About yahoo failure

About yahoo failure

If you want to know anything about Yahoo!, you’d probably google it. But did you know that there was a time when Yahoo! refused to acquire Google twice? Founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in 1994, it was a veritable web titan and one of the pioneers of the early Internet area in the 1990s.

From being the most visited site globally, and once worth a whopping $125 billion, to being acquired by Verizon for less than 4% of that amount, that is $4.48 billion, Yahoo! has seen its downfall. So what happened that led to such a turn of events? Why Yahoo! failed? Can a business learn anything from its downfall? What could have gone so wrong in all these years that it led to the dissolution of the company?

Why Did Yahoo! Fail? Yahoo’s downfall can be attributed to a string of wrong decisions and missed opportunities. Let’s delve deeper to understand the different reasons that led Yahoo! plummet down the hill. Wrong Focus Yahoo! had been more business-oriented instead of focussing on providing a quality user experience. It had extensive advertisements and seemed to change its user interface pretty often. It became a little difficult for its users to become accustomed to new user interfaces so frequently.

Missed opportunities Yahoo had been unable to foresee future trends and had missed out on some big opportunities back in the day. These included – Refusal to acquire Google Failure to acquire Facebook Failure to merge with Microsoft Several unsuccessful acquisitions

Yahoo! Refused To Buy Google In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, had approached Yahoo to sell Google for 1 million dollars since they wanted to continue their studies further. However, Yahoo refused the offer.

Unsuccessful Attempt To Buy Facebook At a time when Google had already come a long way in the world of online search, the new trend in vogue was that of social networking. In July 2006, Yahoo attempted to acquire Facebook for $1.1 billion. However, the deal didn’t work out and a failed bid to buy Facebook got added to the list of missed opportunities Yahoo missed back then.

Failure To Merge With Microsoft In 2008, Microsoft approached Yahoo with an offer of $44.6 billion. However, Jerry Yang baulked at the offer. The repeated offer rejections were because Yahoo felt it was being undervalued. However, it doesn’t seem so anymore after considering its $4.48 billion acquisition deal with Verizon in 2017.

Unsuccessful Acquisitions Yahoo! invested a lot of money in acquiring companies like Broadcast.com, Geocities, Flickr, Right media, Overture Services, Inc, and Tumblr, all decisions leading it one step down the hill. Before Yahoo purchased Flickr in 2005, its founders had intended to tap into social networking. However, the plan wasn’t carried forward, and they missed out on the social media boat. There was a lack of vision, and it paid less attention to cater to the community it had built. It could not retain its customers or expand the customer base because the focus was not on introducing new features or growing the community. In 2013, Yahoo purchased Tumblr, a microblogging and social networking site, for $1.1 billion but failed to turn the acquisition into a profit-making component. It failed to innovate, understand the right direction to head forward in, and keep pace with the competitors in the industry. So, eventually, CEO Marissa Mayer’s bet on Tumblr didn’t pan out so well.

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