
How I Made It: Marissa Mayer, Google's champion of innovation and design - Anon84
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/02/business/la-fi-himi-mayer-20110102
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SHOwnsYou
I can't _believe_ Marissa Mayer is getting any hate here.

She talked at Stanford and her genius was evident.

She is intimidatingly smart and has business sense most people can only dream
of.

The fact that she has been doing it for 11 years for virtually all of Google's
products only further proves her prowess.

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jeremymims
I'm personally in awe of what Marissa has been able to do at Google. We had a
small billing error with Google once and she personally signed off on the
check.

I'm not entirely sure how she is able to stay involved with as many different
products and services as she does. It's a remarkable ability.

It's why when she switched over to managing the Local team, we all knew that
Google was finally getting serious about this category.

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T_S_
I was just thinking today while wrestling with a Google presentation doc that
the _UI_ sucks, as does the UI of many Google products. Yesterday I was
wrestling with the Picasa Uploader.

However the totality of the _UX_ is ok, since I really need to share the
information and that part works ok. In fact it is surprising how much
suckiness I will tolerate in that tradeoff.

Sorry if this has nothing to do with Marissa Mayer. The only thing I know
about her is that I keep hearing her name and seeing her picture, which is not
unpleasant. Also, the original Google page was a miracle of minimalism in an
era that gave us the Flash intro. If that was you Marissa, then thanks.
Otherwise I owe another apology to someone.

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Julianhearn
Under her watch google made several design changes which were direct copies of
bing, I would be embarrassed if i was her.

~~~
ct
Like what?

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lovskogen
I can picture it, Marissa as employee nr. 20. "I really want to try this
design thing". "Okay, you can do the page layout, while we code". Then, with
Google's success, the design became a success, which in turn lead Marissa to a
star designer - without much other merits.

No?

~~~
wvoq
I can't help but notice that, with nothing in the way of demonstrable
evidence, you are _presuming_ a female engineer to be incompetent and
referring to her by her first name to boot. You're further implying that
design is trivial work ("Okay, you can do the page layout, while we code"),
subordinate to the real labor of coding. The general consensus I've surmised
on HN is that design and UI are crucial for adoption; do you believe that
Google's success was independent of the way that users used their product?

And if the public face of the world's most powerful search company has your
imprint, isn't that _ipso facto_ evidence of merit? If design was in fact
irrelevant, how could _any_ number of successful designs ever constitute
evidence for the skill of the designer?

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haploid
I don't see anything in the OP's comment that suggested a presumption of
automatic female incompetence.

Design in many realms is not trivial work. At Google, at present, it is by no
means trivial work. But one should bear in mind that consensus converges on
Google's initial success as being predicated almost exclusively on relevance
of results far more than any other factor.

Google destroyed Inktomi and AltaVista with a better search engine, not with a
better interface.

~~~
ajg1977
His comment is written in a quite snide and belittling way. It's hard to avoid
feeling that he either has a low opinion of Marissa Mayer personally, or
female engineers in general.

Also, I would argue that while Google was indeed a better search engine, its
clean minimalist design and fast loading times also did a lot to differentiate
it from Altavista and Yahoo.

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defen
I'm not entirely convinced "Google" and "design" belong in the same sentence,
unless we're talking about their original no-frills homepage and search
results, before adwords and instant and live preview.

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Detrus
The "design" of the original Google search page was not so much in the
aesthetics as the loading time. Every other search engine piled on decoration
and most users had 56K connections. She was the one who convinced the founders
not to imitate the other search engines, not to be portals, just let people
search as quickly as possible.

That might have been more important than their search results in many cases.
Design doesn't get better than that.

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samt
It's often hard to look back and attribute success to the things that one _did
not_ do. I think this more than anything is Marissa Mayer's problem here on HN
- it's tough to publicly point to anything she _did_ , except play the totally
critical role of saying no a million times over. Few people can do that, fewer
still are right.

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derefr
It seems that people who say no for a living—designers, directors, critics,
even big-league VCs—all fare poorly on HN. I wonder why that is?

~~~
nostrademons
Because HN is filled with prospective entrepreneurs and innovative software
engineers, and these people need to say "Yes" in order to do their job.

Startups would never get off the ground if their founders said "No" to
everything. The next great idea would be killed long before it could be
developed enough to prove its worth.

The critical piece is being able to say "Yes" to everything early on, and then
critically look at everything you've said "Yes" to once they're on the table
and say "No, no, and no" to the vast majority of them.

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joelandren
Who is this Marissa Mayer person? I've never heard of her before...

