Why did Yahoo fail even after being the biggest internet company in the world?

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Main topic: Tech
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Short answer: Yahoo management had a lack of vision, failed to capitalize on the shift in user behavior, missed major acquisitions, and was unable to develop the acquisitions they made.

Despite being the largest internet company at one point, there have been multiple problems at Yahoo which resulted in the failure of the company while its competitors saw unprecedented growth.

Ineffective Leadership[edit]

Yahoo has had eleven CEOs and interim leaders.[1] Yahoo's failures are attributed to its lack of strategy and the focus of its leadership. They failed to have clarity on the intended direction of the business and made a series of decisions that undermined the value of the company.

Yahoo has been derided for the questionable appointments for its CEO position. Terry Semel, with no prior experience in the internet industry, was appointed as CEO of Yahoo between 2001 and 2007. His reign as CEO has been mired with failed decisions.[2]

Yahoo leadership failed to invest in and create a competent search engine algorithm and positioned itself as a web directory. As a result, they had to rely on Inktomi, Google [3] and eventually Bing for search engine services.[4]

They also failed to invest in technology and security resulting in many outages even during its peak.[5] They were not able to protect the user data on multiple occasions resulting in one of the largest data breaches ever recorded in 2013 which diminished internet users' faith in the company.[6]

Failed to capture shifting user behaviour[edit]

One of the major reasons Yahoo was unable to compete with its competitors was its inability to successfully capitalize on mobile users. It allowed its rivals to dominate the race in the mobile industry due to its lack of leadership. It was unable to provide its users with high-quality mobile advertising experiences and trailed behind in developing metrics to evaluate the efficacy of its ad campaigns. This made it harder for Yahoo to attract the budgets of the large advertisers it had previously served.[7]

They failed to foresee the potential of social media and did not develop their products in line with changes in user interests.

Missed major acquisitions and mergers[edit]

Yahoo was unable to predict future trends and lost out on some significant possibilities by failing to make key acquisitions and mergers.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, contacted Yahoo in 1998 to sell the company for US dollar 1 million so they could continue their education. Yahoo declined the offer. In 2002 Yahoo made an offer of US dollars 3 billion and Google founders counter-offered with US dollars 5 billion which Yahoo management turned down.[8]

In 2006, Yahoo attempted to acquire Facebook for US dollars 1.1 billion but Mark Zuckerberg turned it down as he believed they were undervaluing the company as Yahoo management did not realize the potential of products yet to be launched by them.[9]

In 2008, during the economic downturn, Microsoft made an offer of US dollars 44.6 billion to Yahoo. However, Yahoo turned down the offer as it considered the offer undervalued the company.[10]

Failure to capitalize on acqusitions[edit]

Yahoo spent a fortune purchasing firms such as Broadcast.com, Geocities, Flickr, Right media, Overture Services, Inc., and Tumblr. However, Yahoo failed to further develop and capitalize on these acquisitions.

Prior to Yahoo's 2005 acquisition of Flickr, its creators hoped to expand into social networking. After the acquisition, the strategy was not implemented and Yahoo! missed capitalizing on the growing social media opportunity. Due to a lack of direction, the new products and features were not introduced and little was accomplished to expand the user community.[11]

Yahoo acquired Tumblr, a microblogging and social networking website, for $1.1 billion in 2013, but was unable to transform the acquisition into a profitable asset. It failed to innovate, recognize the appropriate path to go in, and stay up with the industry's rivals. Therefore, CEO Marissa Mayer's wager on Tumblr ultimately failed.[12]

References[edit]

  1. ↑ "List of Yahoo! CEOs and interim leaders". Wikipedia. 2022-09-30.
  2. ↑ "Was Yahoo's Terry Semel The Worst Internet CEO Ever?". Business Insider. 2022-09-30.
  3. ↑ "Yahoo! dumps Google as search engine provider". Cnet. 2022-09-30.
  4. ↑ "Yahoo! and Microsoft agreement to use Bing to power Yahoo search engine". BBC. 2022-09-30.
  5. ↑ "Yahoo outage lasted several hours". CNN. 2022-09-30.
  6. ↑ "Data of 3 Billion Yahoo users breached". New York Times. 2022-09-30.
  7. ↑ "Why Yahoo Couldn't Adapt to the Smartphone Era". NewYorker. 2022-09-30.
  8. ↑ "Remember When Yahoo Turned Down $1 Million To Buy Google?". Yahoo! Finance. 2022-09-30.
  9. ↑ "Inside Mark Zuckerberg's controversial decision to turn down Yahoo's $1 billion early offer to buy Facebook". Business Insider. 2022-09-30.
  10. ↑ "Microsoft abandons Yahoo acquisition". Computer World. 2022-09-30.
  11. ↑ "How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet". Gizmodo. 2022-09-30.
  12. ↑ "'Nobody at Yahoo understood Tumblr': Why Marissa Mayer's big bet on Tumblr never panned out". Digiday. 2022-09-30.
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