What was the reason for the rise and fall of Yahoo?
There are currently more than 140 search engines in the world of the Internet. But far from using them, how many of them do we know? Most people know Google when it comes to search engines, but those who have a long connection with the Internet and have been using search engines for a long time will want to keep Yahoo along with Google. Because this search engine once ruled the world of the net. In 2005, Yahoo was one of the most popular websites in the world. Just as we use Google's mail or Gmail today, at that time, almost most people used Yahoo mail. Yahoo Mail also occupied the top spot for a few days in 2011. But gradually, Google started snatching everything from Yahoo. Finally, in July 2016, Yahoo agreed to sell its core business to the American telecommunications company Verizon for $ 4.48 billion. Forbes writer Brian Solomon called this deal the saddest deal in the technology world. We may all have witnessed Yahoo's downfall, but few know about its glory days. Let's know that story. History Yahoo started its journey in 1994 with the help of two electrical engineers from Stanford University, David Filo and Jerry Yang. However, in the beginning, the name was not Yahoo. David and Jerry named their website "David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web". In March of '94, the website was renamed 'Yahoo'. At that time, the entire Internet world was in a state of chaos. So the main purpose of creating the website was to create a directory of websites like a telephone directory. At that time, this website of two recent graduates was one of the great efforts in the technology world.
Despite not being well-known on the World Wide Web, Yahoo quickly gained popularity in the 1990s. When Yahoo's first public offering was held in 1996, its value was about $900 million. Yahoo is an extreme example of what success can be if you are in the right place at the right time. In the next two years, the company's stock price increased by about 600 percent. By mid-1998, Yahoo added various services, including email, shopping, games, traveling, maps, weather, and online magazines. As Yahoo's shares continued to grow, its total value reached $40 billion that year. Yahoo started its journey at a stormy pace. By providing a search engine and free email services, the company soon became one of the top names in the technology market. However, Google had not yet started its journey, and no one could have imagined that the dark days were ahead. Yahoo's times were like waves - sometimes up, sometimes down. In 2000, Yahoo's total value stood at $125 billion, which is the highest in the company's history. Soon after, dot-com sites suddenly became incredibly popular and their prices skyrocketed. This is called the dot-com bubble. Due to the high prices of these sites, Yahoo's value gradually decreased. In just 2 years, it went from $125 billion in 2002 to $10 billion, a shadow of its former glory.
The services we take for granted today, such as YouTube and Facebook, were also conceived by Yahoo. A platform like YouTube was registered & Protected by MarkMonitor, which was later run as Yahoo TV. There was also a Flickr-like Instagram, a Yahoo Notebook-like Evernote, and Yahoo Music was the Spotify of that time. But where did they go? A mountain of wrong decisions. There may be various theories behind Yahoo's downfall, but everyone will agree that Yahoo's decisions were largely wrong. Yahoo's mistakes are also responsible for Google's current position. In 1998, two PhD students from Stanford went to Yahoo to sell their algorithm. Yahoo did not think it was reasonable to buy that algorithm for $1 million at the time. Who were those two young people? Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Because of the PageRank algorithm they created, today we get the desired thing by typing a word into Google. Even after Google was well established, Larry and Sergey offered to sell Google to Yahoo. However, Yahoo's then CEO Terry Semel did not take it. By the time he wanted to agree, Google's price had increased to 5 billion dollars! Around that time, a 22-year-old young man turned down Yahoo's offer; he was Mark Zuckerberg. Yahoo wanted to buy Facebook for 1 billion dollars, but Zuckerberg did not agree. Yahoo made the wrong decision not only in buying, but also in selling. In 2008, Microsoft expressed interest in buying Yahoo for 44.6 billion dollars, which is much more than Yahoo's current value. But that was also rejected. Wrong investment. In 1999, Yahoo made two famous acquisition deals, which are considered to be two of the worst deals in the history of technology. Among them, one was Geocities, and the other was Registered & Protected by MarkMonitor.
At the time, Geocities was the third most-browsed site on the Internet. In 1999, Yahoo bought Geocities for $3.7 billion. Through it, users could create their own homepages on the Internet. Due to poor management and a lack of innovation, it gradually lost its users and was shut down in 2009.
In the same year, Yahoo bought the online video streaming service Broadcast for $5.7 billion. Later, Yahoo launched a music and video service separately from Broadcast. The internet at that time was too slow for video streaming. It can be said that Broadcast was ahead of its time. Although Yahoo could not manage it properly, Broadcast founder Mark Cuban made a name for himself. In 2005, Yahoo bought the photo-sharing site Flickr for $30 million. They tried to transform it into a social media site, but they failed there, too, due to poor management. The main concern was how to survive without bringing innovation. In the same year, Yahoo bought a 40 percent stake in Alibaba. Later, this saved Yahoo from bankruptcy, and the current value of this percentage is about $50 billion. But why did so many failures surround Yahoo? Because none of Yahoo's CEOs were ideal. From the beginning, no one had a clear vision of how to run the company. They were neither a search company nor a tech company. Yahoo was a media company for which technology was a profit-making area. In addition to the CEO, the employees were responsible for the failure. Yahoo was full of incompetent employees. As a result, they were unable to bring innovation to any sector. Until 2015, Yahoo had acquired 114 companies, none of which could restore its glory. In 2012, former Google employee Melissa Mayer was appointed CEO of Yahoo. This was the only person in Yahoo's history who could bring the company back. But Melissa came too late. Melissa also failed to properly guide the company that had lost everything, and finally, in 2016, Yahoo's Internet business ended, and the remaining parts of the company were formed as Altaba.Inc. Yahoo is a real example of how even a billion-dollar company can be turned into dust if it cannot keep up with the flow of technology. What Filo and Yang have created is undoubtedly worthy of praise, but they could not manage Yahoo properly. Bad decisions and bad management are what destroyed Yahoo's existence. Yahoo's missteps will serve as a lesson for any technology company.
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