Yahoo did need a visionary but if you look at her bio on wikipedia it tells a different story. It mentions she is known for her attention to detail and she is a usability leader. She joined google as employee #20 after school. She was involved in many important google projects over the span of her career at google overseeing core key project in many cases. Very well rounded person.

To me that sounds like the wrong person to bet my money on. The employee who plays it safe is not right person to transform a dying company that needed radical change. You need a bolder person. Someone with a burning passion or an act to grind.

If you are google employee 20 and you haven't cashed out to build something you always wanted to but didn't have the resources yet I don't think I want you leading the transformation process. I would rather have employee 21 who quit and tried something else and failed.

"An act to grind" sounds so playful! But normally it's "an axe to grind"...a little more sinister twist to it.

This may be the purest distillation of Hacker News brogrammerism I've ever read.

By her own words, she thought Google had a 2% chance of success. Is that not enough risk for one life?

http://fortune.com/2011/10/03/marissa-mayer-i-thought-google...

Also, her experience running hundreds of projects and experiments at another billion dollar tech company is exactly what they wanted. Not whether she does all-nighters and knows Rails. I'm not going to argue that the Yahoo board made the right choice, but you would definitely have made the wrong choice.

>Is that not enough risk for one life?

Who said it wasn't?