You overestimate the downside of a reputation hit. The business world loves failures, and in fact it promotes them as people experienced with problems.
One of the biggest things she's going to probably have to do is lay off thousands of people. The business world might love that, but the folks losing their jobs probably won't. Turnaround CEOs take a lot of flak.
Look at the previous CEOs of Yahoo. Even excluding Scott Thompson (who lied on his resume) NONE of them have even held executive positions, or done anything significant in the business world. It doesn't seem like people forgave them just because Yahoo is a horrible mess.
Yeah, since leaving. My point is that Yahoo is a career destroyer for its CEOs-none of them have held a significant position afterwards. Bartz even had a great track record before (and during!) her tenure at Yahoo, but that doesn't seem to have helped.
They haven't really had that many CEOs, and Mayer is young enough to weather anything that might happen. I can't imagine she isn't going into this without an upper hand, It's not like she was looking to jump ship (maybe she was) and Yahoo was the only company who would hire her.
