Reasons for Yahoo’s fall, according to its former CEO

Yahoo! was a pioneer of online services in the early Internet era, with a web directory and popular services such as email. Yahoo!. Founded in January 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, both graduate students at Stanford University, it has achieved important milestones such as the Yahoo! It was the most read in the news and media category with over 7 billion visits per month, making it the sixth most visited website in the world in 2016.

In 2017, Verizon acquired most of Yahoo!’s internet business. for $4.48 billion, not including his stakes in Alibaba Group and Yahoo! Japan, who were transferred to Altaba.

But for the company’s former CEO Marissa Mayer (from 2012 to 2017), a distinguished American computer engineer and businesswoman with a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford University and one of the cornerstones of Google News, Yahoo’s demise was due to very specific events .

In an interview with Wired, Mayer noted that his motivation to join the company came “when someone pointed out that Yahoo was search, mail, news, maps, mobile phones and some social networking – all these different components that I was involved in in my career. “I thought that with all these different problems I was working on, maybe I could take what I had learned and apply it effectively in this new context.”

For Mayer, Yahoo “was a treasure trove of truly talented people who helped define the Internet in the early 2000s.”

What happened next with Yahoo!

Marissa Mayer has a pretty good idea of ​​why Yahoo! began to fall.

“What I learned, and it’s obvious in retrospect, is that timing is everything. Yes, bringing all these Yahoo products to mobile was a good idea, but it should have happened five to eight years earlier. In the end, Jerry Yang said, “The product line has never been in better shape. The products are beautiful, comfortable, and useful. “You should be very proud.” It’s a compliment I appreciate. But it was already too late,” he told Wired.