I can clarify what I mean, and it's not that she's simply ridden on other's coattails. She operated on her own and fantastically competently in what she did there. However, AFAIK, she did not originate or lead the early direction or kickoff of any of the products she worked on at Google. These were all products with directions and ideas that others put in place.
She lead efforts to broaden the appeal and usability of all of these things once they already existed. This was not easy effort, or easy work. It has challenges and requires smart thinking like the other parts of product development. Simply figuring out what to measure can often require enormous creativity.
These are very different skillsets and very few people have the skills to cross the boundaries from initiate to grow to sustain. She seems to have good skills in the grow and sustain areas, but I'm not aware of her having ever started any major product from scratch.
If you look at what she's been doing at Yahoo this has carried through. She's tried to initiate changes to grow and change direction of existing products, and she's tried acquiring other existing products. But she hasn't kicked off a whole new class of "thing" at Yahoo from scratch.
I know comparisons to Jobs is being thrown around here, but I don't think that's fair. He was such an outlier that I don't think it's very instructive to make those comparisons. Mayer needs to be compared to other more "prosaic" CEOs. Even her Yahoo predecessors. Even her former Google bosses.
I'm pretty sure at this point that she hasn't been doing what's needed as a CEO of a large company. I'm not even sure she's brought much more to the table than her Yahoo predecessors.
Think about this, the biggest Yahoo news since she's taken over has been the possibility of a sale and revelation that the corporate portfolio is essentially worthless minus its investment stakes in other companies. This was true before she started and remains true today. She has had no effective change in Yahoo despite being there for a while.
What is Yahoo? It's a holding company that holds stakes in other companies and has a legacy media and internet arm that could be shut down tomorrow with almost no bottom-line impact to the company.
Here's an example strategy that she should be undertaking:
0) Yahoo! changes names to Y!
1) All Y! products are to be spun out as individual businesses with Y! as the majority shareholder. 49% of each company should be offered up in a near-term IPO.
2) Y! will spend raised cash on purchasing stakes in other companies a la Alibaba.
3) Y! will form a both a Startup investment arm with significant seed capital and a Startup accelerator called Y!-Combine. To help enable success, these companies (and other acquisitions) get access to Y!'s existing technology portfolio, server/compute infrastructure and advertising network.
4) Y! will start a technology R&D arm called Y!-Research that will research technologies it can add it its portfolio of startup and acquisition enabling technologies. Any technology reaching a significant enough maturity level will be evaluated for sale, spin-out or open sourced.
There. 4 steps that convert Yahoo from a whatever it is into a technology holding company with 4 continuous growth options and almost no headline grabbing layoffs needed. In fact she can start hiring all the people to make this possible today.