Google’s Rise, Yahoo’s Demise: A Tale of Two Tech Titans

Being one of the major players in the rise of the Internet, one of the first catalysts of the rise of Google was the telecom crash in 2001. This incident sent shockwaves around the industry, dealing heavy blows to many companies, including Yahoo. Google, on the other hand, did not suffer huge losses. 

 

For the remainder of the 2000s, Yahoo! and Google would continue to battle for control of the market. But as Google continued to release more apps such as Gmail, Google Maps, etc., and started to rival giants such as Apple and Microsoft, Yahoo!, despite their valiant efforts,  lagged behind Google. Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo! in 2008 for 44.6 billion dollars and while this proposal was rejected, it demonstrated how far behind Yahoo! had fallen.
 

One of the main reasons for  Yahoo!’s failure was its slow entry into the growing mobile world. In the first quarter of 2006, more than a year before the iPhone hit the market, Google CEO Eric Schmidt spoke about mobile devices. Yahoo!, on the other hand, barely mentioned phones in this quarter. When Marissa Mayer, a key figure in the rise of Google,  took over as CEO at Yahoo! in 2012, she mentioned that Yahoo!’s mobile business barely existed. Mayer had the task of bringing Yahoo! into the smartphone market, but it was probably too late. Apple and Google were already dominant in the industry and Facebook was making a revolution in the apps field. Walter Frick, an editor at the Harvard Business Review, looked for the number of times the word mobile was used from the last quarters of 2005 to the first few quarters in 2016. What he found was until Mayers became CEO Yahoo! was out of the mobile game, mentioned rarely and by 2012 it was much too late for Yahoo! to get back in the game as companies like Apple and Google had already built such strong economic moats which made joining the market extremely difficult.
 

What I believe was the final strike in Yahoo!’s demise was when in 2016 it was announced that Verizon Communications would acquire Yahoo!’s core assets. This deal was put on delay due to the revelation that around one billion Yahoo! accounts had been compromised in a series of security breaches–a number that would rise to all 3 billion Yahoo! accounts. Due to Yahoo!’s lack of an economic moat and divided leadership, I believe it will soon be out of the industry altogether. 

 

Image and Info Sources:

• Frick, Walter. "The Decline of Yahoo! in Its Own Words" ["The Decline of Yahoo! in Its Own Words"]. Harvard Business Review. 

• Britannica. www.britannica.com/topic/Yahoo!-Inc. Accessed 6 Sept. 2023.