After a long struggle to lure people back to Yahoo Mail and its search engine, the trailblazing online service plans to spin off its core business, putting it in a position to be scooped up.
A decade and then some past its heyday as an Internet pioneer, Yahoo will spin off its core business after failing to convince people that its products are still worthwhile.
A spin-off of Yahoo's Web business might have more symbolic significance than anything else. The once-mighty trailblazer, founded in 1995 by Stanford University students Jerry Yang and David Filo, is one of the last independent titans of the early Internet. In June, AOL, which helped many people get onto the Internet for the first time through its early dial-up service, was bought by Verizon. Also now just memories of that earlier era are Netscape, Napster and many of the other services that taught us, while stabbing in the dark, how to surf, listen and live online. Yahoo was once the brightest star of the bunch.
The spin-off would also mean the company that Yang and Filo co-founded could be stripped down to an entity that's of more interest to investors than everyday computer users. Of course, it could be argued that most of us largely lost interest in Yahoo a long time ago.
When Ms Mayer, a former Google executive, was named CEO in 2012, she was tasked with turning around the already lumbering company. But Mayer hasn't been able to replicate the excitement around products that many of Yahoo's fiercest rivals have been able to ignite. Once one of the most powerful brands on the Web, Yahoo has been overtaken in search and email by Google, and beaten in media by Netflix and Amazon.
A decade and then some past its heyday as an Internet pioneer, Yahoo will spin off its core business after failing to convince people that its products are still worthwhile.
A spin-off of Yahoo's Web business might have more symbolic significance than anything else. The once-mighty trailblazer, founded in 1995 by Stanford University students Jerry Yang and David Filo, is one of the last independent titans of the early Internet. In June, AOL, which helped many people get onto the Internet for the first time through its early dial-up service, was bought by Verizon. Also now just memories of that earlier era are Netscape, Napster and many of the other services that taught us, while stabbing in the dark, how to surf, listen and live online. Yahoo was once the brightest star of the bunch.
The spin-off would also mean the company that Yang and Filo co-founded could be stripped down to an entity that's of more interest to investors than everyday computer users. Of course, it could be argued that most of us largely lost interest in Yahoo a long time ago.
When Ms Mayer, a former Google executive, was named CEO in 2012, she was tasked with turning around the already lumbering company. But Mayer hasn't been able to replicate the excitement around products that many of Yahoo's fiercest rivals have been able to ignite. Once one of the most powerful brands on the Web, Yahoo has been overtaken in search and email by Google, and beaten in media by Netflix and Amazon.
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http://www.cnet.com/news/yahoo-may-be-about-to-become-internet-history/