History of Yahoo
[10] Carol Bartz replaced co-founder Yang as chief executive officer in January 2009,[11] but was fired by the board of directors in September 2011.
The word "Yahoo" had previously been trademarked for barbecue sauce, knives (by EBSCO Industries) and human propelled watercraft (by Old Town Canoe Co.).
For example, they claimed intellectual property rights for content on their servers, unlike the previous policies of the companies they acquired.
Japan became the first stock in Japanese history to trade at over ¥100,000,000, reaching a price of 101.4 million yen ($962,140 at that time).
[26][27][28] On the next day, its shares rose about $16, or 4.5 percent as the failure was blamed on hackers rather than on an internal glitch, unlike a fault with eBay earlier that year.
formed partnerships with telecommunications and Internet providers to create content-rich broadband services to compete with AOL.
[41] This scheme was lucrative, but proved unpopular both with website marketers (who were reluctant to pay), and the public (who were unhappy about the paid-for listings being indistinguishable from other search results).
[42] In October 2006, Paid Inclusion ceased to guarantee any commercial listing and only helped the paid inclusion customers by crawling their site more often, by providing some statistics on the searches that led to the page, and posting additional smart links (provided by customers as feeds) below the actual url.
acquired social bookmark site del.icio.us in December 2005, and the playlist sharing community webjay in January 2009.
and its board of directors for allegedly breaching their duty to shareholders by opposing Microsoft's takeover bid and pursuing "value destructive" third-party deals.
[57] In early March, Google CEO Eric Schmidt went on record saying that he was concerned that a potential Microsoft-Yahoo!
In addition, they stated that Microsoft's "aggressive" approach was worsening their relationship and the chances of a "friendly" merger.
One of Ballmer's representatives suggested that Yang would implement a poison pill to make the takeover as difficult as possible, saying "They are going to burn the furniture if we go hostile.
[70] Billionaire investor Carl Icahn, calling the current board irrational in its approach to talks with Microsoft, launched a proxy fight to replace Yahoo!
wished to change its direction after chief executive Carol Bartz replaced co-founder Jerry Yang.
[88][89][90] In an email memo sent to employees in April 2012, Scott Thompson re-iterated his view that customers should come first at Yahoo.
's board of directors formed a three-member committee to review Thompson's academic credentials and the vetting process that preceded his selection as CEO.
[102][103] On July 16, 2012, former Google executive and Walmart corporate director Marissa Mayer was named as Yahoo!
[104] On May 19, 2013, the Wall Street Journal reported that Yahoo's board had approved an all-cash deal to purchase the six-year-old blogging website Tumblr.
[citation needed] The announcement was reported to signify a changing trend in the technology industry, as large corporations like Yahoo, Facebook, and Google acquired start-up Internet companies that generate low amounts of revenue as a way in which to connect with sizeable, fast-growing online communities.
The Wall Street Journal stated that the purchase of Tumblr would satisfy the company's need for "a thriving social-networking and communications hub."
Yahoo would pay $1.1 billion for Tumblr, and the company's CEO and founder David Karp would remain a large shareholder.
[105] The revamp of the Yahoo-owned photography service Flickr was launched in Times Square, New York, U.S. on May 20, 2013, in an event that was attended by the city's mayor and a large contingency of journalists.
Eleven billboards in Times Square advertised the website's new tagline "biggr, spectaculr, wherevr" as part of the launch and Yahoo stated that it would provide Flickr users with a free terabyte of storage.
's bid was worth between $600 and $800 million, as a variety of options that consisted of different circumstances were put forward by the company.
The data did not incorporate visit statistics for the Yahoo!-owned Tumblr website or mobile phone usage.
On September 22, 2016, Yahoo disclosed a data breach in which hackers stole information associated with at least 500 million user accounts in late 2014.
[118] The breach used manufactured web cookies to falsify login credentials, allowing hackers to gain access to any account without needing a password.
This breach affected over 1 billion user accounts and was considered the largest discovered in the history of the Internet.
CEO Marissa Mayer announced that she would step down from Yahoo’s board of directors if the company’s $4.5 billion sale to Verizon went through.
