Leaders | The parable of Yahoo
Yahoo is no longer an independent company. Its failure had many fathers
IT WAS one of Silicon Valley’s most riveting success stories. Now it stands as a warning to others. Yahoo began in 1994 as a lark in Stanford’s dormitories, when two students, David Filo and Jerry Yang, assembled their favourite links on a page called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”. The site, which they renamed Yahoo, quickly became the “portal” through which millions first encountered the internet. At its peak in 2000, Yahoo had a market value of $128 billion. In the dotcom version of Monopoly, Yahoo got the prime slot.
This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline “From dotcom hero to zero”
From the July 30th 2016 edition
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