|
|
Title:
Inside Yahoo! Reinvention and the Road Ahead
Review:
The story of Yahoo is the story of the dot com dream; a multi-million dollar company that grew out of the hobby of two Ph.D. students and soared on the stock market. But it also embodies the flip side of the dot com dream; shares in the company fell steeply in 2000 as investors became nervous about dot coms, and the closures of high-profile websites like Pets.com and boo.com led to a steep fall in Yahoo's main revenue stream, advertising. As the books' author, journalist Karen Angel points out, now may the best time to take stock of where Yahoo has come from and where it is going.
'Inside Yahoo!: Reinvention and the Road Ahead' tells the story of Yahoo from it's humble beginnings as a distraction for students Jerry Yang and David Filo from their dissertations (and yes, the popular myth is true, they did once run the site from a trailer), through the heady days of the growth of the dot coms, the so-called portal wars between Yahoo, Lycos, Excite and others; through to the fall in technology stocks and the economic realities of 2002.
Although Yahoo declined to contribute to the book - a fact Angel notes contrasts to the company's past enthusiasm for the media- she has drawn on sources around the former and current management of Yahoo, former Yahoo staff members and Wall Street analysts to tell the story of the company and assess what the future may hold.
These contacts and Angel's own research provide interesting insights in the culture of many of the dot coms that existed in the mid 1990s. These provide startlingly examples of the virtual 'land grab' that was taking place between portals including Yahoo, Excite, Lycos and AOL. For example, Excite.com paid $780 for e-card website Blue Mountain Arts in 1999. At the same time, Yahoo's then director of e-commerce, Elizabeth Collet, hired an intern to build an e-card service for Yahoo - at a cost she estimates of about $10,000. Excite filled for bankruptcy early in 2002; Yahoo has struggled on, posting a profit of $21.4 million in the second quarter of 2002.
However, as Angel discusses, Yahoo has faced its own challenges since the heady days of deal making in the late 90s. The company's diversification away from relying on advertising for revenue has resulted in changes that have been controversial with some users - for example the annual fee for listing a commercial website in the Yahoo directory, and the company's partnerships with pay-per-click search engines.
'Inside Yahoo!: Reinvention and the Road Ahead' is an assessable, interesting read for anybody interested in the story of one of the companies that shaped the Internet into how we know it today. It paints a clear picture of the rapid-fire deal making, acquisitions and entrepreneurial spirit that characterised the growth of the dot coms, and the painful reality which hit in 2000. It will be interesting to see what form Yahoo exists in when the author writes a updated edition of this book.
Free Pint Reviewer:
Duncan Parry works in the UK editorial team of European pay-per-click
search engine Espotting <http://www.espotting.com/>, whose partners
include Yahoo! Europe and Ask Jeeves in the UK. When time permits he
writes for EuropeMedia about the UK Internet industry
<http://www.europemedia.net/editors.asp?EditorID=113>, and is studying
for a degree with the Open University. Previously he worked on the
directory of Lycos UK <dparry@lycos.co.uk>.
Related Free Pint Links:
|
