Yahoo was first introduced at Stanford University as a web services provider. During its journey,
it had found highs and lows. Once upon a time, Yahoo was one of the biggest tech companies in
the world. The founders of Yahoo are Jerry Yang and David Filo and founded in January 1994.
Both of them graduated from Stanford University. Through the worldwide web, they both
developed a website called “Jerry and David’s guide”. Later in April 1994, Jerry and David’s
guide renamed Yahoo. The acronym of YAHOO is “Yet Another Hierarchically Organized
Oracle ”. On January 18th, 1995 the domain developed called Yahoo.com.
Throughout the 90’s, yahoo made rapid growth in the world. It has diversified into the web portal
and by numerous high-profile companies. During the 90’s era, yahoo was the internet for
everyone, the only site that had news on politics, sports, and finance in its directory. These three
were in hike and services remained popular as an oath, Verizon’s name for its AOL-Yahoo media
mashup. Yahoo added email, shopping, classifieds, personals, games, travel, weather, maps,
people, celebrity, search, chats, a kid-oriented version called Yahooligans, and an online
magazine in early 1998. Gradually it had found success. Their competitors were Excite,
Infoseek, and Lycos. These portals were providing everything on the net in one place. They gave
a big fight to yahoo and yahoo made its successful remarks.
Yahoo demised for 6 reasons –
1. Yahoo refused to buy Google for $1 million: This is the biggest mistake committed by
Yahoo when Larry Page and Sergei Brin approached them to buy Google. Pagerank was
a small startup created by them, they needed to concentrate on their studies so they
planned to sell their site to the company. But yahoo refused their offer.
2. Failed to buy Facebook: Yahoo repeated the same mistake as did for Google. It failed to
buy Facebook and just ignored the offer. Yahoo initially offered $1 billion to Facebook
but later it came down to $850 million.
3. Hired wrong CEOs: Inquirer report released the data on hiring the wrong CEOs and they
commit the same mistake again and again. None of the CEOs of yahoo had got the long
strategic vision.
4. Called itself a media company: Yahoo is not the media company but its tech company.
Yahoo failed in addressing them as a tech company and was wrongly portrayed as a
media company.
5. Declined Microsoft’s acquisition: This is another nail in the coffin in 2008. Microsoft
showed interest to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion. But the company refused their offer.
6. Yahoo never had the right strategic vision: The students of Stanford University
developed Yahoo and they lack in creating the strategic vision. Their vision was not as
big as their competitors and this made a huge impact in the world. Therefore the above reasons has majorly hit Yahoo to group its site in the world and people
shifted to Google. Opportunities are very rare, if Yahoo would have grabbed the opportunities
then it would not have had faced failure but they refused the golden opportunities offered by
Google and Facebook.
Failure of Yahoo – the unseen story
