It came as a considerable surprise that Marissa Mayer left a 13 year career at Google to join Yahoo as the 3rd CEO in 12 months and the 5th in 5 years.
Mayers potential with Yahoo is huge, with a degree in artificial intelligence and being the 20th “googler” (now “Xoogler“) she has driven the “Googliath” forward over the past 13 years and by the age of 37 has become one of the most important people in technology and arguably the most influential woman.
However there is no scepticism regarding the task that lays ahead of Mayer, further enforced given the news that Yahoo’s Dreary Second Quarter earnings have again tanked.
For Yahoo Maktoob, one of the last strongholds of the Yahoo empire (now valued at half what was originally offered by Microsoft), Mayer must be a shining light and opportunity to further establish Yahoo Maktoob as a publisher.
No one doubts that Yahoo as a player in search advertising have an almost impossible task of gaining back some of the lost Google and Facebook advertising globally. Most believe that it is impossible. In the Middle East however, it is a different story. Yes, Google are still the largest search players (and advertising overall), but the differentiator for Yahoo Maktoob is Arabic content and circa 50 million subscribers to their services a much more robust Arabic content service and arguably a greater ability to target Arabic language users than most other advertising distribution networks.
It will be interesting to see how Mayer defines the Middle East and the importance of growing Arabic language online, we know that her predecessor Carol Bartz publicly defined it as one of the top priorities of the company. Yahoo Maktoob are quintessentially the leaders in the market to make this happen and here’s hoping that the importance of the language is maintained in Mayers turnaround strategy.
For businesses in the region and those targeting Arabic markets, we need to have more than one player in the search market, so from a personal perspective, here is also hoping that Mayer brings a lot of innovation that makes her new company much easier to work with.
Further, Mayer is a shining example of what big business’ in the region need. As a female leader of a global player, Mayer will be an inspiration to women in the male dominated region to not only get into the workforce, but to get into technology as a career.
digitalarabia 