Historical events
- In November 17, 2008 Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang announces intention to step down and this ushers a new business perspective for Yahoo amid takeover bids from Microsoft.
- April 21, 2009 – Yahoo announces plan to cut 700 jobs, company is under new CEO Carol Bartz. Company is seeking a turnaround and has to cut costs.
- July 29, 2009 – Microsoft takes responsibility of Yahoo search and yahoo focuses on advertising business with banner ads.
- December 16, 2010 – Yahoo’s stake at Alibaba is spun off into AliPay, and this affects Yahoo’s stock valuation negatively. It also becomes a show of dwindling revenue options for the company.
- January 17, 2012 – Jerry Yang, the Yahoo co-founder leaves the company completely by stepping down from the board. The control heritage of the company changes and new shareholders jostle for control at this time.
- July, 2012 – Marissa Mayer becomes the CEO of Yahoo.
- 2012 – Yahoo gets three CEOs in the same year, indicating the troubling times that the company has.
Achievements
- October 7, 2010 – Yahoo provides tools for giving people information results that they need quickly, and it becomes a media empire with content for entertainment, sports and major events. Model brings users to the Yahoo site where it earns advertisements. The model becomes a new way of monetization that will feature in the company’s future strategies and revenue expansion plans as an advertising publisher and service provider.
- May 20, 2012 – Yahoo announced that it was selling half of its stake at Alibaba and would earn 6.3 billion dollars in cash and 800 million dollars in Alibaba shares. Net income from the sale was about 4.2 billion dollars that would go to shareholders.
- 2013 – Yahoo brought significant engineering talent to reinvigorate the company’s focus for innovation. It boosted its tech focus by putting David Pogue as head of Yahoo Tech.
- 2014 – Yahoo became innovative again by acquiring Flurry and Brightroll, which as new platforms for mobile & social media based content creation that promise to be future revenue centers for the company as it seeks to become profitable in future (Lunden 2014).
Milestones
- 2001 – 2007:
- Terry Semel is the longest serving CEO of Yahoo and he had a focus on media business which explains why the company was so centered on content development and advertising revenue for its users. The company developed various platforms and successive CEOs tried to resurrect some dying business ideas from this CEO’s era.
- April 17, 2012:
- After years of making losses, the company made a net income increase of 28 percent. This indicated the possibilities that the company could have by refocusing its business and cutting costs.
- July 6, 2012:
- Yahoo and Facebook agree on an advertisement alliance that ushers a new way for Yahoo to earn revenue outside its platforms by spreading user base to other popular platforms (The Associated Press 2012).
- 2015:
- Yahoo creates SpinCo, a new tax-free spin-off company that takes 100% of its remaining holdings in Alibaba. This transforms the value of yahoo to its own products in the market (Levy 2015).
Failures
February 19, 2004 – Yahoo stops using Google-powered results and launched own search engine technology later. The company should have sought other ways of competing with the search company or even acquired Google’s search business at the time. Such missed opportunities will continue to affect the competitiveness of Yahoo in future.
When Yahoo became a media company, it focused so much on content and forgot to polish its assets on engineering and innovations on the internet. By the time mobile technologies became popular, Yahoo was still focusing on media and advertising. It lacks the right channels to push its media and advertising business and was overtaken by events (Foremski 2015).
The 2009 deal for handing over search to Microsoft for a decade denied Yahoo opportunities for innovation and response to its rivals in search business technology. It also negatively affected company’s ability to attract top talent in the technology field.
Reference List
- Foremski, T 2015, On Yahoo’s 20th anniversary CEO Mayer counts her achievements. Web.
- Levy, S 2015, Marissa Mayer has completed step one. Web.
- Lunden, I 2014, Yahoo buys mobile analytics firm flurry for north of $200m. Web.
- The Associated Press 2012, Timeline: Key events involving Yahoo and its performance. Web.