Another era has come to an end!
Yahoo, once the world's first portal search site, has completely withdrawn from the Chinese market.
Yahoo China announced on its website that users will not be able to use the company's products and services from Chinese mainland from November 1, but it will not affect Yahoo's business elsewhere in the world.
Yahoo has two founders, an American David Ferro and another Jerry Yang.
Yahoo takes its name from Gulliver's Travels, in which the protagonist Gulliver is shipwrecked on his fourth voyage and is taken by the sea to an unknown island where yahoo lives. The people known as yahoo are uneducated, stupid and barbaric, symbolizing the lowest.
Yahoo is once the world's number one search portal and the pioneer of internet portals, with operations in 24 countries and regions around the world and more than 500 million users.
In September 1999, the Yahoo China website was launched;
In August 2005, Alibaba wholly acquired Yahoo China;
On October 29, 2008, Yahoo Software R&D (Beijing) Co., Ltd. was established, 100% owned by Yahoo Cayman (Asia) Holdings Limited, and Yahoo Software R&D was deregistered on July 18, 2017;
In 2013, China's Yahoo Mail, Information and Community ceased to serve, and the original team turned to Alibaba's public welfare undertakings;
In 2015, Yahoo closed its global R&D center in Beijing and laid off 200-300 employees.
The outside world has commented that Yahoo is a "magical" company, from the rise to become a giant to the decline of the mainstream market, Yahoo has always played the role of "product killer" - no matter how powerful the product, as long as it is acquired by Yahoo, it will quickly fade its aura and become ordinary.
It can be said that the acquisition of one destroys one.
Flickr was the first image social product, and in 2005 Yahoo acquired Flickr, and then Flickr fell at a speed that was visible to the naked eye, until the new generation of users only recognized Instagram, and not many people thought of passing photos to Flickr.
Delicious, the originator of online bookmarks, Altavista, the earliest search engine overlord, myBloglog, a blog hosting service... All of them disappeared after being bought by Yahoo, and finally either shut down or sold cheaply.
In 2002, Yahoo intended to acquire Google, opened a $3 billion chip, Google's two founders were almost heartbroken, only to pay back a price of $5 billion, Yahoo decisively gave up;
In 2006, Yahoo wanted to buy Facebook for $1 billion, and when Zuckerberg was about to sign, Yahoo felt that the negotiations were too smooth, Xiaoza's signature was too painful, wondering if he had suffered a loss, and the price of 850 million US dollars was pressed on the spot, and The Facebook board of directors tore up the agreement in anger;
In 2008, Microsoft came to the door with $40 billion in cash to propose a wholly-owned acquisition of Yahoo, Yahoo disliked the lack of money, and rejected Microsoft after several days of internal discussions, and a few years later Yahoo sold itself to Verizon for $4.6 billion.
Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator and legendary Silicon Valley investor, whose startup was acquired by Yahoo in 1998, also followed him into Yahoo, and he summed up Yahoo's "unique features": 1. Yahoo positioned itself as a media company, making quick money by selling banner ads, and making money quickly was not aggressive; 2. Yahoo engineers were second-class citizens and were not of high quality.
"I eat with employees in Google's cafeteria, and when we talk about search result optimization, almost all google employees are thinking and expressing 'what should I do', but at Yahoo you can't hear that, the engineers will only work according to the requirements, and they don't care about things outside the requirements." 」
Last summer, media reported that Ruiz, a former Yahoo engineer, had been sentenced for using his position to hack into more than 6,000 Yahoo email accounts to access the privacy of young women, including personal friends and colleagues, and to collect pictures and videos of indecent content.
Yahoo's problem is not only that it has killed a bunch of good products, but it is not focused enough, and its once advantageous business is also a mess, in the final analysis, the DNA of the old-fashioned Yahoo has not adapted to this era.