Source: altwire.utne.com --- Monday, July 25, 2016
In 2000, Yahoo was worth $125 billion. In 2008, it rejected a $44 billion buyout from Microsoft. And today it sold to Verizon for $4.83 billion. The lesson here is, if you won the last computing platform and are on the cusp of the next one you’re not built for, you might want to sell the company. Mobile fell on an unsuspecting Yahoo like a piano on a cartoon villain. It was a web portal. You could search and browse through a huge variety of websites. But the mobile age spurred by the iPhone’s launch in 2007 changed behavior. Instead of searching or browsing one omni-site to navigate around the Internet, we downloaded and opened different dedicated apps. Meanwhile, content consumption patterns changed too. Instead of hour-long sessions sifting through expansive content and news sites on a desktop computer, we sought tiny snippets of mobile entertainment to fill the moments of downtime during our lives on the go. Yahoo wasn’t built for either. It was hesitant to adapt. A few products like Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Finance were snackable enough. But the core properties had evolved to survive in a different environment. They got mobile versions mostly in design, not in function. Not only did usage slip away, reducing Yahoo’s ad inventory, but it missed out on the ad targeting data generated by social networks. And so Yahoo’s value sank like a stone. Saving the ship would have taken decisive action much earlier, like aggressive acquisiti ...
from Microsoft http://ift.tt/2aljr2p
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