And if she had stayed at Google, what would be the next step for her career-wise? She went from vice president of search products to overseeing location and local services. Now she's CEO. You don't think that'll motivate her?
What I was expecting was that she would leave and start some sort cross between 'solve a world issue' with 'easy accessibility' kinds of UI. At Google her strength was having a clear idea of how to speak to users through UX, The Yahoo gig can use that, certainly, but watching the succession of failures and missteps at Yahoo the issues aren't primarily UX or users, it seems like Yahoo is in a major identity crisis about what exactly it actually is.
When one of their recruiters was trying to convince me to join the pitch was this:
"Yahoo is the premier digital media company
Yahoo! delivers amazing personalized digital content and experiences, across devices and around the globe, to vast audiences. We provide engaging and innovative canvases for advertisers to connect with their target audiences using our unique blend of Science + Art + Scale."
To which my response was "Really?", if someone were to ask me what the "Premier digital media company" was I don't think I'd respond "Yahoo!"
Hence my surprise.
It may be that I think 'education/entertainment' more than I think 'discovery' when I think digital media. If Yahoo claimed to be the digital media discovery company that might be the starting point for a bigger vision.
I think when people hear the phrase "digital media", they think of it has traditional-media-delivered-digitally. But I think the internet enables entirely new variations of traditional media, tailor-made for our hypersocial, crowdsourced, and attentionless internet society.
They are a company filled with brilliant engineers (who give us things like Hadoop), yet they only want to be a media company.