Vision - January/February 2008 - (Page 10) visionary any once red-hot search engines like Altavista, Excite, Lycos, Go.com, Snap and others have faded from view. However Yahoo! is still in the game as one of the top Internet portals despite an intensely competitive environment. Its primary rivals today are Google and Microsoft’s MSN. The Silicon Valley start-up began in 1994 when two Stanford University doctoral students, Jerry Yang and David Filo, decided to catalog their favorite World Wide Web sites. Yang and Filo realized the business potential, took a leave of absence from Stanford and incorporated Yahoo! Inc. in 1995. Yang, who emigrated from Taiwan to San Jose as a child, was just 27. They called the online list of sites, “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”. It was later renamed Yahoo!, an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”, but also was chosen for the definition of a yahoo: “rude, unsophisticated, uncouth” and fun. The company went public on April 12, 1996 and both co-founders took on the titles “chief yahoos”. Tim Koogle was hired to run the business and later Terry Semel. Yang focused on corporate strategy, technology vision, strategic partnerships and international joint ventures while Filo dealt with the technological end. Buy-out offers emerged from Netscape, AOL, and others, but were turned down. By 2001 the site was recording 1.32 billion page views a day. In 2005, Yahoo! merged its Chinese operations into Alibaba Group, a Chinese company that runs the e-commerce sites Alibaba.com and Taobao.com, paying $1 billion for a 40 percent stake. However, Yahoo! has had a challenging year. In June 2007, Semel resigned and Yang was tapped as CEO to help the company increase Yahoo!’s traffic and ad revenues. So what is the vision? Yang told its nearly 12,000 employees, “A Yahoo! that is better focused on what’s important to its users, customers and employees.” The company aims to attract outside developers to create tools to make Yahoo!’s pages more inviting to users who act as con- chief yahoo! and ceo jerry yang ] • [ by cindy loffler stevens M Yahoo! Moves Forward tent creators and making sure Yahoo!’s 200 million registered global users find exactly what they want when they do a keyword search. It recently bought Del.icio.us, Flickr and MyBlogLog positioning for a long-term play. Chief Yahoo! and CEO Jerry Yang talked to CE Vision about Yahoo!’s plans. How has Yahoo! evolved from a portal to a leading Web brand? When David (Filo) and I started Yahoo!, the Web was on the cusp of becoming main stream—its users were almost all novices. We believed our role was to curate its content on behalf of thousands—now millions— of everyday people. We did it by bringing some basic human insight (usually our own) to culling the Web, and then serving up relevant content. Simplicity, accessibility— everything was just a click away. The number of people who came to trust and love Yahoo! grew from thousands to hundreds of millions to half a billion today. But things have changed. First, the Internet is much more inextricably woven into our lives. Our physical and digital interactions are blurring, and soon we will interact with information through everyday objects and devices. People also are accessing the Internet via multiple devices, not just the PC and using it in new ways beyond the PC. Second, the users are no longer novices. Users expect to configure, assemble, mashup and create their own experiences. They have little tolerance for experiences that aren’t totally relevant to them. Third, there now are hundreds of thousands of advertisers worldwide with tens of billions in total marketing budgets to capture the attention and dollars of consumers, along with an important and growing network of publishers and developers who are after both consumers’ attention and marketers’ ad dollars. Yahoo! is embarked on a multi-year transformation to meet the needs of this rapidly developing ecosystem of users, advertisers, publishers and developers. From our original role as Web curator, we are building the world’s most open, robust and vibrant online ad network to reach the largest and most engaged community of online users. 2007 was a difficult year for Yahoo!, as CEO how have you repositioned the company? We are zeroing in on three big multi-year objectives: Make Yahoo! the starting point for the most consumers; become the “must buy” for the most advertisers; and deliver industry-leading platforms for the most developers. We are prioritizing our resources around key starting points like the home page, My Yahoo!, Mail, Search and Mobile, and creating strong differentiators in those products. We’re also focusing our resources around services like Y! Finance, Sports and News, and Yahoo! Go to enhance and support our starting point. We’ve taken important steps to transform Yahoo! from selling just our owned-andoperated inventory to delivering comprehensive, integrated and targeted solutions to advertisers and publishers both on and off Yahoo!’s network. We’re rapidly scaling our open ad exchange to handle significantly greater volume, as well as developing more sophisticated advertising and publishing ad management tools. Our open platform strategy will allow for rapid delivery of new products and services from third parties to our consumers and customers. We are looking at different ways to open up Yahoo! by providing access to critical platforms and APIs. We believe our users, advertisers and publishers will benefit from this rich developer community by having access to a vast array of highly personalized and relevant services that they can choose from and that they can take throughout Yahoo! We believe our addressable market www.ce.org 10 January/February 2008 http://www.taobao.com http://www.Alibaba.com http://www.ce.org
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.