Welcome to watchmojo.com in today's business school bid, we continue our series on some of the most exciting media and technology companies out there on the Internet, and today we look at none other than Yahoo or as others call it Yahoo!
Yahoo was founded in 1994 by two Stanford PhD students Jerry Yang and David Filo, who became more interested with what is going on with the World Wide Web than what was going on in their classrooms at Stanford, not to blame them.
The site was launched originally as a directory of some cool websites that Jerry and David would come across, and the name of the site was originally Jerry's guide to the web. They decided to go with Yahoo because that was an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle!
Later on that year the two Stanford students met up with Sequoia Venture Capitalist Michael Moritz, who loved the name, fell in love with the two students, and liked the idea of the developing a directory of cool websites. He told them that he was willing to invest in the company, but the catch was that they had to keep the name. It's pretty cool VC if you ask me.
Later on in 1996, the company went public, raised a lot of money and they basically benefited from the rise of the Dot-com Bubble. At some point they were going to merge with eBay and there were rumors going on that they were going to acquire Walt Disney or joined them in a merger. Of course that never took place for the simple reason that the Dot-Com Bubble burst sending Yahoo!'s shares and fortunes down the drain.
Now something interesting happened too in the late 1990's which was Yahoo! had essentially developed as a portal which had a directory and they decided to forgo investing in their own search technology and adopt the search engine by what is now their biggest competitor is Google.
What ended up happening was that Yahoo! powered Google search engine and that helped Google become the biggest search engine out there. But by 2001 with the market not being too good, Yahoo! realized that that was a big strategic mistake. At that point they acquired Inktomi as well as Overture to basically bolster their own search offerings.
As the dot-com market turned around and began to improve, they decided to bring on Warner Brothers veteran Terry Semel who helped the company diversify away from simply being a portal by acquiring numerous companies.
Today Yahoo! is probably the best example of a digital media company. It doesn't brandish itself as being a technology company leaving that for companies like Microsoft and Google, but it does position itself as basically a Walt Disney.
Now a days Google and Yahoo! are competing furiously in the search base, and well, Yahoo! is number two in the search market, they remain still a major player in that market, and today still remain the biggest media property on the web.
That's in this week's business school bid, Yahoo! catches next week when we look at another company in the space.
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