The proposed sale of Yahoo Inc. Verizon Communications Inc. puts an exclamation point to a hectic period of two decades that began with his success as an organizer of the web and ended with a string of failed leadership and strategic errors.
the long fall of Yahoo could serve as a classic business case in which several CEOs failed to respond to a question in What is Yahoo
After being born in a dormitory at Stanford University in 1994, the company spent its first decade amassing scale internet portal?. Then, as Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. -two companies that came close to buy- clinched lucrative positions in search engines and social networks, Yahoo underperformed at the speed of the internet economy that she helped create. Visitors and revenue declined as the company struggled to innovate in a thousand services.
“If you’re all, like you’re nothing,” says Brad Garlinghouse, a former Yahoo executive who in 2006 he wrote the peanut butter Manifesto (something like Manifesto peanut butter), an internal memo criticizing the company expanded too.
Garlinghouse says the fluctuating strategy Yahoo often confused employees . The executive recalls that during a retreat in 2006 asked the managers the first word they could think when they heard the name of a company. Google, eBay and others produced clear answers: “search” or “auction”. Yahoo not. Managers “mail”, “news”, “search” and others said. A parade of CEOs for two decades increased the confusion, ranging from technology and media.
Co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo, initially created an index of websites, called Guide to the worldwide network of Jerry and David, as they left for later a thesis project.
His first executive president, a former rocker silver-haired named Timothy Koogle, that joined the company in 1995, when he still did not register income one and had six employees, after a recruiter told him that “they had a desperate need for adult supervision.”
Two years later, Yahoo was among the most visited sites. It classified 735,000 web sites offering free email, news and chat rooms, with 25 million unique users per month.
Internet use soared and fed growth to 100 million users, 2,000 employees and a market value of about US $ 125,000 million in 2000. Unlike similar companies, Yahoo was then profitable, partly because he was a pioneer of online advertising.
then burst the dotcom bubble. Since its peak on January 3, 2000, Yahoo shares plummeted 93% within 20 months. Koogle resigned in 2001 and the company undertook its first restructuring effort.
The next boss Terry Semel, the former Warner Bros. executive, he strove to turn Yahoo into a media company. He aimed to get more fees for premium services, including a line of astrology charged US $ 14.95 per question.
Meanwhile, another pair of Stanford students had built a search engine powered by computer they called Google. Would ruin Yahoo.
Google Yahoo hired in 2000 to boost your searches and included the logo of his rival in the search box. Semel negotiated the purchase of Google with its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, for US $ 1,000 million, but could not reach an agreement on the price. By 2002, the major influence of Google on Internet commerce did fire their income.
Semel changed strategy. Yahoo paid US $ 1,900 million for two technology firms search and in 2004 began to promote their own searches. In 2007, when Semel resigned, Google’s sales were more than double the US $ 7,000 million Yahoo.
In 2006, Yahoo struggled to pay US $ 1,000 million for Facebook, but the talks were unsuccessful due the lack of agreement on price. The market value of Facebook now exceeds US $ 340,000 million. Semel and other former Yahoo executives declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.
Then went to Yang as Yahoo CEO. Cofounder promised a restructuring, saying that “there would be no sacred cows”.
In early 2008, Microsoft Corp. made an unsolicited offer to buy Yahoo for about US $ 45,000 million, a premium of nearly 60 %. Yang and the board rejected Microsoft’s progress for months. Angry investors, including Carl Icahn tried to oust Yang and eventually obtained three seats on the board.
That November, Yang quit. His successor, the former head of Autodesk Inc., Carol Bartz, Yahoo inclined to back to the media. He invested in news, sports and finance, hiring journalists and buying a company producing cheap content that attracted clicks.
Bartz was fired by phone in September 2011. Soon, rumors of a sale began to circle . The next CEO, the head of PayPal, Scott Thompson, emphasized in e-commerce. However, before he could carry out its restructuring plans, resigned in 2012 by discrepancies in their academic records.
That same year, Yahoo returned to their technological roots by hiring Marissa Mayer, one manager Google product that had risen rapidly, generally delighted investors and employees who had hoped for a fresh start.
Mayer focused on improving products such as email and the site Flickr photo sharing, and urged investment in mobile software, online video and search. To renew the talent in Yahoo, spent more than US $ 2,000 million in more than 50 startups.
Despite this, even she struggled to define Yahoo. Mayer argued that the company should be central to the “ha-daily habits” of the people, whether in internet searches or e-mail. The strategy failed to stop the brain drain and revenue fell. If he did something, was to raise a lowdown on Yahoo: still a portal ambiguous internet
Some former employees said that the root of the slow decline of Yahoo was simpler. Missed the phenomenon of searches, networks social and mobile.
“so Yahoo is going through today is not the result of decisions made three years ago,” says venture capitalist Andrew Braccia, former head of Yahoo search. “It is the result of decisions taken 10 years ago”
No comments:
Post a Comment