So, Mayer's job is cut out for her.  Enact the most successful business transformation this side of Steve Jobs.  Good luck. 

She has some things going for her, though.  For one, Google's grown mighty big, so big that its users might like an alternative set of services to provide some healthy competition.  Two, Google's employees may be getting a little restless.  Earlier today, an email startup called Streak posted a poaching call to Google's employees that gave the following reasons for leaving the company:

Googlers: We have nothing against Google, in fact, Streak's founders are ex-Google/ex-startup people, but we think you should take the plunge and join Streak because you can: Launch stuff faster - No PM bureaucracy.  No exec approvals.  No insanely complex and interdependent infrastructure.  Just listen to users and launch stuff as fast as you can build it.  Innovate on Gmail, not just maintain it - ever wished you could make email better?  You can, without being on the Gmail team.  We've built infrastructure to easily build on top of Gmail.  Feel more connected to the end user - your work will have a direct impact on making users lives better.  You won't be 3 or 4 levels of indirection removed from users

Think Mayer has a few ideas that Schmidt, Page, or sheer bureaucracy made impossible?  Guess where she might get a chance to implement them. 

To make Yahoo really work, though, Mayer's got to do more than win some incremental tech and talent wars with her main rival.  Yahoo's got to find an identity and to do that, maybe Yahoo's got to do something seriously radical.  Something like:



1) Embrace its role as the preeminent media company of the Internet age.  Yahoo already gets more traffic to its content than most websites could ever dream of.  But it's never really embraced its potential as a serious competitor to every single media business.  With its scale, it could completely reinvent the online display advertising business, which would be great for everyone. ( Hey, she did once say her childhood dream was to be CEO of Disney!) 

2) Go mobile first.  You know how in media, everyone talks about being digital first.  What if Yahoo just bet the house on mobile?  After all, "Mobile Is Where the Growth Is." 



3) Build a Facebook competitor with your huge audience, Flickr, a dash of Instagram, and a whole lot of privacy.  Media sharing is what drives social media.  Take that lesson to heart and double down on Flickr, using it as a social (and mobile!)  play instead of trying to build or acquire a better social presence.  Offer people a $3 a year data tracking opt out plan. ( Bonus!  Now you have their credit card information.) 

4) Take on Bloomberg and Thompson Reuters.  Google might be tough to take on in the early going, so maybe Mayer should lead her company into battle against these two information giants. 

5) Buy Twitter.  Hey, why not?  You're the world's portal the web; so's Twitter, actually. 

6) Actually come up with a new product.  At this point, we're kind of used to the idea that only Apple comes up with new stuff.  Create and launch a completely new product.