I remember that in 2000, there was a popular Hong Kong love film "The Lonely Man and the Widowed Girl", an office romance played by Andy Lau and Sammi Cheng. It doesn't matter what the plot is, but I still remember that a young and handsome Chinese-American guy proposed to Zheng Xiuwen; the movie introduced him to become an Internet company in the United States and became a billionaire. Obviously, the prototype of this role is Yahoo co-founder Yang Zhiyuan.
Author Zheng Jun
From $100 billion to open sale
I remember that in 2000, there was a popular Hong Kong love film "The Lonely Man and the Widowed Girl", an office romance played by Andy Lau and Sammi Cheng. It doesn't matter what the plot is, but I still remember that a young and handsome Chinese-American guy proposed to Zheng Xiuwen; the movie introduced him to become an Internet company in the United States and became a billionaire.
Obviously, the prototype of this role is Yahoo co-founder Yang Zhiyuan. At that time, Yahoo’s market value was as high as $128 billion, which was the peak period. Yang Zhiyuan is a new idol that the global Chinese and the scientific community look up to, and its influence is no less than that of Zuckerberg. Perhaps, in that era, Yahoo's share of the global Internet and even Silicon Valley, even better than the current Facebook, only Google can be compared.
Yahoo was founded in 1995 and was successfully listed the following year. In a sense, in the era when the Internet was just emerging, Yahoo created a new era, and its influence on the Internet is even higher than that of Google. The success of two Stanford students has inspired more young people to devote themselves to this new field of technology and to create their own legends. These young people include both Pezi and Brin, including Zhang Chaoyang and Ding Lei, including Ma Yun and Li Yanhong.
The reason for recalling this movie is because Yahoo finally announced the sale. The former Internet giant finally sold $4.8 billion to sell core assets such as portals, search, and mailboxes to Verizon, the largest US operator, and bid farewell to Yahoo’s iconic business. It was like a long soap opera with a known ending, and finally put down the last curtain.
In the past year, Yahoo is like a discounted product on the shelf, and has no choice but to wait for a bargain, and is looking forward to the buyer. For the Internet giants once, this ending is more like a humiliation. The $4.8 billion sale price is less than a fraction of Yahoo’s $100 billion valuation at its peak. In the eyes of investors, Yahoo's truly valuable assets are shares held by Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, which are now worth more than $40 billion. After selling the portal assets, Yahoo will become an asset management company.
Meyer is powerless to turn around
Why did the Internet once used to sign the company Yahoo will fall to the present ending? As the last captain of Yahoo, Meyer’s responsibility can’t be shirked. Before entering Yahoo, Meyer has been playing for Google. As Google grew from a startup to a technology giant, she also made a name for herself in the Internet industry. But Meyer didn't actually run the history of a company independently, nor did he have the experience of reversing a recession business. Yahoo chose her, perhaps more hope that she can bring vitality and vitality.
Meyer did indeed carry out drastic reforms. She made significant adjustments to management, replacing many of the original executives and replacing them with their own trusted subordinates. In the four years of Yahoo!, Meyer also spent nearly $2.2 billion on nearly 50 acquisitions, trying to inject fresh blood into the giants, bringing more talents and emerging assets; the most eye-catching deals , that is, to buy the light blog site Tumblr for $1.1 billion.
But these measures did not play much role, but rather like the last struggle, exhausted the remaining strength. Like Yahoo’s previous acquisitions, the startups that Meyer acquired, after entering the black hole of Yahoo, began to decline and decline. In the past year, Meyer has repeatedly impaired the acquisition of assets, actually acknowledging the failure of the acquisition.
However, simply blaming Meyer for his incompetence, perhaps the most lazy move, does not make any sense. Perhaps the fate of Yahoo may have been determined as early as several years. Like many companies that ultimately fail, Yahoo has the same ills: frequent changes in management, chaotic board, vacillating strategic positioning, controversial CEO choices, and low morale talent.
In fact, when a company experienced a significant decline, only a handful of entrepreneurs successfully reversed the trend. The most legendary thing about Jobs is not to start Apple, but to save the bankrupt Apple in the name of the Savior and bring back the peak of the technology industry. And more entrepreneurs, whether they are young people with high spirits or experienced veterans, face this kind of downturn, and they are helplessly sinking with the company. Yahoo Chief Yang Zhiyuan also returned, but the outcome is still a sudden departure.
Network Mall Station Mall
So why is Yahoo going into decline or even selling, but the Internet companies belonging to that era have different fates? The same Amazon, which was launched in 1995, has been steadily rising for many years. It is the fourth-largest technology market after Apple, Google and Microsoft. Is Google, who is only two years younger than Yahoo, still in a rising channel after 18 years of history?
Maybe to explain this complicated thing, it would be better to make a simple analogy. When the Internet was just emerging, each site was like a city, scattered around the virtual world. Yahoo's website classified search service is like a train station, helping people find their own trains and rush to the place they want to go. This is also the main reason for the initial rise of Yahoo.
Yang Zhiyuan's website is like a hub of the online world, just like the railway station in the center of the traditional city. No matter where you go, people need to come to Yahoo Station and board the train from here to the place where they want to go. Then Yahoo found that the flow of people means business opportunities, and they can provide a series of supporting services around the network station, such as email, information, hosting, forums and so on.
This is the origin of the portal concept - to provide users with the services they need to access the Internet as much as possible, and to keep them on their own websites to realize their value. At the time, portals such as AOL and MSN were also the same business philosophy. They continued to increase their service types and quantities through internal development and external acquisitions, and turned themselves into a shopping mall.
If the website search service provided by Yahoo is a train, then the crawler search service provided by Google is like a flight. Just as the US airport has completely replaced the station's status, users quickly discover that Google's airport is the most effective way to find a destination in the online world. The original train station Yahoo has become a mall that sells many goods.
Peter Thiel, a well-known venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, once suggested that Yang Zhiyuan should not make Yahoo a portal and position itself as a media company. Yahoo apparently did not really understand the deeper meaning of Tyre’s suggestion. With the rapid growth of Internet advertising, Yahoo's portal business has begun to grow. They are more concerned about how to attract more netizens and let them stay in their own stores for a longer time.
Neglecting search is the beginning of recession
Neglecting search technology is a precursor to Yahoo's beginning to decline. At the time of Google’s rise, Yahoo was still in the middle of the day. As a portal, the first step for netizens to access the Internet is to log in to Yahoo. But Yahoo did not realize that the core of these business opportunities is its own network hub status. If the user does not need to come to the train station, these business opportunities will follow.
Yahoo didn't have its own search technology at first. From the most glorious period from 1996 to 2004, Yahoo has been the largest Internet company by market value, and can buy almost any emerging Internet company that it is interested in. But in this most critical eight-year period, Yahoo has chosen third-party search technology providers such as AltaVista and Inktomi as its back-end services, allowing Google to grow wildly in the online search market.
Yahoo felt the potential threat when Google’s rise was unstoppable. In 2001, Yahoo also had a desire to acquire Google, but Google II raised its offer from $1 billion to $3 billion in a week. At that time, CEO Semel believed that it was a sky-high price and abandoned the acquisition plan. In the following two years, Yahoo acquired the original search partners Inktomi and Overture for $235 million and $1.6 billion to form their own search technology team, but this time Google has dominated the search engine field. Yahoo can only rank second in the market.
In fact, Yahoo is a failure in the acquisition. On the one hand, they missed the acquisitions of Google, eBay and Facebook that could change the Internet landscape. On the other hand, they spent billions of dollars to acquire a lot of sky-high assets, but they finally depreciated or even shut down completely in their own black holes. These notable failures include: $5.7 billion to acquire online content company Broadcast, $3.6 billion to acquire web hosting company GeoCities, $1.6 billion to acquire search technology company Overture, $850 million to acquire social advertising company RightMedia, $500 million to buy e-commerce website Kelkoo.
However, a meeting between Yang Zhiyuan and Ma Yun in 2005 brought the most successful investment in Yahoo and even Internet history. Yahoo exchanged a 40% stake in Alibaba with Yahoo China for $1 billion. In the days that followed, Yahoo sold two shares in Ali, cashing more than $17 billion, and still holds a 15.4% stake in Ali. According to the current market value of Ali, Yahoo holds more than 30 billion US dollars.
Why is Amazon Google not waning?
Going back to the previous question, why are the same Internet companies, Amazon and Google have maintained growth over the past two decades, and Yahoo has fallen into a continuous recession and eventually sold?
Amazon started from the original online bookstore and developed into an all-encompassing online supermarket, firmly occupying the dominant share of the online retail market. At present, Amazon's online retail market share in the United States is about 24%, while the retail giant Wal-Mart's share is only 2.5% (commercial company Conlumino early year statistics). In addition, Amazon also opened up a cloud-oriented business for enterprises as early as 2002, currently occupying a market share of up to 30%. Whether it's e-commerce or cloud services, Amazon is in a fast-growing market and dominates.
Google not only dominates the search field, but also builds a series of Internet software services around search. Mailboxes, search, video, maps, in addition to the social field, Google has a clear advantage in almost every field. On the other hand, Google has also established the mobile operating system Android and its perfect ecosystem, which has an absolute advantage. It has a first-mover advantage in new fields such as robots, unmanned vehicles and biotechnology.
The two giants have always firmly grasped the core needs of Internet users and opened up new demands and markets. Their core business is still in a period of rapid growth, and it has an unpredictable advantage. Both companies will not suffer a severe recession until the user's needs and usage habits have changed dramatically. Even with the emergence of new technologies, Amazon and Google have already taken the lead.
In contrast, Yahoo's strategic positioning has been embarrassing between technology companies and media companies. Unlike Amazon and Google's dominant engineer culture, Yahoo's core business has always been Internet display advertising, so the long-term advantage is the sales culture. Meyer tried to transplant his familiar Google culture within the company, but it did not seem to bring significant results.
For more than a decade since 2004, with the rising of competitors such as Google, Gmail, Youtube, Facebook, and Instagram, Yahoo’s proud portal business has been significantly impacted on almost every business. In the core areas of search, email, video, social, and pictures, it was quickly overtaken. As Yahoo's share of the Internet world continues to decline, Yahoo's share of Internet advertising has fallen sharply from the original 23% to 3% today.
Looking back at Yahoo's history, the scene that can't be ignored is that in 2008, Yang Zhiyuan refused Microsoft's $45 billion takeover offer. Yang Zhiyuan refused the transaction more because of his personal feelings. The subsequent market pressure made him leave his job and gradually withdrew from Yahoo, which he personally founded. If the acquisition was made by Microsoft, the answer to this question is unknown, and history has never returned. However, Yahoo, who lost the soul character Yang Zhiyuan, is becoming more and more at a loss under the pressure of the outside world and capital. The sale of core assets is also forced to proceed.
Please give respect when you say goodbye
In the history of technology companies, there have been too many companies that have been in the sky. But when the technology trend and user demand changed dramatically, these giant companies quickly declined in a few years or even less because of pre-judgment failure, strategic error or slow response, becoming a lost meteor.
Wang An Computer, Nortel Networks, AOL, Nokia (Mobile), Blackberry, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Yahoo, these once famous names have changed the development track of technology, the brand represents an industry, and has a profound impact on the latecomers. influences. When they gradually become star-studded and even withdraw from the historical stage, they may be given enough respect when they are pity.
Yahoo is still the industry leader if it is only measured by the portal. Even now, Yahoo is still the third-largest US website after Google and Facebook, and has a comparative advantage in financial and sports information business. If you compare the portal AOL in the same period, perhaps Yahoo's situation is slightly better. The Yahoo website will continue to operate under Verizon.
However, whether or not we continue to use Yahoo! services, whether or not these businesses retain the original brand, this represents the end of a Yahoo era, representing the official exit of the Internet 1.0 era giants, representing a far-reaching impact on Internet development. The farewell of the name.
From 1995 to 2016, Yahoo's Internet road has gone through twenty years. Yahoo's fate is embarrassing and more thought-provoking from the initial days of the day, to the mid-term continuous mistakes, and to the late torment.
Gates said that Microsoft is only 18 months away from bankruptcy.
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