Yahoo Case Study

Executive Summary

Yahoo, the original "portal of choice" amongst internet users, started out as a website directory that helped people find what they are looking for on the internet. Since the company started in early 1990's, it has evolved to become one of the biggest web portals. It averaged over 144 million page views per day at one point in time.

The company was initially able to achieve success and raise profits through advertising online. Unfortunately, they had a business model that limited them, therefore; they lost enormous amounts of the company's value and a large portion of market share to their everyday rival Google. They have since expanded their strategy to provide consumers with many services from email, to news and social networking and streaming videos.

Although they now operate under a more stable business model, since Semel became CEO in April 2001, they have made many acquisitions. They had acquired HotJobs and Flickr, as well as Inktomi, Overture Services, and many more. However, Yahoo did lose the battle to You Tube to Google in 2006, which Google moved way ahead of Yahoo after that in everything. Google has a competitive advantage over Yahoo, due to the fact that many internet users prefer using Google and its services. Yahoo needs to come up with a strategy yet again, to allow them to get ahead of Google and once again become the portal of choice, which they used to be when they first developed. Only time will tell what will happen to Yahoo in this fast-changing technology world, can they maintain to be the portal of choice after having such a fierce competitor being Google?

Introduction

Yahoo, which was created by David Filo and Jerry Yang, had all started from a hobby at first, and then evolved into a company with over 11,000 employees, in year 2000 a $475 stock price at an all time high, and a value of 220 billion; it would soon become the most well known interactive web portal in the world. However, following the dot-com bust in early 2000s and confidence on a dependant business model, Yahoos stock had plummeted to an all time low of $8.11 in September 2001. This made the company only worth a fraction of what it used to be. Since that happened, due to this intense competition from rivals such as Google being their biggest fear, the company and its top executives are faced with the problem of how to grow revenues and keep their position as the web portal of choice. This case study takes an in depth look into the history and current situation of Yahoo. It begins with a review of the company's history, followed by a review of its external environment, and ending with a review of its internal environment. Furthermore, there is also a SWOT analysis and porters five forces in the appendix to follow.

Company Overview

David Filo and Jerry Yang created a hobby while they were attending Stanford University; they were two PhD candidates in electrical engineering. They figured out a way to make a faster and easier way of remembering and revisiting websites. As a solution to avoid sorting through thousands of useless websites and URLs, they created a website with categories such as business, culture,