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From the 1997 letter that's included at the bottom: > We established long-term relationships with many important strategic partners, including America Online,

From the 1997 letter that's included at the bottom: > We established long-term relationships with many important strategic partners, including America Online, Yahoo!, Excite, Netscape, GeoCities, AltaVista, @Home, and Prodigy. That takes me back.

simonh 11y ago
Looking at it that way, it's kind of impressive that Yahoo! is still around.
- hinkley 11y ago
  I honestly don't have the slightest clue how yahoo stays in business. And I don't mean that as rhetoric, either. Other than Bloomberg I don't get where the money comes from. I hope it's not organized crime... I'd probably read a biography of the company out of curiosity.
  - huuu 11y ago
    Search, advertisement and stock. For example they have worth ~40B in Asian stock.
  - simonh 11y ago
    All I can do is guess, but if you go to their home page take a look at the sidebar. That's a pretty impressive range of services. You can manage your email, buy stuff, check the news, see what's on TV, check the weather. It's AOL but on the web and for non-technical people having one place where you can do everything is probably pretty attractive. Especially if it came set as their web browser home page and they don't know how to change it or create bookmarks. That's not a long term sustainable business though, as the non-tech savvy oldsters in the population get replaced by youngsters that mainly use mobile devices and apps anyway. I think Cringeley has a point. Yahoo should slim down and use it's remaining financial weight to turn itself into a tech industry specialised version of Berkshire Hathaway. Copy Google's corporate structure and hive off the portal into a subsidiary of a holding company that focuses on managing investments.
    - lmm 11y ago
      I think they should do the opposite. Even as a young guy their product is very valuable, or was, but they're destroying it piecemeal, closing the unprofitable services and not realizing that the value came from having all those services in one place. They need to massively cut costs and write down a lot of their value. Their portal with all their services could easily be a cashflow-positive sustainable business. But because they were once big they're not willing to do what it takes to be sustainable now that they're small; instead they're selling off all the good bits to fund wasteful moonshots.
  - hvm 11y ago
    They're pretty big in asian markets. When I was in Tokyo everything was set with yahoo as the homepage for some reason.
    - ZenoArrow 11y ago
      Yahoo Japan has about 40% of the search engine market in Japan, which is pretty impressive: http://returnonnow.com/internet-marketing-resources/2015-search-engine-market-share-by-country/ http://returnonnow.com/internet-marketing-resources/2015-sea...
  - manarth 11y ago
    Alibaba.
davesque 11y ago
Prodigy...I think that's the most archaic seeming company in that list.

simonh 11y ago

Looking at it that way, it's kind of impressive that Yahoo! is still around.

hinkley 11y ago
I honestly don't have the slightest clue how yahoo stays in business. And I don't mean that as rhetoric, either. Other than Bloomberg I don't get where the money comes from. I hope it's not organized crime... I'd probably read a biography of the company out of curiosity.
- huuu 11y ago
  Search, advertisement and stock. For example they have worth ~40B in Asian stock.
- simonh 11y ago
  All I can do is guess, but if you go to their home page take a look at the sidebar. That's a pretty impressive range of services. You can manage your email, buy stuff, check the news, see what's on TV, check the weather. It's AOL but on the web and for non-technical people having one place where you can do everything is probably pretty attractive. Especially if it came set as their web browser home page and they don't know how to change it or create bookmarks. That's not a long term sustainable business though, as the non-tech savvy oldsters in the population get replaced by youngsters that mainly use mobile devices and apps anyway. I think Cringeley has a point. Yahoo should slim down and use it's remaining financial weight to turn itself into a tech industry specialised version of Berkshire Hathaway. Copy Google's corporate structure and hive off the portal into a subsidiary of a holding company that focuses on managing investments.
  - lmm 11y ago
    I think they should do the opposite. Even as a young guy their product is very valuable, or was, but they're destroying it piecemeal, closing the unprofitable services and not realizing that the value came from having all those services in one place. They need to massively cut costs and write down a lot of their value. Their portal with all their services could easily be a cashflow-positive sustainable business. But because they were once big they're not willing to do what it takes to be sustainable now that they're small; instead they're selling off all the good bits to fund wasteful moonshots.
- hvm 11y ago
  They're pretty big in asian markets. When I was in Tokyo everything was set with yahoo as the homepage for some reason.
  - ZenoArrow 11y ago
    Yahoo Japan has about 40% of the search engine market in Japan, which is pretty impressive: http://returnonnow.com/internet-marketing-resources/2015-search-engine-market-share-by-country/ http://returnonnow.com/internet-marketing-resources/2015-sea...
- manarth 11y ago
  Alibaba.

davesque 11y ago

Prodigy...I think that's the most archaic seeming company in that list.