Yahoo screwed up so many times.
They could've been Google.
They could've been Facebook.
It's sad because in the 90's, they were the "go to" place. I knew so many early internet users who had their home pages set to Yahoo.
It's sad because in the 90's, they were the "go to" place. I knew so many early internet users who had their home pages set to Yahoo.
They could have paid talent and they had a ton of traffic. You can basically build whatever from there.
They never had Google's attitude that "what helps the web helps us".
And it was easy to control _how_ and _where_ you wanted your site to appear in the index. It's naive to think something similar would survive endless spam nowadays, but damn, I liked and really miss it.
To be fair, it didn't even scale in the face of DMOZ (née GnuHoo), which was similarly structured and human curated, but Wikipedia to Yahoo’s Britannica.
Most support seems to be nostalgia. But if somehow Yahoo did buy Google or Facebook I doubt Yahoo would have been up to the task to make it as successful as they are now.
You are right though. They would not have been as successful.
The primary damage was psychological. Investors lost faith in technology so after 2000 tech companies scrambled to reinvent themselves as "not tech" companies.
Yahoo was one of the worst examples, hiring CEOs that tried to turn it into a media company. Yahoo's technology investment suffered and they had no technology strategy for too long.
Mozilla has a real vision, and Yahoo could have moved the vast internet properties under its control into conformity with Mozilla's vision in various ways, and given real legs to things like Persona, or the various other beautiful Mozilla Labs projects.
To me that's an ultimate what-if, and a missed opportunity for both companies.
Yahoo was so great in the 90's! It was hard finding things on the early Internet. What they were doing with directories and search seems primitive now, but it really ground breaking. I still remember the first time I discovered it. Probably late '94 (before it was called Yahoo) or '95...
Exactly. Yahoo had more organic pieces of a true social network than Google ever did. In addition to the ones you listed, there were their news properties, groups, fantasy sports, and later on, properties like Delicious, Flickr and Tumblr. They could have had something really interesting under good management (admittedly a huge caveat).
They had the pieces to a more plausible facebook competitor than Google ever did, and even Google's best potential seed of a social network, Google Reader, was mismanaged in a failure of strategic vision. In any case, I'm not among those who think Yahoo was doomed. They had the pieces to become something interesting.
You could even read your email over the phone way before smartphones were a thing.
All that lead gone to waste...
But in the 90s they had no real competition and some of their products were actually pretty good and convenient given the limitations of the time.
Everyday I woke up with a phone call from yahoo at my chosen time telling me how many unread emails I had, the weather for that day and what events my calendar had.
All went to waste...
Yahoo turned down the option to buy early Google. They didn't see the value in search because it would take users away from their site. They wanted users to stay on their site and participate in discussions and such.
Yahoo was "the Internet's homepage" (before Reddit co-opted that), and was, when keyword-based search was kind of sucky and already getting gamed (HTML "keyword" headers, if anyone remembers those, Lycos, HotBot, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, ...) a pretty good way to find things. The Yahoo directory itself (Yang's Hierarchical Officious Oracle or Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle) was carried forward for a while as DMOZ (since killed), and has certain similarities to Wikipedia, though that focuses on knowledge and not necessarily webpages. To that extent, I find Wikipedia more useful today, because it tells me what I'm looking to find out, rather than directing me to some page, which may, or quite probably, may not, have what I'm looking for. And in either case, almost certainly assaults my senses.
Yahoo also served as an information hub. Before there was Google News, there was Yahoo News, Yahoo Weather, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Maps (I think). One of the first online web-based email services (and still a large, though declining, share of the market, along with Aol and Hotmail, along with a few other relics).
The consumerisation of Yahoo was already turning me off by the late 1990s, and I remember running across the first print magazine pushing that side of the company in San Francisco in the late 1990s / early 2000s, and deciding that the company had jumped the shark so far as I was concerned. I've always lead the crowd....
(I'm not bragging. I'm saying that if I predict something, give it another 20 years. Though I occasionally get closer the mark.)
At the time, there wasn't anything on the Open Web that was close.
There were entirely closed portals, most especially AOL, and other early online services (Prodigy, CompuServ, etc.). But the idea of one place you could go for all of that, no. Yahoo started the Portal Wars. (Best rejoinder ever: "My ass is a portal".
One version of that (from 1999, and, of course, /.), here:
https://linux.slashdot.org/story/99/03/04/1128220/redhats-ne...
So, at the time, Yahoo was huge. And the Internet was tremendously smaller than today -- about 100x fewer people online then than now -- call it 30 million rather than 3 billion users. Today, a social site with "only" 30 million MUA is considered a failure or minor player.