History Of Yahoo
Yahoo! or Yahoo! One of the biggest companies in the history of the Internet that many people probably don’t remember now, or don’t even know about.
Because of its importance and the importance of its journey, we will talk about it today, and learn about its beginning and end, its fierce competition with other technology companies, the reasons for its decline, and how things turned out to be what they are today.
If you are one of the golden generation who used the Internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it is essential that you read this article.
But if you are from a newer generation, and have not used Yahoo at all, then you are the person in the world who should read this article to the end.
Hey ho! It is a company that manages and provides a group of services related to the World Wide Web, such as: Yahoo e-mail, search engine, news services, maps, and others.
And before that, it included the popular free messaging service, Yahoo Messenger, which stopped after 20 years of operation in July 2018.
Yahoo was a lot like Google today, with almost everyone on the Internet using one of its services.
Founding of Yahoo!
The story of the company’s inception is somewhat absurd, as it is the result of the shared passion of two Stanford Ph.D. colleagues, Jerry Yang and David Filo.
As these two were so passionate about the Internet, they decided to call themselves “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” in which they collected their favorite sites on the Internet.
Through this website, they collected various links to their favorite sites, and categorized them into multiple sections, as it served as a guide to other websites in the absence of an easy way to browse the Internet.
Then came the famous Netscape Navigator browser, and the young men found that their site was getting millions of visits, and then they had to establish their company.
Which changed its name from Jerry and David’s guide to the World Wide Web to Yahoo in a story stranger than the site’s founding story itself.
Where did the name Yahoo! or Yahoo!
After this resounding success, Jerry and David realized that their company could not continue as Jerry and David’s website directory, and decided to find a new, better name.
Then they did what a normal person would do in their place, they looked through dictionaries and whatever was around them, until they came up with a name they liked very much.
Surely you know it, dear reader, and after that they symbolized each letter with a word in order to convince the world that it is an acronym for a more complex and important name: Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.
Where the word Hierarchical symbolizes Yahoo’s digital methodology in arranging data, while Officious symbolizes user curiosity, and Oracle symbolizes truth and wisdom, referring to what the word divination means in Arabic.
But they faced another problem, which is that the name Yahoo is taken from another company belonging to Ebisco Industries, so they decided to add the exclamation mark “!” at the end of a word to highlight “Yahoo!” To start the brand in 1995.
Yahoo development
The year 1996 witnessed the real launch of Yahoo on the Internet, after which it became one of the most prominent Internet icons in the nineties of the last century.
Yahoo was the marvel of the World Wide Web at that time, and in order to simplify its history and understand the stages of its development, I will present some of its stages in the nineties in the form of points as follows:
a) Reliance on hierarchical algorithms such as Yahoo’s construction and search method, which made its search engine the most integrated, of course in this period in light of the lack of websites.
b) The company’s shares increased by 600% in 1996 after launching its shares to the public, and the company broke many records, for example, its shares jumped in a very short time from $13 to $43.
C) An explosion in the number of Yahoo users, especially with the launch of several services such as news, financial services and others, to access hundreds of thousands of users daily, and this is the time of a very large part of Internet surfers.
d) Millions of advertisers’ money flowed into Yahoo, which at that time was the gateway to the Internet for anyone around the world.
e) Yahoo launched its email service in 1997 after acquiring and rebranding a previous service called Rocket Mail.
f) The number of Yahoo search engine users reached 95 million daily users in 1998, which is a very scary number at this time.
j) The company’s launch of a number of other services such as chatting, weather, tourism, travel, shopping, advertisements, games, in addition to an electronic magazine and others.
Beginning of Yahoo decline and emergence of Google
It didn’t last long for Yahoo, after Yahoo was living its golden period at the end of the nineties, and it was the strongest of all, dominating the Internet, and its market value exceeded $ 125 billion, everything began to collapse.
We cannot say that only one reason led to this downfall, rather it was due to many factors, causes and wrong decisions.
For example, the company made many acquisitions – some of which were worth billions – that were useless and failed, while they did not acquire companies such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, and others.
Also, mismanagement and organization failed many important projects and products of the company, and made its small competitors overcome and crush them completely.
Let us continue in our method by presenting the stages and facts in the form of points until the matter becomes clear to us:
1) Google appeared as a new player in the arena without any marketing plan or effective business model, and Yahoo made the biggest mistake, which is to ignore this player that appeared in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
2) Yahoo refused to buy the Google founders’ Page Rank algorithm for just $1 million, in one of the stupidest and worst decisions ever in the history of the Internet.
3) Google used this more sophisticated and complex algorithm, which helps to rank and rank pages better.
4) The Google algorithm continued to evolve and was able to provide a better experience and results for the user, while Yahoo focused on keeping users on the site for as long as possible.
5) Yahoo acquired many companies instead of developing the services itself, and many of these companies were then sold at prices much lower than they were paid, for example Broadcast, which it bought for $5.7 billion, which it closed years later.
6) Because of poor planning, Yahoo was unable to make most of the companies and services it acquired successful, which led to the loss of a lot of money.
7) Many competitors emerged for Yahoo services and outperformed them, for example, WhatsApp surpassed Yahoo Messenger, Amazon surpassed Yahoo Shopping, …… etc.
8) Google easily overtook Yahoo’s search engine and began to attract advertisers.
9) Finally, Yahoo felt the competition and danger, so it tried to acquire Google, but after Google demanded $5 billion, Yahoo turned a blind eye to the deal.
10) Although Yahoo launched some improvements and new services, it could not compete with Google.
11) Yahoo tried to get a license from Google and use its own search engine, but that made people move to Google and like it much more.
12) Because of Google’s genius algorithm, advertisers rely on it because it achieves much better results than Yahoo ads.
13) Yahoo has been in the market ever since, but it’s not the big company it was in the 90’s.
14) Microsoft tried to acquire Yahoo in 2008 for $44.6 billion, but the company refused.
15) A few months after this rejection, the company’s market value dropped to $14 billion.
16) Yahoo panicked and changed 5 CEOs in just 6 years including Jerry Yang. Anyone who didn’t achieve quick results was eliminated.
17) Between 2013 and 2016 Yahoo lost hundreds of millions of users to its Yahoo Mail after a massive hack and leak.
18) Verizon acquired Yahoo in 2017 for $4.5 billion, after its value in the 1990s exceeded $125 billion.
The saga of what was once the internet empire ends.
Reasons for the decline of Yahoo!
Of course, you will have deduced many of the reasons for the collapse and deterioration of the company through our narration of historical events, which are specifically:
The company’s failure to acquire Google: In 2002, Yahoo had a great opportunity to buy Google for one billion dollars, but due to the reluctance of the company’s CEO (Terry Semel) at the time, the value was raised to more than 5 billion dollars, so the company ignored Google’s offer.
Not taking advantage of Flicker: Flickr is one of the companies acquired by Yahoo before the development of Instagram and Facebook, as it was used to exchange photos before them, so it was more like a social networking site, and if it had been taken care of, it would have been a lifeline for Yahoo, but unfortunately it did not This happens due to mismanagement.
Not buying Facebook: In 2006, Yahoo was close to buying Facebook, but because the company offered only one billion dollars to Facebook, the deal was rejected.
The failure of Tumblr: Yahoo had bought the Tumbler platform to make up for it, but unfortunately this did not happen.
The lack of a clear vision for the company: There was no future vision for the company, and not one of the executives could draw the future of the company.
Lack of coordination between the company’s services: Yahoo had hundreds of services and applications, but nonetheless, there was no communication between the departments it managed, and sometimes they used to act in ways that hurt each other.
For example, at one time there was a team that ran Flickr, which we previously talked about, and another team that ran “Yahoo Pictures.”
Although these two teams were doing almost the same work, they did not know what the other was doing, and they were not cooperating to make the company a success, but on the contrary, they harmed each other.
Lack of an idea about the nature of Yahoo: In an experiment conducted by one of the employees, he asked the employees what comes to their mind when they think of one of the following companies (Google, Amazon, and Yahoo), so the result was that almost everyone associated Google with search and Amazon with purchase, but it came Lots of different answers on yahoo.
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Conclusion
What happened with Yahoo is very similar to the famous saying, “It is easier to reach the top than to stay in it.” After the great success, the company deteriorated until it became a spectrum of its previous success.
Thus, we showed you the story of the company and its history, from being the sole controller of the Internet empire until losing its market value and selling it for only $ 4.5 billion.
In the end, I hope that you liked the article, and if you have any comments, you can put it to us in the comments, and we will respond to it.
