I was an Internet Yahoo! The problem is that was almost 20 years ago.
I had Yahoo! email, Yahoo! messenger and used Yahoo! search. When I first logged onto the Internet on my 28.8 baud modem Yahoo! was my world and the only thing I really knew about the Internet was that AOL and Compuserv didn’t want you on it – those two ancient companies wanted you to consume their own content and would only let you onto the World Wide Web if you asked very nicely and clicked all the right boxes to escape.
Now Yahoo! has been sold to Verizon and joins AOL as another casualty of the .com boom and bust cycle. So what went wrong?
I’m sure all the analysts and tech writers will tell you where Yahoo! failed and why one of the brightest stars from the dawn of the Internet age has imploded. They’re all wrong though, I know exactly what went wrong.
Anyone that knows me will know I’ve always been a little bit stubborn and set in my ways. If I like a company or service I’ll carry on using them which is why I still pay something like £45 a month for my broadband when I could switch and probably get it for about a tenner a month. I just like the guys I’m with though, a bit like I once liked Yahoo!
But then my friends all started switching to Google claiming it was faster and had better search results. Skype came along and overnight everyone dumped Yahoo! Messenger and started Skyping so I had to switch. Eventually I saw the light and started using Google as a search engine, bought my first domain and had my own email so no longer relied on Yahoo! Mail and that was pretty much that. My Yahoo! days were over.
While writing this article I thought I should really log into Yahoo! just to see what I’m missing. It appears I haven’t logged in for almost 4 years and had to go through some account verification.
Once logged in, all I have are 96 unread emails from Showcase Cinema dating back as far as 2014. It would appear that they email me 4 times a month which is probably why I gave them a disused email address in the first place. I don’t think I’ll notice Yahoo!’s passing… for me they died a long time ago.
Quite simply Yahoo! failed to keep pace with the Internet and for me became less relevant with other services replacing theirs. I still like Yahoo!, I’m quite fond of them, I just don’t use them.
Verizon are paying around $4.83 billion in cash for Yahoo!’s main operations including their advertising business. Yahoo! will end up as a holding company for their Far East assets including their 35% stake in the Yahoo! Japanese operations and a 15% stake in Alibaba.
5 Responses
First place I use to go to when I went online back in the late 90s, use to be a great portal for all manner of things, but times change. My eBay ID is the same as my Yahoo ID too. 🙂 (yes I know that’s sad)
for whom the bell tolls EBAY
I still use my yahoo email for amazon/ebay seller accounts and customer service, while using gmail for my suppliers. Will I be able to continue using yahoo mail for the foreseeable future or should I jump ship now and get a new email set up for paypal/ebay/amazon accounts?
28.8
That was when things were really rocking.
Remember the Flying Teapot B-)
Ahh Nostalgia.
Ringing a BBS and getting the busy signal and the modem would redial.
I remember a friend taking me to his University and they had Gopher.
I was blown away. Netscape and the like.
Ohhhh Stoppit, I am getting all teary!!!
I actually used to work for Yahoo back in 2002 and it was already becoming clear then that they were losing the initiative. They originally sold themselves on the premise that every site that appeared in their search results had been vetted by a human being. As the internet snowballed, that became an impossible dream and they had to quietly drop it, but the writing was already on the wall.One thing they did do well was the personalisable homepage – you could set up all your newsfeeds and areas of interest on a single page and it was really easy to move things around. It was my go to page for years, but eventually they stopped supporting it properly and I moved on.