YAHOO! THE JOYOUS CRY BECOMES A WHIMPER

By Ruma Dubey

At one point of time, Yahoo was such a big deal. Everyone thought it was “Oh so hip” to have a yahoo email id or say that you used the yahoo search engine.

Google came and all that changed for Yahoo forever. It has been around but no one really cares. The de facto search engine is Google, in fact Google has become the generic name for any search … we say it so nonchalantly, “google for the info”.  Yahoo Messenger was really good – it was a tough competition for Hotmail’s messenger. But that too disappeared as Skype and other chat apps came.

Yahoo email id? Well, no one really uses that any more. That too, was either Hotmail or then came Gmail where people felt it was so cool to have a gmail id, not the Hotmail id which all and sundry had. The only thing currently working for Yahoo is social media site, Flickr.

But that slowly marked the death of Yahoo. At its peak, when the dot com boom was really booming, its enterprise value was pegged at a jaw dropping $125 billion! Then naturally Yahoo ruled the roost and it had no intentions of selling.

Things have changed so much since then. Yahoo is just about surviving and this company, which once was a phenomena, was sold off to Verizon. Did you even know about it? And that too for just $5 billion. We say, “ just” because that’s a huge drop from the earlier price tag of $125 billion… $120 billion wiped off just like that!  Even in 2005, Microsoft was eyeing Yahoo and pursued it for three years, making a final offer at $44.6 billion. At that time, Yahoo said it was being “undervalued.” You can only sometimes wonder at the folly of mankind… greed.

The acquiring company, Verizon is well known in the tech circles and has acquired other successful brands like Huffington Post, Techcrunch and Engadget.

So what really did it Yahoo in? Like in most such cases, it was lack of innovation and not adapting fast enough to change. Yahoo simply did not think ahead of its competitors – it was more reactive than proactive, doing things after Google or Hotmail had done, that too pretty halfheartedly.  Google kept on coming out with new features on a consistent basis and Yahoo simply could not keep pace, which also explains why Google remains the world leader today.

This is exactly how Kodak shut down and more recently, Nokia lost out its entire market to Samsung. And Yahoo tried to salvage its losses too late. In 2012, it brought in a new CEO - Marissa Mayer. She increased Yahoo’s social presence through Tumblr and then Flickr and that’s all that remains of this once huge giant – mere skeletal remains.

One does not know what the future holds for Yahoo. Maybe Verizon will allow it to die natural death or cull it once it starts bleedings its company. But like many other biggies, who were complacent, did not innovate or adapt, Yahoo will be another case study for students – that’s all its legacy will be about.

Adaptability is the hallmark of human nature thus make merry but save when times are good and learn to move on when things go phut! That’s the moral of the Yahoo story.