The once great Yahoo! brand has died a slow death. Yahoo the ISP was one of the pioneers of the internet era. Created in 1994 by David Filo and Jerry Yang, originally known by the simple yet cumbersome name "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web." Yahoo had its glory days through the remainder of that decade. In 1997 it initiated Yahoo!Mail, the first free email offered to the general public. Some of you may know that I still have and make at least some use of my yahoo.com address. By 1998, Yahoo's homepage was the most popular starting point for web users. After that, there was the dotcom bust of 2000-01, which Yahoo weathered rather well given its leading position in many fields. But that experience may have instilled in the high ranks of the company a notion of the defensive crouch as a wise policy. It didn't prove to be in the years that followed. Yahoo ceased to be an independent company in 2016-17, as Verizon purchased it in two stages. Since the...
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Yahoo as an independent corporation is coming to an end. The core business, as I mentioned in a blog entry last week, will become part of Verizon. Other non-core assets will remain as part of a holding company, but that holding company will change its name, so as not to interfere with the value of Verizon's rights to the :"Yahoo" brand. Last week's brief comment was about what Verizon sees in the deal. This, as advertised, is a requiem for Yahoo! Yahoo had its beginnings in 1994, and was first known as “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web”. What Jerry (Yang) and his partner David Filo offered was a web portal combined with a search engine: they offered the keys to the kingdom, letting people play in this new limitless cyberworld. What is more, they did so … for free. You didn’t have to pay anyone a dime to use their search engine, to make their home page your own, or to start receiving email at mail.yahoo.com. This was for the time revolutionary, and the ...
I have a yahoo! email box. I have other email addresses, too, but the yahoo box is the one I've had longest, its use is second nature to my personal friends, so it has long functioned as my default. I don't believe that is about to change. Verizon is buying the core of yahoo, and it will presumably continue to be happy to allow me to get my mail in the old way. But that isn't why Verizon is spending the $4.83 billion buying the venerable internet company's core operations. Verizon doesn't likely care about preserving the convenience of lil ole me. So what do they care about here? Well, Verizon already owns AOL, another venerable internet brand, going back to the '90s of blessed memory. Presumably it can wrap the two companies together now, eliminate 'redundancies,' and look for 'synergy. All that business school stuff. Beyond that, I suspect that there is some empire building at work. Somebody in executive ranks wants to be a somebody in ro...