Mayer takes over Yahoo

The big headline from yesterday in tech was Yahoo’s hiring of veteran Googler Marissa Mayer. For more in this story, please consult all Marketplace shows in the last 12 hours or the web itself. On said web, you may come across the clean and economical Google.com home page, still clean and simple after all these years, still resisting the urge to clutter up with a ton of ads and links. That’s Mayer’s handiwork. This morning, I checked other tech news on Google News, which was intuitive and simple. That’s Mayer as well. I also checked my Gmail, again Mayer.

Clutter and navigation are huge problems for Yahoo, so the hiring will hopefully bring something new and better to everyone’s favorite web gateway from 1996.

I think it also matters a lot that Mayer came into Google (as employee #20) as an engineer. She gets the guts of how the thing works. That, plus her astounding resume, should grease the path to reform for her tenure at Yahoo.