Even if Yahoo had managed to buy Google, Facebook and Netflix, there is no guarantee that those three companies would have grown up to be what they are today. Maybe Yahoo would have messed them like it did to itself.
Without the same incentive to grow these companies that the founders had they surely would not have become what they are today. If they were owned by Yahoo the founders would not work so hard on them or be innovative most likely they would be off making other companies most likely eventually.
Case in point: Flickr. They pretty much were Instagram before Instagram, pioneering the idea of shared personal photos; one of the first “Web 2.0” sites that brought a dynamic UI to a web browser through JavaScript and dynamic HTML; got acquired by Yahoo and from day one it was hell for their users and employees, who left in droves after each stupid management decision forced by the mothership. I resisted as a paying user until recently, and I feel like I just turned off the lights on my way out. Sad.
Netflix messed up as much as Yahoo. I don't know how people paying for Netflix. The Netflix's dolby vision is terrible, huge lack of 4k movies and almost all of the great movies aren't in the catalog. It's disgrace.
Yahoo is so far left wing. All they do is lie. Never say anything bad about Democrats and Biden or anything good about Republicans and Trump. It’s such an obnoxious platform. Many of their stories are days old and repeated over and over. They are part of the dishonest left wing media that lies nonstop like CNN, ABC, MSNBC do. They use propaganda from the NYT’s, Huff Post, the Atlantic and more.
I worked at Yahoo! in the early 2000's. The high management was recruited mainly from media/TV networks. They were not focused on launching or improving web products. They did not understand Web technologies at all. They stayed in their comfort zone when the audience was big and got demoted, because of their lack of understanding and vision for Web Tech.
Yahoo wasn't truly a real tech company. It started out as a link directory which any high school kid with html skills could've put together. They just happened to be the first. At that time, Microsoft was the most feared tech company, and Yahoo no doubt didn't want any part of them. Yahoo's natural progression into a portal monetized by banner ads made sense for it to continue its course into becoming a full blown digital media company - like an online version of Warner Bros and News Corp. Yahoo hired hollywood veteran Terry Semel. Everything seems to be fine. Problem was, Google was becoming popular and Yahoo must've figured Google was making serious money with their PPC advertising system. This put Yahoo at the crossroads, since Yahoo was the #1 most visited site on the web, Google was gaining grounds on them and could soon displace them. Yahoo could've stuck to the plan and continue to focus on becoming the Internet's leading digital media company but they chose to compete with Google instead. The rest as often said was history.
I had friends working on their Brazil division then; they told me exactly that! As a young-ish outsider, I found it hard to believe that such a foundational website and web brand could be so short-sighted, but here we are.
While hindsight is 20/20, it's amazing how they kept buying companies that were doomed to fail and passing on ones that are worth hundreds of billions today. But in a way I guess it's a good thing. Imagine how different the internet landscape would be today if they were bought out.
I think it's very much a causal relationship, not just coincidental. I think it's very possible they would have run Google and other companies into the ground, had they bought them.
It's clear we would not have a Google or Facebook today if Yahoo had actually succeeded in buying them. They would have destroyed the two companies with poor decisions.
Crazy story🤯 Btw thank you so much for not including a mid-video ad for Silo… it makes your already high quality vids so much more enjoyable. It’s completely understandable your approach for user acquisition and I completely understand your reasoning for the in-video ads. Just my (relatively meaningless) feedback/suggestion as a user… I feel as though if you place the Silo ad at the end of videos it would be a great compromise that would benefit both your company and us as the audience, as I, personally, have a much better viewing experience with the ad at the end, and am a lot more likely to watch seeing as it’s not being forced to me. Anyways tho thanks for the consistent very high quality content you produce and wish you the best!
@@LogicallyAnswered I think there's still a chance for Yahoo. It's not like they've got much to lose at this point, so they have a rare opportunity to try some wild new business models.
@@LogicallyAnswered - That was one of their best features... but since they dont exist anymore the competetion took away the traffic. It would fail if they brought it back
There's a little more to acquisitions than simply buying a good company. You have to structure the deal in such a way that improves the chances of success. Google and Facebook could have easily ended up like Overture and Tumblr if Yahoo had acquired them under the same agreement they had with their other acquisitions
Another example being Yahoo!’s acquisition of Flickr, which could have been (and in some ways was) Instagram before Instagram, but instead Yahoo! completely stalled it out and Flickr became a footnote.
The dramatic music has never been better suited than in this video. This video brought back a lot of memories and I learned a thing or two. Thanks Hari.
When you see how Yahoo was managed it is really possible that even if they bought google and co they would have bust them, and the companies they bought would have maybe did really well if they didn't bought them
Funny thing about yahoo is they would buy competing and complementary companies like geocities and egroups. Then they did no maintenance at all for 10 to 20 years. The sites got stale so they got closed. It was just one waste after another.
Exactly. Another example being Yahoo!’s acquisition of Flickr, which could have been (and in some ways was) Instagram before Instagram, but instead Yahoo! completely stalled it out and Flickr became a footnote.
Personally I still have an old yahoo email I use as sort of "required registration" dumpster. Basically, if a website or a game requires me to make an account to use it, I use the yahoo email. Anything else, like work or payments, I use a different email lol
RU-vid makes Google money because Google is an advertising company at it's core. Hard to say if RU-vid would be profitable if some other tech company whose core business wasn't advertising had bought it back then. There has to be ENORMOUS costs involved in running a site like RU-vid.
@@Toby1952 That's true. Google bought YT for $1B as I recall. The interesting thing is that YT wasn't profitable for the longest time and is still a tiny sliver of Google's business. The real value of YT, Gmail, Chrome and even maps is that you stay logged into Google which lets them track you across the web, not just searches. Maps also makes money now through the costs to other companies who use it to autofill addresses or to plan routes (like Uber did until ~3 years ago).
I loved the early unruly days of Yahoo Answers where you could find questions like: _if I fingerblast my first cousin can she become pregnant?_ and have like 20 serious replies. 😂
I still use my Yahoo email address. When I need to print something out at the local library (approx. once a year, which is why I don’t keep a printer).
0:49 Impossible. No way that APPLE has more than HALF of ALL the email clients in the world. Absolutely no way. I have never in my life heard of anyone using Apple's email at all nor seen it being mentioned anywhere at all.
They’re a bunch of yahoo’s running that company anyway. (Ahem) The reason I hated Yahoo from the outset was that the front page was littered with distracting ads and pulsating GIFS, Google by comparison was just clean and let me look up what I was looking for without ramming crap down my throat. To their credit, they’ve kept this aesthetic and approach which is why I’m still with them and wouldn’t consider an alternative.
- It's usually young people who innovate, that begin a startup - It then get's overrun by boomers, who look down on young inexperienced people and ignore their input... We all know how it ends...
This just goes to show that it takes more than a University level education to run a successful business. You have to be aware of the market, copy and innovate.
I remember the old days when watching the stock market with Yahoo seemed like the future. With all the graphs and Data, almost no one knew that data back then. But honestly? They had such a big chance and they blew it. What a shame😔PS: Great work with the video, maybe we could do a co-up?
You missed the investment in Alibaba which made them some tens of billions and was a lot of what propped up the value in the late 2010s. And also the relationship with Yahoo Japan. This video misses out a hell of a lot
Fun fact: Zuckerberg never wanted to sell fb so the BOD advised him to buy it so a deal was made that if they offer 1 billion dollars, they will sell and if they offered anything less they had to refuse and Zuckerberg was the happiest person with deal not going down
Who noticed that sometimes when he said "yahoo", he showed an image of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Cos yahoo and Netanyahu rhyme at the end. Quite off topic but just thought to mention it if anyone noticed
Let's be honest, if Yahoo bought these companies they would be just as irrelevant as yahoo is. We are all better off this never happened. This video could have been titled the tech society almost missed out on.
Is it that they picked all the losers, or that they caused them to lose? Couldn't it be that Google and Facebook will become losers if they were bought by Yahoo??
For me, the decline started because their slogan actually had a soundbite that went "yaaaaahooooooooooo-oo". I mean, why was that necessary? It sucked out all the air in the room. It wasnt that it was bad or cringey, it was even memorable, but what's left to say about them after that? We talk about Google all day long. "google this, google that, let me google it real quick". But after hearing thay "yaaahoooooo" jingle hang in the air for 3 whole seconds, all conversation dies and there are no words left to say, so we never ever talked about yahoo after finishing up on their site. **shrug**
I work in IT and didn't even know this but. I still do have a Yahoo email. Do I use it No, I keep it incase I forgot to migrate any accounts that I forgot about.
And what if we look at it other way around. Whatever company Yahoo chose to acquire its got shutdown. And the one's who didn't ended up getting successful. Its easy to look at the end picture and say that company is a trillion dollar company but what most of us don't see is their choices, decision making, perseverance, hard work and ofcourse process which makes them a trillion dollar company. It's totally depends on the higher level management and their competency whether a company going to succeed or fail. The more talented and competent they are higher the chances For e.g. Microsoft after Satya Nadella and before Satya Nadella Another example would be we see RU-vidrs with millions of subscribers and 100s of millions of views hit what we don't see is how much work one has to put in in making a single video.
My Yahoo account is still my primary email. (I can hear the response: "You still use email?") I don't have a large number of accounts or registrations, but changing them to something else like gmail, is more bother than I care for.
@@LogicallyAnswered I think Yahoo had 1 opportunity and that was in 1998, a time when no one heard of Google. The second time around in 2002 or 2003, I don't think the Google guys were genuinely interested in selling anymore since they were raking in millions and millions from PPC, and still haven't gone public yet. But yes, Yahoo should've still bought Google in 1998 when the asking price was only $1 million, which was like getting it for free since Yahoo was worth many billions at the time.
I cringe every time I hear somebody using a yahoo email. Their customer service is garbage and the website is garbage and their email service is garbage. I can't tell you how many people I've heard from that were charged to get back into their own account and how many people clicked on malware advertising links that disguise themselves as emails. Nobody should be using yahoo.
Wow all the great opportunities Yahoo's turned down is like me turning down dates with 5 women that are going to be on the 10 most beautiful people of decade 😅😅😢 that got to kill Yahoo executive looking back
Yahoo recently blocked me from the comment section, about 2 weeks ago. I guess they don't like independent thought, especially if you're a conservative.
