"Mayer consulted the W3C HTML specs and found a tag (the align=right table attribute) that would allow the right-hand table to load before the search results, adding a revenue stream that has been critical to Google’s financial success."
Is there any way to independently confirm that she was the one who consulted the spec and made this discovery? Because otherwise it sounds an awful lot like an executive taking credit for the work of someone underneath them.
It could also be a journalist sloppily attributing the work of someone underneath her. Also, though, she's pretty technically deep; she was doing AI before she started doing usability at the big G, and it wouldn't be at all surprising for her to come up with an idea like that, especially given that we're talking about a time when Google was a small company (this was when they were first adding AdWords; would have been in 2000 or 2001?)
Under some circumstances you might argue that there's more leverage in an executive like Marissa delegating work like this to someone else. But maybe sometimes the raw brainpower you bring to bear on a technical problem can really make a billion-dollar difference.
Is there any way to independently confirm that she was the one who consulted the spec and made this discovery? Because otherwise it sounds an awful lot like an executive taking credit for the work of someone underneath them.