Anahid Hojjati

Today, it was announced that Marissa Mayer, one of Google's executives, will become Yahoo's president and CEO. In several headlines or in the body of the articles, it was noted that this selection was not expected. Here are some samples of US media's reaction to Yahoo's move:

"Yahoo Stunner: Marissa mayer named CEO in a move no one saw coming"

"Yahoo has a new CEO -- again! And this time the selection came completely out of left field."

However, when I check Marissa's credentials, she is extremely qualified. Interestingly, in some of these articles, right underneath sentence regarding surprise announcement by Yahoo, Marissa's credentials are listed indicating how she was vice president of location and local services at Google and was managing 1000 product managers at this position, and how "She had been considered one of the search company's most powerful executives when Eric Schmidt was CEO."  This is some info on her from Wikipedia:

"

Early life and education

After graduating from Wausau West High School in 1993,[7] Wisconsin governor Jim Doyle selected Mayer as one of the state's two delegates to attend the National Youth Science Camp in West Virginia.[8]

Mayer graduated from Stanford University with a B.S. with honors in symbolic systems and an M.S. in Computer Science. For both degrees, she specialized in artificial intelligence. In 2009, the Illinois Institute of Technology granted Mayer an honoris causa doctorate degree in recognition of her work in the field of search.[9]

Career and honors

Mayer, who joined Google in 1999, was the first female hired and one of their first 20 employees. Prior to joining Google, Mayer worked at the UBS research lab (Ubilab) in Zurich, Switzerland, and at SRI International in Menlo Park, California.[10]

Mayer was responsible for the layout of some of Google’s most used products, including the unadorned white search homepage, Google Search, Gmail, Google News and Google Images.[11][12]

Fortune magazine listed her as one of the 50 most powerful women in the world and she was the youngest woman ever to make the list.[13]

Mayer was named one of Glamour Magazine's 2009 Women of the Year.[14]

"

As you see from the above, her education and her work experience make her to be a qualified person to run Yahoo. Scott Thompson, previous Yahoo CEO only had an accounting degree and there was a controversy that he had tried to make it appear that he had a computer science degree too. It seems that US media was mostly surprised because a woman was selected to run Yahoo. In any case, Marissa Mayer will have a challenging time at Yahoo. Yahoo has seen its shares fall by about 40% in the past five years. Also in the past four years, Yahoo has had several CEO's.