Yahoo! – The Other Google
It must be tough to be Yahoo! They're trying harder because they're always number two - and constantly having to fight to keep from being bought out by Microsoft. That's when they're not trying to keep from being dismantled from the inside by billionaire investor and self-proclaimed fanatic Carl Icahn. And of course, the rest of the time they're fending off the US Department of Justice, who turns a blind eye to Microsoft but pounces on the Yahoo-Google advertising partnership like it was the crime of the century.
And the crowning insult: Google is the synonym word for Internet search - but Yahoo was here first!
Stacking up to Google
It's fascinating to see the way the two net portals have developed over the years. This image illustrates their different philosophies very clearly - Yahoo in the top row and Google in the bottom. While Google has deliberately kept things simple, almost to a fault, the Yahoo page, year by year, tries to cram everything in the world into the front page. In fact, Google has gotten simpler still than it was when it first started.
The two cultures have a striking difference that explains the ideas behind their design: GUI vs. CLI. GUI stands for "graphical user interface" and CLI stands for "command line interface". You use the GUI whenever you use the mouse, and operate menus and dialog boxes and icons. But anywhere you use a keyboard to type text into a box, you're using a command line. You don't think of the address bar or the search query box as a command line, but that's what it is! Command line interfaces are stark, simple, and fast, but they're more intimidating if you don't know what you're doing. Graphical user interfaces are rich, cluttered, and slow, but even a child could figure one out quickly.
Yahoo got started in January of 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, originally as a simple HTML page with a list of links, titled "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web". Consider that the World Wide Web itself didn't really get rolling until 1992, with the creation of the Erwise and ViolaWWW web browsers on the X Windows Unix platform, and you'll appreciate what pioneers Jerry and David were! The web portal was born.
Yahoo grew over the years, beating both Google and Microsoft to market in offering many web-based services which we now take for granted. Yahoo beat both its main competitors in offering search, a directory, a chat client, web-based email, and mobile services. They are also one of the few solely-Internet companies to bounce back after the dot-com boom and bust. Most web users today would remember having Yahoo as their first destination at some point in the 1990s, when the web was just becoming popular.
What Yahoo offers...
Through either their own innovation or companies they've bought out and merged, Yahoo's umbrella of web services includes:
- Yahoo Groups - For the longest time, they have been the leading mailing-list and online forum site for nearly a decade. The continued success of groups makes it one of the top 5 features which generates the most traffic for the Yahoo portal.
- Yahoo Games - Bet you forgot this one! Yahoo's games portal is so old, it predates Macromedia Flash! Started in 1997, they used Java and Javascript to allow gamers to compete online over chess, checkers, go, backgammon, and much more. Many Internet users remember this as their first online gaming experience.
- Yahoo 360 - One case where they were late to the game, this is their blog site.
- Yahoo Answers - So far a somewhat unique service, although imitators are creeping up. Yahoo Answers is a site where you post a question and others answer it, and answers are voted up or down by still others based on how helpful they were. It's currently one of the brightest stars in the constellation of social knowledge-sharing.
- Acquisitions Del.ico.us and Flickr - The premier social-bookmarking and image-hosting sites, respectively.
Despite what Carl Icahn and various stockholders who want Yahoo to sell out would have you believe, Yahoo is a company that's doing very well. They're a Fortune 500 company ranked at #412, they bank $7 billion USD in profits every year, and Yahoo sites attract 1.5 billion visitors annually. Look at it this way: if Microsoft's MSN.com domain were a stand-alone company without Microsoft to back them up, Yahoo would be acquiring them - not the other way around.
Filed Under: Mobile Internet • The Internetz
