What Google Lost When Mayer Left

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- When Marissa Mayer was hired as Yahoo! (YHOO) CEO from Google (GOOG) there was a lot of talk about her sex, her youth and her engineering credentials.

That was a little over a month ago. Since then Yahoo! stock has declined 6.2%. It really fell out of bed when, as the Associated Press reported, Yahoo! announced it would not be passing the gains from selling Alibaba and Yahoo! Japan on to shareholders, that it would invest that in the business.

Google, meanwhile, has powered ahead. It's up nearly 14% since Mayer left. Put that into perspective. Since Mayer joined Yahoo!, Google's value has gained by about twice Yahoo!'s market cap.

While a lot of people think they know what Yahoo! got in Mayer, there has been little talk about what Google lost with her departure. That can be summed up in one word.

Humility.

Google is now putting ads for its tablet on its formerly clean, Mayer-designed home page, as Mashable notes. Its reaction to the loss by its leading OEM, Samsung, in Apple's patent lawsuit is summed up in one word by Insider Monkey -- defiance.

Google's executive suite is now a lot more testosterone-driven than it was. Of the three women in top management, two do "woman stuff" -- PR and non-profit work. The exception is Susan Wojcicki, who is senior vice president for advertising.

Jared Newman of Time says Google is now more focused on search. But it's also focused on creating a GoogleWorld for GoogleHeads, tying Gmail accounts to its Google Plus social network, and using knowledge from those networks in searches by default.

Then there's the Googlization of Motorola. The workforce has been cut 20% and the product line pared to just a few phones and tablets, as ZDNet reports.

What of Yahoo!? Except for a few key hires, most of them female, including new Chief Marketing Officer Kathy Savitt, an entrepreneur and former Amazon.com (AMZN) executive, VentureBeat reports, we haven't heard much.

Business Insider writes the staff is getting iPhones. But what are they doing with them? Are they working on apps, on cloud, are they charting new horizons in media, product marketing or branding? It's been pretty much radio silence. Reporters and analysts are getting antsy.

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