他她話題:梅爾能否馴服雅虎(下)?

She joined Google aged 24 after studying computer science at Stanford University, becoming custodian of the homepage as well as other core services such as Gmail. "I had the rare privilege of watching a service scale 10,000 times over and build the back-end infrastructure," she says, when asked about her main achievement there.

梅爾在斯坦福大學(Stanford University)計算機科學專業畢業後，於24歲之齡加入谷歌。她在谷歌負責管理主頁和Gmail等其他一些核心服務。當被問及她在谷歌的主要成就時，梅爾表示："我享有罕見的特權，目睹了一項服務增長了一萬倍，並且構建了後臺基礎設施。"

"At heart, Marissa is a product person, not a media or tech person," says Dan Crow, chief technology officer at Songkick, a live music website, who worked with Ms Mayer in the late 2000s and believes she is an "inspired choice" to run Yahoo.

現場音樂網站Songkick首席技術官丹•克羅(Dan Crow)表示："本質上，梅里莎是一位做產品的人，而不是媒體或者科技人士。"他曾於21世紀前10年的後幾年和梅爾共事，認爲她是執掌雅虎的"卓越人選"。

But Ms Mayer was seen as being sidelined in her later years at Google and emerges with a mixed reputation as a manager. One underling called her a "demanding diva", while a peer describes her as a "high latency micromanager".

但有人認爲，梅爾在谷歌的最後幾年被邊緣化了，成爲一名譭譽參半的經理人。一名下屬稱她爲"苛刻的天后"，而同行則描述她爲一名"深度潛伏、事無鉅細的管理者"。

Josh McFarland, another ex-Google staffer now running data-marketing company TellApart, dismisses backbiters who say Ms Mayer rode on the coat-tails of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google's co-founders. "You can't hide in a 20-person company," he says."You can't rise so far and be so close to the founders and not be brilliant. Larry and Sergey do not suffer fools."

如今在經營數據營銷公司TellApart的谷歌前員工喬希•麥克法蘭(Josh McFarland)對那些背後嚼舌頭、認爲梅爾不過是搭了谷歌聯合創始人拉里•佩奇(Larry Page)和謝爾蓋•布林(Sergey Brin)順風車的人很是不以爲然。他說："在一家只有20個人的公司裏你無處躲藏。不聰明不可能升的這麼高，和創始人保持如此密切的關係。拉里和布林可不會容忍傻瓜。"

Crucial to her success at Yahoo will be answering what the website, visited by hundreds of millions of people, is really for in an age of Facebook and Google dominance.

她在雅虎能否取得成功，關鍵要看她如何回答這個問題：在Facebook和谷歌主導的時代，對於雅虎這家有數億用戶的網站應如何定位？

Some, however, suspect the posting will serve to boost Ms Mayer's profile yet further, regardless of whether she can answer that question. "If she does something great, huge win," says a Yahoo alumnus. "If she can't, she can say it wasn't fixable and will still have had the opportunity of sitting in a CEO position."

不過，有人懷疑，不管她能否回答這個問題，擔任雅虎首席執行官這個職位都會進一步提升梅爾的資歷。一位雅虎校友表示："如果她能做出一些偉大的成就，那就是巨大的勝利。如果不能，她可以說雅虎已經無可救藥，她仍有機會擔任一家公司的首席執行官。"