Why Marissa Mayer May Be Wrong For Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO)

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) may have made the wrong choice in getting Marissa Mayer as its CEO, Nicholas Carlson says in a discussion on CNBC.

Though the author and Business Insider reporter did acknowledge that Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) was a mess when Mayer transferred there from Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL), he noted two things that Mayer did not do which leads him to wonder whether Mayer was not the right executive to turn around the ailing giant.

“She had this air cover from Alibaba which is why the stock is up. […] Really, what Mayer had was a unique situation that turnaround CEOs never get. […] That is, how does she do running the company, getting it ready for the future when no one is really looking at the core? Is she going to take a lot of cost out of the business? Is she going to get revenues growing again? Those are the two big things, and she didn’t,” Carlson said.

According to Carlson, his book is about the first two years Mayer spent running Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO). Investors have been bullish about Yahoo in the past before the Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE:BABA) IPO because it was a way of gaining exposure to Alibaba before it even become public in the U.S.

Essentially, Carlson implies that Mayer should have done a better job with the fundamentals of Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) before her shield expired with the Alibaba IPO. In an earlier part of the discussion, Carlson acknowledged that Mayer has certainly made his company run more efficiently but questioned her focus on making Yahoo the apps maker for people’s smartphones because Google and Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) are already there.

Jeffrey Smith’s Starboard Value LP owned about 7.72 million Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) shares by the end of September 2014.