What is Yahoo!?
The name Yahoo! is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle". It is the first online navigational guide to the Web.
History of Yahoo!
Yahoo! began as a student hobby and evolved into a global brand that has changed the way people communicate with each other, find and access information and purchase things. The two founders of Yahoo!, David Filo and Jerry Yang, Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, started their guide in a campus trailer in February 1994 as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. Before long they were spending more time on their home-brewed lists of favorite links than on their doctoral dissertations. Eventually, Jerry and David's lists became too long and unwieldy, and they broke them out into categories. When the categories became too full, they developed subcategories ... and the core concept behind Yahoo! was born. The Web site started out as "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web"
Jerry and David soon found they were not alone in wanting a single place to find useful Web sites. Before long, hundreds of people were accessing their guide from well beyond the Stanford trailer. Word spread from friends to what quickly became a significant, loyal audience throughout the closely-knit Internet community. Yahoo! celebrated its first million-hit day in the fall of 1994, translating to almost 100 thousand unique visitors.
The yahoo.com domain was created on January 18, 1995. Due to the torrent of traffic and enthusiastic reception Yahoo! was receiving, the founders knew they had a potential business on their hands. In March 1995, the pair incorporated the business and met with dozens of Silicon Valley venture capitalists. They eventually came across Sequoia Capital, the well-regarded firm whose most successful investments included Apple Computer, Atari, Oracle and Cisco Systems. They agreed to fund Yahoo! in April 1995 with an initial investment of nearly $2 million.
Realizing their new company had the potential to grow quickly, Jerry and David began to shop for a management team. They hired Tim Koogle, a veteran of Motorola and an alumnus of the Stanford engineering department, as chief executive officer and Jeffrey Mallett, founder of Novell's WordPerfect consumer division, as chief operating officer. They secured a second round of funding in Fall 1995 from investors Reuters Ltd. and Softbank. Yahoo! launched a highly-successful IPO in April 1996 with a total of 49 employees.
Today, Yahoo! Inc. is a leading global Internet communications, commerce and media company that offers a comprehensive branded network of services to more than 345 million individuals each month worldwide.
Growth
Like many search engines and web directories, Yahoo! diversified into a Web portal.On 8 March 1997, Yahoo! acquired online communications company Four11. Four11's webmail service, Rocketmail, became Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! also acquired ClassicGames.com and turned it into Yahoo! Games. Yahoo! then acquired direct marketing company Yoyodyne Entertainment, Inc. on 12 October 1998. On 28 January 1999, Yahoo! acquired web hosting provider GeoCities. Another company Yahoo! acquired was eGroups, which became Yahoo! Groups after the acquisition on 28 June 2000. On March 8, 1998, Yahoo! launched Yahoo! Pager, an instant messaging service that was renamed Yahoo! Messenger a year later.
On 26 June 2000, Yahoo! and Google signed an agreement which would make Google power searches made on yahoo.com. But this later was dropped on February 18, 2004 and returned to using its own technology to provide search results.
Partnerships and Acquisitions:
Yahoo! 's notable partnerships includes: SBC Communications, BT Openworld, Verizon, etc.
Yahoo!'s notable acquisitions includes: Inktomi, Konfabulator, Overture Services, Inc. and its subsidiaries Altavista and Alltheweb, Oddpost, Flickr, Upcoming.org, Del.icio.us, webjay, etc.
Competition
On January 29, 2008, Yahoo! announced that the company was laying off 1,000 employees as the company had suffered severely in its inability to effectively compete with industry search leader Google. The cuts represented 7 percent of the company's workforce of 14,300. Employees are being invited to apply for an unknown number of new positions that are expected to open as the company expands areas that promise faster growth.
Yahoo! announced on November 17, 2008, that Yang would be stepping down as CEO.
On December 10, 2008, Yahoo! began laying off 1,520 employees around the world as the company managed its way through the global economic downturn.
With Microsoft
Microsoft and Yahoo! pursued merger discussions from 2005 to 2009. On July 29, 2009, it was announced with a 10 year deal that Microsoft will have full access to Yahoo!'s search engine to be used in future Microsoft projects for its search engine, Bing. Under the deal, Microsoft was not required to pay any cash up front to Yahoo! The day after the deal was announced, Yahoo!'s share price declined more than 10% to $15.14 per share, about 60% lower than Microsoft's takeover bid a year earlier.
Carol Bartz replaced co-founder Jerry Yang in January 2009.
On October 28, 2009 Ms. Bartz told PCWorld that she struggled with the question of what Yahoo! is when she took over as CEO in January 2009. After talking to many users in about 10 countries, she said, Yahoo! concluded that users consider it their "home on the Internet".
Source: Yahoo Media Relations and Wikipedia. See more here and here.
The name Yahoo! is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle". It is the first online navigational guide to the Web.
History of Yahoo!
Yahoo! began as a student hobby and evolved into a global brand that has changed the way people communicate with each other, find and access information and purchase things. The two founders of Yahoo!, David Filo and Jerry Yang, Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, started their guide in a campus trailer in February 1994 as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. Before long they were spending more time on their home-brewed lists of favorite links than on their doctoral dissertations. Eventually, Jerry and David's lists became too long and unwieldy, and they broke them out into categories. When the categories became too full, they developed subcategories ... and the core concept behind Yahoo! was born. The Web site started out as "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web"
Jerry and David soon found they were not alone in wanting a single place to find useful Web sites. Before long, hundreds of people were accessing their guide from well beyond the Stanford trailer. Word spread from friends to what quickly became a significant, loyal audience throughout the closely-knit Internet community. Yahoo! celebrated its first million-hit day in the fall of 1994, translating to almost 100 thousand unique visitors.
The yahoo.com domain was created on January 18, 1995. Due to the torrent of traffic and enthusiastic reception Yahoo! was receiving, the founders knew they had a potential business on their hands. In March 1995, the pair incorporated the business and met with dozens of Silicon Valley venture capitalists. They eventually came across Sequoia Capital, the well-regarded firm whose most successful investments included Apple Computer, Atari, Oracle and Cisco Systems. They agreed to fund Yahoo! in April 1995 with an initial investment of nearly $2 million.
Realizing their new company had the potential to grow quickly, Jerry and David began to shop for a management team. They hired Tim Koogle, a veteran of Motorola and an alumnus of the Stanford engineering department, as chief executive officer and Jeffrey Mallett, founder of Novell's WordPerfect consumer division, as chief operating officer. They secured a second round of funding in Fall 1995 from investors Reuters Ltd. and Softbank. Yahoo! launched a highly-successful IPO in April 1996 with a total of 49 employees.
Today, Yahoo! Inc. is a leading global Internet communications, commerce and media company that offers a comprehensive branded network of services to more than 345 million individuals each month worldwide.
Growth
Like many search engines and web directories, Yahoo! diversified into a Web portal.On 8 March 1997, Yahoo! acquired online communications company Four11. Four11's webmail service, Rocketmail, became Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! also acquired ClassicGames.com and turned it into Yahoo! Games. Yahoo! then acquired direct marketing company Yoyodyne Entertainment, Inc. on 12 October 1998. On 28 January 1999, Yahoo! acquired web hosting provider GeoCities. Another company Yahoo! acquired was eGroups, which became Yahoo! Groups after the acquisition on 28 June 2000. On March 8, 1998, Yahoo! launched Yahoo! Pager, an instant messaging service that was renamed Yahoo! Messenger a year later.
On 26 June 2000, Yahoo! and Google signed an agreement which would make Google power searches made on yahoo.com. But this later was dropped on February 18, 2004 and returned to using its own technology to provide search results.
Partnerships and Acquisitions:
Yahoo! 's notable partnerships includes: SBC Communications, BT Openworld, Verizon, etc.
Yahoo!'s notable acquisitions includes: Inktomi, Konfabulator, Overture Services, Inc. and its subsidiaries Altavista and Alltheweb, Oddpost, Flickr, Upcoming.org, Del.icio.us, webjay, etc.
Competition
On January 29, 2008, Yahoo! announced that the company was laying off 1,000 employees as the company had suffered severely in its inability to effectively compete with industry search leader Google. The cuts represented 7 percent of the company's workforce of 14,300. Employees are being invited to apply for an unknown number of new positions that are expected to open as the company expands areas that promise faster growth.
Yahoo! announced on November 17, 2008, that Yang would be stepping down as CEO.
On December 10, 2008, Yahoo! began laying off 1,520 employees around the world as the company managed its way through the global economic downturn.
With Microsoft
Microsoft and Yahoo! pursued merger discussions from 2005 to 2009. On July 29, 2009, it was announced with a 10 year deal that Microsoft will have full access to Yahoo!'s search engine to be used in future Microsoft projects for its search engine, Bing. Under the deal, Microsoft was not required to pay any cash up front to Yahoo! The day after the deal was announced, Yahoo!'s share price declined more than 10% to $15.14 per share, about 60% lower than Microsoft's takeover bid a year earlier.
Carol Bartz replaced co-founder Jerry Yang in January 2009.
On October 28, 2009 Ms. Bartz told PCWorld that she struggled with the question of what Yahoo! is when she took over as CEO in January 2009. After talking to many users in about 10 countries, she said, Yahoo! concluded that users consider it their "home on the Internet".
Source: Yahoo Media Relations and Wikipedia. See more here and here.
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