Today in Tech: Can Marissa Mayer do a Steve Jobs at Yahoo?; Infy's Marathon & GS on tech spending

Can Marissa Mayer do a Steve Jobs at Yahoo?

 When Marissa Mayer takes over as Yahoo!'s CEO later today, she will be the sixth person to occupy that slippery chair in the last five years, including interim CEOs. She is moving from Google. She was employee number 20 at the search engine giant, and worked there for over 13 years. Some of that stickiness will help Yahoo.

However, the bigger question is whether she can turn Yahoo around. It has been in a mess in the recent years, losing market share and facing dwindling revenues. Yahoo badly needs a break.

Comparison with what Steve Jobs did to Apple is tempting. In fact, at a Tech conference on Monday, Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and now an investor, made a reference to Jobs resurrecting Apple: "...it’s hard to overestimate how screwed Apple was in 1997... Tech companies can in fact be turned around. The problem is, there aren’t a lot of Steve Jobs characters running around."

In this case, the reference to Jobs is not too off the mark. A story in Mashable notes: "In profiles of Mayer, she comes across as a kindred spirit to Apple’s Steve Jobs in both her attention to detail and her allegiance to a design aesthetic. In one anecdote, Mayer asked her team to test 41 gradiations of blue to see which one consumers preferred best."

But, to stretch these comparisons beyond a point would be unfair to both Mayer and Yahoo - and not very useful. No two companies, no two persons, no two problems are alike. It is what it is. And going by this video, it looks as if Mayer learnt that lesson pretty early.

To make sense of what Infosys CEO SD Shibulal keeps repeating about it running a marathon and not a sprint, I looked back at Infosys stockmarket performance (maximum available from Moneycontrol.com) against Sensex, under different CEOs.

Here it is.

(Click to enlarge image)

GS cuts IT spending forecast

In a report published yesterday, Goldman Sachs said it has reduced its 2012 global IT spending growth forecast to 3% (from 4%) thanks to lower GDP growth in advanced economies and a lower global fixed investment forecast. It has reduced its advanced economy IT spending forecast to 2% (from 3%), and emerging market IT spending forecast to 6% (7% ).

Also of interest

• Migrant Workers in China Face Competition from Robots: Technology Review
• Facebook in Asia: Growth Deceleration Continues: Forbes
• Automating the bank’s back office: McKinsey Quarterly

More on Mayer:

• Yahoo’s Mayer Brings Google Product Prowess To Turnaround Bid : Bloomberg
• Google's Mayer Takes Over as Yahoo Chief: WSJ
• 5 things Marissa Mayer will change about Yahoo: Cnet
• A speech Mayer gave at Stanford

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soYKFWqVVzg[/youtube]