A sad farewell to Yahoo: Too bad it ended the way it did
You’re not supposed to feel much about the demise of a prominent company. It’s just business, right?
But it’s not. Losing Yahoo as an independent company hurts. This is the Silicon Valley pioneer that brought the world to the web and the web to the world.
In the beginning, Yahoo was the new thing — an internet company when the internet as we know it now was still new. It represented something more than a corporate entity — creativity, exploration, warmth and fun.
Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo, said it well Monday when she noted that Yahoo would now be partners with AOL, which Verizon also owns.
“Yahoo is a company that has changed the world, and will
continue to do so through this combination with Verizon and AOL,” Mayer said. “Yahoo and AOL popularized the internet, email, search and real-time media. It’s poetic to be joining forces with AOL and Verizon as we enter our next chapter focused on achieving scale on mobile.”
I remember when David Filo and Jerry Yang, two Stanford graduates, started the crazily named company with the exclamation point in the mid-1990s.
When I visited their offices and talked to workers and executives, their excitement was palpable. That was when Yahoo offered a gateway to this new thing called the web. I remember executives talking about creating a phone book-like directory for the web, which was still small but mysterious. Yang and Filo’s first creation in fact was a website called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.”
I understand why Verizon buying Yahoo had to happen. The $4.8 billion deal for Yahoo’s core business may be good for Yahoo shareholders. It may mean that some of the best of Yahoo — Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, Flickr, Yahoo mail — will survive or even thrive in a Verizon universe.
And for Yahoo employees, including the roughly 4,000 who work in Silicon Valley and in the firm’s Sunnyvale headquarters, the deal means their futures will begin to lurch forward like a train that has been stopped on the tracks. But still, I’m sad. It’s pointless to wonder “what if,” but I can’t help it. Perhaps Yahoo could have avoided its more serious troubles — anemic ad revenue growth — if bigger, better competitors such as Google and Facebook hadn’t shown up and proved even Yahoo’s big vision wasn’t big enough.
Maybe trying this and that for years could have been good enough. After all, Yahoo for a long period was a moneymaking machine. It grew, stumbled and still survived, just as many companies before it had done. Then it stumbled some more.
Grown-up leadership came in the form of Tim Koogle, who took the company public, and Terry Semel, who stabilized the stock after the dot-com bust. He made the critical decision to invest in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba but declined to buy then-young Google.
When Yang took the CEO job in 2007, the move was heralded much like Jack Dorsey’s more recent return to Twitter. But Yang tripped big time by rejecting a bid by Microsoft to buy the firm. And then came Carol Bartz and Scott Thompson before Mayer, a Google executive, took over in 2012.
Despite two years of excitement over Mayer, she stumbled too. She didn’t cut costs like she needed to. She made huge bets, such as the $1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr, that never really paid off as planned.
And now Mayer is shepherding the company to a demise of sorts.
The sale had to happen. But I will miss Yahoo as a stand-alone, independent company, and the whimsy and cheery confidence its exclamation point represented. I’ll even miss the leadership drama, which underlined that Yahoo mattered. Now as part of Verizon, Yahoo matters less.