Goodbye Yahoo- The most tragic Death on the Internet

Very few companies ever go as big as Yahoo! did. But out of those who do, rarely would have one of them seen a downfall as Yahoo! did. This post may very well be taken as the Goliath's obituary. 

Founded way back in 1995, by the industrious David Filo and Jerry Yang, the company ruled the roost in the web world, and grew phenomenally, before making some of the most remarkable mistakes in business that the world has ever seen.

It turned down the offer to buy Google, twice. Once in 1997 for as little as 1 million dollars, to refusing to buy it for 5 billion dollars in 2002, as it was "not worth it" (words for history to laugh at).

Another curse that Yahoo had was destroying any company it acquired. Flickr was at the forefront of the social media movement, when Yahoo acquired it, resulting it in being soon overrun by Facebook. The acquisition of Tumblr, for a billion dollars, in the hope of having its own social networking site didn't do the company any good, and instead made Tumblr lose users due to the persistent Yahoo Ads. It is yet to make money for Yahoo.

Another blow in this series of unfortunate events was the refusal to be sold to Microsoft in 2008, for about 44.6 billion dollars, because it was, "too less" (more fun). To put that into perspective, the price it sold to Verizon now is 4.83 billion dollars.

The death can be attributed to many causes, but if we were to put our finger on one, it would be lack of innovation. The company kept backing out of fights, and rather than innovating, waited for some company they could acquire to fight on their behalf. When Google was new to the market, rather than creating technologies to take on the Startup, they got it to power their own search engine. The prolonged term of Marissa Mayer as CEO did the company little good and it went stagnant.

While what it looks like is a complete screw up, it surely isn't. What Verizon has bought is core Yahoo business, and, while we are not sure why they did it, or why they left the rest of it, the remaining part, temporarily aptly named as RemainCo owns considerable assets, and is still controlled by the ex- Google Exec turned captain of the sinking ship Marissa. This includes 35.5% stakes in Yahoo Japan(a separate entity now), a 15% stake in Alibaba, the e-commerce giant of the east, patents and a convenient 10 billion dollars in cash. This is the part which will now be renamed as Altaba.

The once Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle's (that's Yahoo, by the way) new name, as we guess, expands to 'All that's left is Alibaba'. With rumors of both Marissa Mayer, and David Filo stepping down as board of directors, it is for the future to narrate what unfolds for the new company. For now, Goodbye Yahoo, we really loved you(until Google came along, anyways)