hard for one who was long regarded as one of the personalities the most promising of the Silicon Valley. By joining Yahoo!, Marissa Mayer had joined the very closed circle of women CEOS of the high-tech, alongside Meg Whitman (Hewlett-Packard), Ginni Rometty (IBM) and Ursula Burns (Xerox). Has 37 years old, she was even imposed as the youngest of the S&P 500, the club of the largest u.s. companies.
Descent into hell
It had been hosted at Yahoo! like a star. Poster “Hope” had been plastered on the walls, plagiarizing those designed in the likeness of Barack Obama in 2008. But his position has proved to be a true torture, and the revelation of the largest hacking in the history of the last month has only served to confirm this impression of descent into the underworld.
Marissa Mayer would she be able to save Yahoo! ? “ there may be anyone to do it, ” says his biographer Nicholas Carlson. No less than five CEOS had preceded in the space of five years, and had been also unable to reverse the situation. The site, which seemed to be indispensable for browsing the Web in the 1990s, has suffered from not having been able to make the shift to modernity, in the face of Facebook and Google in particular. “ Yahoo! short too many things at once. It does everything but is not a leader on anything. For some, it is a company of tech who don’t understand the media. For others, it is a media company that does not understand the tech “, telling a venture capitalist in Palo Alto in the spring.
Except surprise, Marissa Mayer has no hope of joining Verizon with the rest of the teams working in the core business, as she had expressed the desire last spring. The Internet activities of Yahoo! will be close to those of AOL, and will be piloted by CEO in place, Tim Armstrong, has already informed the CEO of Verizon, Lowell McAdam.
Lucie Robequain, Les Echos
New York Office
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