Yahoo Full Form, What is Yahoo?

Yahoo full form Yet Another Hierarchical officious Oracle

Yahoo! is an Internet portal that incorporates a search engine and a directory of World Wide Web sites organized in a hierarchy of topic categories. As a directory, it provides both new and seasoned Web users the reassurance of a structured view of hundreds of thousands of Web sites and millions of Web pages.

History of Yahoo!:

It is an American web services provider headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and owned by Verizon Media. The original Yahoo! Company was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 2, 1995. Yahoo was one of the pioneers of the early Internet era in the 1990s.

It provides and/ or provided a Web portal, search engine Yahoo! Search, and related services, including Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping, video sharing, fantasy sports, and its social media website. Yahoo! was the most widely read news and media website, with over 7 billion views per month ranking as the sixth-most-visited website globally in 2016.

Main Drawback of the Company:

Yahoo is a collection of outdated consumer internet products and services that were primarily cobbled together via acquisition. It is hard to see any evidence of a cohesive corporate strategy. The current management teams appears to be moving very slowly to effect change and are most likely incapable of having a meaningful positive impact on one of the world’s most familiar brands.

Easy Money, Bad Business Decisions

Early on its existence Yahoo found an efficient way to monetize page views. This has subsidized the company to this day and allowed it to limp along in a lazy fashion. Many business development deals were very short sighted (ex. broadband partnerships, mobile deals, YAP, social integrations with Facebook, transferring over search, etc) and have turned out to be huge corporate distractions. The company has restricted itself in one way or another from having the freedom to build disruptive services that would have potentially upset various partnerships.

Lack of Engineering and Product vision

It is a company that has failed to attract a leader who can articulate a vision that excites its employees, investors and most importantly users. It is a workplace that rewards average workers and discourages risk taking and aggressive behavior. Many employees have been parking in their cubes, doing the least amount of work necessary, for over a decade while its leadership fails to get rid of under-performers. Poor management and apathy have deeply penetrated all levels of the company. The corporate leadership has not clearly articulated goals that are ambitious in nature or which play to the strengths of the companies’ users and employees.

Dropped Balls and Missed Opportunities

Instead of attempting to develop a strategy that involved understanding how to efficiently build for, attract and delight customers Yahoo took the easier road of buying eyeballs and reacting late to what the market was doing. It seldom had the ability to see where things were heading and react early. As a result it missed key opportunities that were critical to its future success in:

·         search (lost to google)

·         advertising (lost to google)

·         social networking (lost first to myspace and later facebook and twitter)

·         online video (lost to youtube)

·         communications (well on its way to losing to face book and goggle)

·         mobile (lost to apple, google and facebook)

·         photo sharing (lost to facebook)

What's next

who knows? It's like watching an abusive relationship play itself out. One can hope that one of the world’s strongest consumer brands can pick itself up and dust itself off before it's too late but the hawks are circling. The amount of risk that the company needs to take in order to re-invent itself is not technically possible as a public company. Its greatest hope for increased consumer relevance is a significant reduction in headcount, articulating a clear vision for its future, and hiring competent leaders who can attract young employees who have unbelievably huge incentives in place to rebuild everything at Yahoo.