Microsoft has Windows, Office and Xbox.
Amazon has massive web server and product distribution platforms.
Apple has OS X and iPhone.
Google has Android, search, ads, and an online office suite.
What does Yahoo do? I guess they have some long-time email users and a well-liked stock tracking platform?
Yahoo had it all - email, answers, news, stocks, search, and they even invented Hadoop back then to sift through all their data. They just never had any larger vision to integrate any of their assets properly to solve a grand problem.
They always just threw ever more noodles to the wall and tried to see which ones would stick.
There's zero coherency in anything they do, for me it's just a diverse bunch of poorly maintained and integrated services that's purely kept together with duct tape, page rank and marketing hacks stacked on top of each other.
It's the kind of slow death when there's just enough recurring revenue left that it's hard to screw things completely up, even with a league of completely dilbertized MBAs in charge battling each other until the last of talented people have left.
Banner Ads: $423M
Search Revenue: $403M
Other: $245M
2014 total revenue for year was 4.6 Billion
Millions use Yahoo website daily and Yahoo email.
Yahoo is the fourth/fifth most visited website in the world. WORLD.
Yahoo's ONLY problem is that they want to be a leader in their industry. If they did not and were content with milking their content and user base, they would be boring but very profitable.
Yahoo can deploy many products to its audience and be a leader again.
I'm not doubting if Yahoo could build (or buy) some cool tech products and put them in front of their large audience. But the real question is whether their audience is the sort who would bite and eagerly adopt new technology.
While I am sure there are exceptions, I think the bulk of people visiting Yahoo and using Yahoo properties are there because they can't or don't want to change things up. I think how many of those hits to yahoo.com come from library computers that are hardwired to visit it as the homepage, from my parents computers, from people who will load the yahoo.com page to type "Gmail" in the search bar "because that's how the Internet works" etc.
The early adopter set that's more consciously in control of their digital destiny and eager to try new things are already giving their eyeballs to Apple, Google, and the swarms of shiny startups orbiting their ecosystems.
I'm not celebrating this fact. I wish there were more tech centers of gravity to choose from, and I am saddened that Yahoo (along with so many others) is unable to break through.
In the sense that both Google and Yahoo are mostly focused about showing adds, they are not that different. Google has just more means of showing ads that are more effective, and viewed as cooler by its users.
Actually they have like ~1.37 Yahoos worth of non-ad revenue[1][2]
[1] https://investor.google.com/earnings/2015/Q2_google_earnings...
[2] https://investor.yahoo.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=92308...
My Dad used to spend time on Yahoo!'s portal too, mostly for stocks and movie information. I never thought it was worth going directly to Yahoo, but if a Google search sent me there for a stock then I'd read it.
The original "synergy" idea was more about being a portal. But those don't exist anymore because search completely superceded it. It seems too late for Yahoo! to revive its search business. It isn't a good aggregator or content discovery platform because there are stronger competitors like Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook.
http://www.listsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/good-qu...