Can Marissa Mayer Save Yahoo?

Marissa Mayer is sitting in URLs, theYahoo cafeteria, making the case for the future of a company that almost everyone in Silicon Valley views as doomed. It’s been a long July, in which Mayer’s one-year anniversary as chief executive officer was marked with an uninspiring second-quarter earnings report. Mayer prefers to focus on the company’s increase in Web traffic. She won’t give numbers but says it’s enough to erase the entire decline from the previous year. “Name another Internet giant that went through three years of decline and then started to grow again,” she says for this Businessweek cover story. “It’s a very good sign.”