Yahoo! seeks to recover its cool
Business being redesigned around mobile
Remember the time when Yahoo! was the gateway to the Internet? The once iconic search and advertising giant is now attempting to make a serious comeback.
Much of what we enjoy today on the Internet owes something to Yahoo! The company defined the mercurial innovation of an exciting yet untested online economy.
Yahoo! brought us our first taste of cloud computing with Yahoo! Mail. It was the first real killer Internet search service. It put instant messaging (IM) on the map with Messenger and for many people, it provided them their first email address.
Yahoo’s founders, Jerry Yang and David Filo, were the cool kids of the tech world and true visionaries that inspired today’s Internet entrepreneurs like Google’s Larry Page and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.
Services like Flickr defined our love affair with taking and sharing pictures online long before Instagram became the hot photo sharing service.
Once valued at $80 billion during its peak, Yahoo! was valued last year at a mere $14 billion, according to Bloomberg. This is largely a result of Google and Facebook grabbing most of the Internet’s eyeballs and advertising revenue.
When Yahoo! was at its peak, smartphones didn’t exist and mobile was nowhere as dominant as it is today.
Yahoo!’s comeback was kick started by hiring Google’s Marissa Mayer and redesigning the business around mobile.
Mayer is the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company and has been ranked number 14 on the list of America’s most powerful businesswomen of 2012 by Fortune magazine. Prior to Yahoo Mayer was vice-president of local, maps, and location services at Google for desktop and mobile.
Mayer is an engineer and a successful builder of portals and services, but is most famous for building company culture, loyalty and identity within Google. Yahoo!’s stock has already risen by 25 per cent since Meyer took the reins in July.
Yahoo! has been on a tear lately. They revised Yahoo! Mail into a smoother and more streamlined service rivalling Gmail. They plan on improving Flickr and making that service more compelling to photography-focused users especially on mobile devices.
Yahoo! has released its Mail app for iOS, Android and Windows 8 to ensure a consistent look and feel across these mobile devices.
This will give Yahoo! a broader presence and make their services available to a wider audience of mobile users.