THE YAHOO! PHENOMENON – RISE AND GROWTH OF THE ORGANIZATION:

If there’s one web portal and a Search Engine that is considered as a tough competitor for the world renowned Google, it is undoubtedly the American multinational Internet corporation Yahoo. It is one of the most popular websites in United States of America and has even surpassed Google on the number of visitors to its website in that country in the month of July, 2013. Let’s know more about this one of the most successful start-up companies of all times and how it had come into being.

THE BEGINNING AND EARLY CHANGES:

The roots for this Multinational Internet Company were planted by two Electrical Engineering graduate students of Stanford University in the year 1994. They are Jerry Yang and David Filo. For the purpose of providing a directory of other websites organized in a hierarchical structure as opposed to searchable pages index, they had created a website named “Jerry’s guide to the World Wide Web”. This was later changed to “Yahoo!” in March, 1994 and a domain “yahoo.com” was created on January 18, 1995.

From its abbreviation, “Yet another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”, we can understand that the Yahoo database was arranged hierarchically through a number of layers of subcategories. Though this full form was unknown to most people, the acronym Yahoo was an instant catch and was liked by most people.

EXPONENTIAL DEVELOPMENT AND A BLOW:

Yahoo was one of those rare organizations which had experienced rapid growth as soon as it was established. Following the path of many other successful search engines and Web directories, it had also added a web portal. Its first disappointment arrived in September of 2001 after the dot-com bubble burst during which it had attained an all-time low of $8.11.

SEARCH ENGINE AND MAIL:

Yahoo had used Google for search purposes only in the early 2000s. During this time, it developed its own search engine and it was launched in the year 2004. It had also created a Mail engine in the year 2007 which offers unlimited storage with an addition of Yahoo Messenger and offered free text messages to the mobile users across the countries like U.S.A, Canada, India and Philippines.

Yahoo created a homepage in the year 2006 during which users were offered a chance to beta test that on different browsers. It had supported well only for Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox while it drew criticism from the users of browsers like Opera. After this, Yahoo assured that it would design it in such a way that it supports all the major browsers in the future.

Because a number of major layoffs the company had a tough time during the year 2008. This was mainly due to its competitor website and industry search leader Google. As many as thousand employees were laid off at first and at the end of the year, the number turned into 1,520 because of the economic downturn.

MERGING DISCUSSIONS WITH MICROSOFT:

After three consecutive unsuccessful merging discussions by Yahoo with Microsoft in the years 2005, 2006 and 2007, Microsoft made an unsolicited takeover bid to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion in cash and stock which was also rejected by Yahoo as it thought their organization was undervalued.

During this time Yahoo had considered merging with major organizations like Google and News Corp for which it was sued by two Detroit-based pension companies for allegedly breaching the duty of shareholders.

Even after Microsoft had raised its offer by $5 billion making it $33 per share, Yahoo still declined the offer by telling that they wouldn’t go for less than $37 per share. After all the discussions and failed negotiations, Microsoft withdrew their offer. This had hit Yahoo like a blow as the stock of this company had dropped down to $23.02 per share. This forced Yahoo to re-negotiate with Microsoft but it refused to go with the earlier proposed $33 per share and announced that it would consider another proposal only if Yahoo ousts its then nine directors and on November 30 of 2008, Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for $20 billion and in the month of July, 2009, an announcement that Microsoft has full access to use Yahoo’s search engine for the next years was made.

THE CHANGE OF CEOs:

During the year 2009, Carol Bartz, former executive chairman of Autodesk, was appointed as the new Chief Executive Officer and a member of the board of directors by Yahoo replacing the co-founder Jerry Yang.

Yahoo! has undergone a number of changes after Bartz has taken charge as the CEO. In the year 2009, it launched a new front page which allowed users to customize it through the “My Favorites”. This helps users to avail the users with third party applications or web services.

But Bartz did not last long as the CEO as Tim Morse was appointed as interim CEO in September 2011 after Bartz was removed from her position by company’s chairman Roy Bostock through a phone call. The former president of Paypal, Scott Thompson was appointed as CEO on January 4, 2012 and immediately succeded by Marissa Mayer who is the current CEO of Yahoo!

YAHOO PRODUCTS AND SERVICES:

Yahoo has a wide array of products and services apart from mail and search engine. The most popular categories in which it has its upper hand in providing services are personal information and tracking usage, communication, content and information, co-branded internet services, mobile services, E-commerce, small business, advertising. Some of its unique services are Yahoo Next, Yahoo BOSS, Yahoo Meme, Y!Connect, Yahoo Accessibility, Yahoo Axis and Yahoo SearchMonkey.