PayPal president tops Yahoo

PayPal president Scott Thompson will become Yahoo's new CEO.

The position has been vacant since September, when the company fired Carol Bartz. Thompson will replace the temporary CEO of Tim Morse, who will return to his post of CFO.
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Thompson since 2008 was president of PayPal, a division of eBay. Yahoo’s statement on the appointment of Thompson emphasizes that under his leadership, PayPal has more than doubled its number of active users and its revenues.

According to observers, over the past few years, eBay and PayPal have become a kind of breeding ground for stable and reliable leaders who are able to manage complex financial and business processes. If Thompson has something in common with other top managers of the company he has just left, then he is not Carol Bartz.

With a bachelor’s degree in accounting and computer science from a small private college in Massachusetts — he is not the standard Silicon Valley executive who graduated from Stanford. Most of his career, he was engaged in technology in financial firms, the longest - in Visa and its various divisions. He joined PayPal, part of the eBay universe, in 2005, after being a technical director for three years before becoming president. And he is familiar with the need to head one of the largest technology companies in the world.

Thompson’s appointment may mean that Yahoo is no longer for sale. As reported, several private equity firms showed an interest in buying a 20% stake in Yahoo, and Microsoft signed a confidential agreement with Yahoo in November to get access to the company's financial information, which could be the first sign of a potential deal. In 2008, Microsoft has already tried to acquire Yahoo - as reported, for more than 44 billion dollars.

The Yahoo search engine is still the second most popular in the world, but it is losing much of the traffic in favor of Google and Facebook. The company's net profit in the third quarter of this year decreased by 26% compared with the previous year. Maybe Geek Thompson is really exactly what Yahoo needs right now.

via Mashable , VentureBeat , The Atlantic Wire