Marissa Mayer, please don’t leave Google!
Marissa Mayer is here to stay after internet rumours spread about her departure
To say I was relieved at the recent reports from Valleywag.com that "Marissa Mayer is Sticking to Google Like Icing on a Cupcake" is a slight understatement. I have in previous blog posts praised Marissa Mayer's great work and her commitment to the Google brand, she was Google's first female engineer back in 1999 and assumed the responsibilities of directing "user interface and web server experience".
Being the 19th employee of Google.com undoubtedly gave Marissa Mayer some strong financial stability from Google's success, she remained focused on many parts of the customer and user experience, in 2002 in her first public interview 3 years on from joining the company she spoke much about how Google's user experience was becoming a "what you want, when you want it", this was the year that Google started to really refine and innovate solutions such as Google News, and was in the middle of a patent lawsuit against the now defunct search engine Overture.
With Mayer's strong creative thinking the company continued to grow through 2003-04, on the other hand in 2003 Marissa Mayer presented a slightly unathordox way of "counting users" using Google search, inserting a small counter on the Google homepage, this small counter was powered by a web cookie which stored information about the user's computer, not the user themselves searching. Many became concerned at exactly what was happening with this information, remember this was back in 2003 before Google really did start going after ALL of your data!
The one thing that never ceased to amaze me about Mayer was her constant way of saying Google hasn't even started to reach it's full potential yet, from way back in 2003 in a USAToday.com article when Mayer said "We've come a long way, but we believe search is in its infancy" to 2008 where she blogs about where search will go in 10 years from now.
It's not that I believed it to be bad, but I was curious as to where the progression in Mayer's work really was, had she helped to develop a good user experience for the Google advertising platform which has bought Google a large percentage of it's revenue income, or had she helped realize the true potential of Youtube.com and help mold it's user experience into something more usable then it's original design?
The thing that has captured my attention moreso with Marissa Mayer is her speeches, especially this one from Stanford University:
This is what Twitter users have to say about Marissa Mayer:
https://search.twitter.com/search?q=marissa+mayer
And this is what Friendfeeders are saying about Marissa Mayer:
https://friendfeed.com/search?q=marissa+mayer&who=everyone
Now, of course I shouldn't be that bothered about this unsubstianted rumour, particularly as it comes from the worst and most uninformative news site ever Valleywag.com, or should I say *ahem* valleywag.gawker.com, Owen Thomas, editor of Valleywag.com is the master of twisting words to his advantage, and the whole concept of Valleywag plays upon whispers and murmurs in Silcon Valley including the rumours of Marissa Mayer leaving and then expanded and turned into a "news" story. But Marissa, if you ever read this through all the noise of Valleywag, Twitter, Friendfeed etc just know that I don't believe you have truly finished your work at Google, don't leave just yet!
Originally Published at:
https://www.joshchandlerblog.com