Why don’t I Yahoo anymore ?

Author: varundube

3 Jun

I still remember early 1999 when Internet was fresh in India. I used to dial up using Modems and get hooked to the cyberworld at pathetic speeds of 4 kpbs. With a sigh of relief , that after some 15-20 failed attempts, I finally got through the busy numbers of my ISP. I used to hurry to the Internet explorer to open type http://www.yahoo.com/. It was my passion watching a homepage open on my browser (I never liked the student ISP account as it was only text). I don’t know why, but I just loved the circular yahoo icons on the top. Then I registered my first cyber address on Yahoo mail. I still have it by the way. Its legacy and I presume worth millions

and therefore I will still keep it and wait till I can make billions.

Years passed by and one fine day it was on news that Microsoft is planning to buy Yahoo. Seriously its been years I have visited Yahoo. I finally opened that site and had a good look at it. How could that be… How could they loose such a passionate visitor… Why I dont Yahoo anymore ?

Lets go back to fundamentals… I remember reading an article at Harvard Business Review by Management guru - Peter F. Drucker ” The Theory of Business“. He argues, what lies in the core of many large and successful businesses worldwide does not work forever. The business have to review their “Theory of businesses” over and over again and align it to changing business and customer needs. Very trivial and I think most of us will agree to it. Now connect this to the above story. I was so passionate about this site but the thing that took me away was it doesn’t interest me anymore. Same old bla bla that I see on every site. I see more interesting things happen elsewhere. Yahoo did great initially but lost the steam eventually and that’s the theme of discussion.Where the hell are great Yahoo minds? When management gurus talk about early starter advantage and barriers to entry, these factors give you an edge, but not forever. They need to base their business models on innovations. Companies should not forget that it takes steam and lots of steam to keep the growth engine going.