Marissa Mayer, the controversial former Yahoo CEO who has now left the company following Verizon’s purchase, expressed her excitement to use Gmail again this week.
Speaking at the Accelerate-Her Forum in London, “a program dedicated to helping women succeed in the tech industry,” Mayer reportedly declared, “I look forward to using Gmail again. [I] am always faster when using a tool I designed myself,” according to Consumerist.
Mayer previously worked at Google, where she was one of its earliest employees and its first female engineer.
“I will continue to use the excellent Yahoo Mail too. The team’s hard work paid off with a dramatically better product,” Mayer clarified in a series of tweets following her talk. “This out-of-context comment was about Gmail’s design and how it has evolved since my work in the early days.”
I will continue to use the excellent Yahoo Mail too. The team's hard work paid off with a dramatically better product. https://t.co/ZQyTvjULlW
— marissamayer (@marissamayer) June 14, 2017
This out-of-context comment was about Gmail's design and how it has evolved since my work in the early days. https://t.co/ZQyTvjULlW
— marissamayer (@marissamayer) June 14, 2017
Under Mayer’s reign as CEO, two major security breaches were discovered at the company, compromising the data of over one billion users.
Despite the rsecurity breaches occurring in 2013 and 2014, Yahoo failed to announce what had happened to its users until 2016.
In both incidents, users had their names, email addresses, dates of birth, security questions and answers, phone numbers, and hashed passwords stolen by hackers, including the details of over 150,000 government employees.
In 2016, the CEO also faced a lawsuit that claimed she purposely purged male employees. Several employees of Tumblr, the popular micro-blogging platform owned by Yahoo, also claimed that Mayer and her management were responsible for the decline of the social network.
In January 2016, Mayer faced heavy criticism after making a joke to employees about the number of layoffs at the company.
“No layoffs… this week!” joked Mayer, in response to questions raised by concerned employees.
A New York Times report also claimed that Mayer had denied repeated requests for additional investment in Yahoo’s cybersecurity, with the security team allegedly being referred to as “paranoids” inside the company.
Following both hacking incidents, and the revelation that Yahoo had been secretly scanning user emails for U.S. intelligence agencies, Verizon reportedly sought a significant discount on its purchase of the company.
In January, Fortune claimed in a report that Mayer, who has previously complained about “gender-charged” press, would receive nearly $141 million merger pay for the purchase of Yahoo by Verizon.
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook.
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