To be fair, I'm willing to see this question posed as "Can Marisa's Yahoo!" as opposed to "Can pre-Marisa's Yahoo!", and I see them potentially being two different things. In some ways, like Apple before Jobs can back, and Apple after Jobs came back.
Where does all the bizarre over-the-top Marisa-love on HN come from? Yahoo couldn't actually be wasting money on paying for this PR could it?
I'm beginning to think that there is some bizarre Natalie Portman nerd obsession phenomenon going on with Marisa. There certainly hasn't been an ounce of business evidence that she has any more gifts than the average CEO.
1. Since Mayer was hired, Yahoo stock is up approximately 64%. This is the measurement by which all CEOs are eventually and finally judged. Whether that trend will sustain itself for the long term has yet to be seen, but nobody can see the future. We can only examine what data we have today. And we do have this correlation (acknowledging that correlation != causation).
2. There is a buzz about Yahoo. That hasn't happened with Yahoo's prior CEOs for a long time. For a consumer company, if you have no buzz, guaranteed that consumers won't be interested. Especially for online consumer companies, where customer loyalty seems to switch so easily and quickly.
3. There have been a number of product revamps that have been well received. The biggest one obviously is Flickr. Another one was Yahoo. When was the last time we saw a well-received Yahoo product revamp before Mayer?
Yeah, Mayer's time there has been short. But in less than a year, she's accomplished more than Yahoo has accomplished in several years.
Everybody loves a good underdog story, and Marissa has the background and qualifications to be a potentially great underdog story.
The evidence is how much Yahoo is in the news lately. Before her strategic moves, everybody had written Yahoo off. Now, everybody is genuinely interested in Yahoo. Their products are actually starting to feel cool again. That is seriously impressive work in such a short time period, and she's just getting started.
Because she came from Google and, by all appearances, is trying to turn Yahoo into Google's worst nightmare. That's incredibly intriguing to the audience.
