Mayer's secret weapon is knowledge of Google internal product roadmap, esp gmail. Well I guess that's not much of a secret either.

Any turnaround at Yahoo is going to have to build on the backs of user sign up which mean yahoo mail will need to start killing it against gmail. I would be surprised if we didn't see a revamped and rebranded (cough ymail) email launched at a big press event in the next 5-6 months.

I wonder if the Sparrow acquisition was accelerated when she left because Google decided they needed to accelerate their gmail roadmap too.