She was very successful at Google. Her taste drove much of Google's early design aesthetic. Why is the landing page mostly blank? In large part because Marissa insisted.
"There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever."
She said that in 2005. And a clean design was quite revolutionary at the time--yahoo and all the other internet portals were cluttered and sticky.
She isn't solely responsible for this aesthetic of course, but it really was her driving much of the theory.
See also, eg, https://daringfireball.net/2008/03/kahney_jackass (the original citation has fallen off the net, unfortunately) where Marissa is cited as being the driving force behind most product look and feel.
I remember Larry saying that in reality for a long time the homepage was spare because Sergey's HTML sucked (or vice versa).
I worked on a project that fell under her umbrella. I have seen up close some of the things she gets blamed for. She was demanding, a workaholic and stubborn in some of her choices. E.g. there was this one change that she —through her PM— insisted on, without any knobs, even if we pretty much knew that a vocal minority were going to be unhappy.
On the other hand, she did pick good people to lead the project, even if I wasn't enthusiastic about every single decision taken by her or them. Because she worked so much, it was easy to get feedback from her, too. :-) I also appreciated that she gave props to our team at a public event when we least expected it.
Overall, she wasn't a perfect leader, but she wasn't as bad or just lucky as some claim.
She said that after the announcement of a partnership with AOL. But I believe it to be very, very unlikely that she was the main force to avoid this change. Since it was a characteristic that had come from the creation of the site. But maybe make the other products have a similarity. Or rather, always remember the central page of google was her responsibility.
"There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever."
She said that in 2005. And a clean design was quite revolutionary at the time--yahoo and all the other internet portals were cluttered and sticky.
She isn't solely responsible for this aesthetic of course, but it really was her driving much of the theory.
See also, eg, https://daringfireball.net/2008/03/kahney_jackass (the original citation has fallen off the net, unfortunately) where Marissa is cited as being the driving force behind most product look and feel.