The Rise and Fall of Yahoo!

you are watching cold fusion [Music] TV hi welcome to another cold fusion video before we get started on today's topic I'd just like to say that if you subscribe to this Channel and you haven't hit that little bell button uh it would be cool if you could do that cuz it seems like a lot of people haven't actually been getting notifications for when I've uploaded new videos so when you hit that Bell button it make sure that you get the notifications so cheers all right cool so today we're going to be having a look at the rise and fall of Yahoo Looking Back Now it's hard to believe that at one stage Yahoo was worth over $100 billion today they're just a shell of their former selves Verizon an American Communications company is now buying Yahoo for $4.8 billion a fraction of that $100 billion that was once worth it was a huge company but for me personally in my mind it was never really a strong brand I never really knew where they fit in in the Tex face as you'll see in the end this is partly what caused the downfall so what's the story here how did Yahoo start and where did it all go wrong yahoo.com was founded in 1994 by two Stanford graduates Jerry Yang and David Philo those here a lot of fun Discovery finding information you know that's what Yahoo is all about it's fairly unimpressive as far as the space is concerned most people think it's going to be huge space with all kinds of computer stuff but maybe 10 computers that are doing all the work here today we're adding between 500 and 1,000 sites a day this rapid expansion this catch you guys by surprise while you're at Stanford well we certainly never we never thought we'd be at this point when you're finding these sites how do you decide if one is cool if we find something as we're adding these that really catches our eye and it's interesting and we think that other people will think it's really interesting um then we designate that as what's cool Yahoo was to act as a portal to the internet at a time when it was still just a mess of unorganized websites and information at the time there were very few meaningful ways to quickly browse for what you wanted to see the company went public in 1996 and by 1997 they were ranked second in terms of internet traffic behind AOL of course in 1998 Yahoo was approached by two young Stanford PhD students their names were Larry paage and Sergey Brin the pair had just created page rank a search engine algorith and a quick way to get relevant information on the internet the Stanford students were asking $1 million for the algorithm Yahoo said no as they thought that it would take uses away from their main website while decreasing traffic and AD Revenue the page rank algorithm would eventually become Google around this time in the late 1990s the internet was all the rage it was seen as a new economy a disruptive magical concept that could transform the entire planet this notion was [Music] [Applause] [Music] the hell was I it gives you Microsoft Technology and speeds of up to 56k for fast reliable connections to the things that interest you [Music] [Music] most the problem at the time was the tech technology just wasn't good enough yet meaning that nobody was delivering on all these Grand Promises of infinite growth and technological Revolution eventually investors caught onto the Ponzi scheme and the party came to an end in the year 2000 the majority of tech stocks were sold in a panic as everyone tried to rush out the door all the tech companies were hit badly but Yahoo Google and a few others survived through the storm Yahoo didn't escape with some immense damage though their stock price went from over $18 to just $46 in 2002 Yahoo was still the most visited site on the internet but it loses to Google in a big way in terms of search in 2005 the company bought a 40% stake in the emerging online retail company Alibaba the remainder of these Holdings now worth $30 billion make up the majority of Yahoo's market capitalization today in this year they would also purchase the photo sharing site flicker one year later the company was turned down by a 22-year-old Mark Zuckerberg yaho offered to buy Facebook for $1 billion but Zuckerberg declined According to some sources if the offer was 1.1 billion Facebook's board would have forced Zuckerberg to take it and the world may have been a very different place in 2008 Microsoft offers $44 billion to buy Yahoo they laugh it off saying that it didn't highlight the value of the company they' soon wish they did accept because this was the highest offer they ever receive after a slow steady decline former Google executive Marissa Maya comes on board in 2012 Yahoo begins to heavily invest in Mobile and update the Brand's look and feel 2 years later they acquire Tumblr all of this didn't work by 2016 the company was suffering a $4.4 billion loss and was absolutely bleeding money at the end of 2016 Verizon buys out Yahoo for $4.8 billion that's about 1% of what Microsoft was willing to pay in the course of its lifetime Yahoo had bought 114 companies none of them turned into a hit which could save the company okay so that's a timeline of what happened but let's look a little deeper where did it all go wrong to answer that we have to start by rewinding back to the times just after the Doom crash around this time and in the next few years web portals started to become more irrelevant as web users tended to search go Google for what they wanted and then Venture on into individual sites after this eventually Yahoo just got left behind in all areas of Business by companies that just did it better for example Yahoo's mail service got overtaken by Gmail and Hotmail Yahoo messenger got enveloped by WhatsApp WeChat and Facebook messenger instead of getting their news from web portal sites people began to go to social media to get their news mainly Facebook Twitter dedicated news websites and even YouTube by 2010 Yahoo had been chipped away from every angle until there was very little left and here's The Clincher for where it all fell apart as users drifted away from Yahoo's services so did the ad revenue and company profits it was a complete disaster and nobody knew what to do this is highlighted by the fact that the company went through four CEOs in 6 years unfortunately this was at a time when the company needed solid leadership the most to make things worse investors were getting very anxious and called for more change to fix the problem this created even more instability in upper management turning the whole thing into a vicious cycle a feedback loop it was a flaming sinking ship and all the captains were already rowing away in their lifeboats during its later years if there was any chance of Yahoo surviving it would have been through Marissa Meer the main issue was that she was just not a good CEO she wasn't a leader Marissa just couldn't decide which direction to take the company and even the multi-billion dollar Alibaba stake was left sitting there nothing was done with it being a CEO is by no means an easy thing but this particular situation just goes to show that if you're going to take on the top job indecision should be avoided at all costs in the end the story of Yahoo shows that a lack of focus inability to change and a lack of company Direction can be fatal in Yahoo's case cutting some of the excess fat in their operations and actively reacting to the changing internet landscape around them could have saved them by staying so stagnant and so vague Yahoo lost everything as for the future not a lot is known but we have to see what Verizon does with the remnance of Yahoo on the bright side if there's one good thing that Yahoo has left us with it's Yahoo answers am I pregnant am I pragnant am I parant am I gregnant am I pegate help is there a possibly that I'm pregrant am I pragnant or am I okay could I be pronate how do I know if I'm prengan can I be pregnant can get pregante all right so that's where we'll leave it today thanks for watching don't forget to subscribe to this channel if you're new give this video a thumbs up if you liked it anyway this has been toogo you've been watching cold fusion and I'll catch you again soon for the next video cheers have a good one cold fusion it's new [Music] [Applause] [Music] thinking

Channel: ColdFusion

Views: 1,384,940

Keywords: Coldfusion, TV, Dagogo, Altraide, Technology, Apple, Google, Samsung, Facebook, Tesla

Id: 5DpspOXs1rM

Length: 10min 26sec (626 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 05 2017