<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"Two thousand people losing their jobs is just the worst kind of news and for Yahoo, it\u2019s a culmination of years of decline. The company is not decimated. As of Q3 2011, it employed over 14,000 full-timers. 12,000 or so is still a very significant workforce and this could be beginning of a big turnaround for the online portal that provides services across a wide variety of categories including news, entertainment, business, business services, finance and multimedia. It\u2019s home to one of my favorite online services: Flickr.\nAt this moment, I have no idea where the cuts are coming from. Like any company in its position, Yahoo positions the layoffs as making the company smaller (obvious) and nimbler (I guess we\u2019ll take your word for it, Yahoo).\nNew CEO Scott Thompson will be painted as the bad guy here. He\u2019s the one making the cuts. But he could also be seen as the guy making the tough choices. Yahoo has not been on solid strategic footing for years. It just never \u2013 or at least since the mid 1990s \u2014 seemed to know what it wanted to be and its revolving door CEOs, and lost-boy founder Jerry Yang, didn\u2019t help things much. \nI\u2019ve been watching Yahoo for over 15 years. Back in the 1990s it seemed unstoppable. There was no Google and though many other sites were offering indexed searches of the Web, Yahoo\u2019s approach, which was more of a directory (they actually used AltaVista\u2019s index at one time), seemed to get that the Web is more than just a gigantic bucket of words, it\u2019s content.\nHow did Yahoo get here? Why didn\u2019t it become the Google of our generation? Yahoo had the head start, it understood more about the World Wide Web than anyone else way back in 1995. Is it because it followed AOL down the content/entertainment/media company path instead of upstart Google, which came along in 1999 and subsequently dominated search and uses that position to generate a raft of successful products (and some no-too-successful ones)?\nAs I was searching for evidence of what went wrong, I came across two interesting pieces of text, both of which shine a little light on what Yahoo was and what it is today.\nYahoo is kind enough to keep an entire history of company press releases online, going all the way back to 1996.  The company was launched in 1994, so these are the early days. In each release, about everything from the introduction of \u201CYahooligans!\u201D to Yahoo\u2019s 1996 IPO (2.6M shares at $13 apiece), there\u2019s a bit of text about Yahoo the company. This is the paragraph or so, crafted by Yahoo, to describe what it is and does. I\u2019ve pasted one below from a 1996 press release:\nAbout Yahoo! Inc.Located in Sunnyvale, California, Yahoo! Inc., offers a globally-branded Internet navigational service that is among the most widely-used guides to information and discovery on the Web. Yahoo! provides a context-based directory structure for Internet resources, as well as a Web-wide search engine that is seamlessly integrated with the Yahoo! directory service. Yahoo! is one of the most visible and recognizable names associated with the Internet. The company is continuing to develop a family of Yahoo!-branded media properties in targeted subject matter (Yahoo! Computing, Yahoo! Internet Life), demographic (Yahooligans!, a Web guide for kids), and geographic areas (Yahoo! Japan, Yahoo! Canada). Yahoo! can be found on Web at http://www.yahoo.com.\nIt\u2019s short, sweet and makes it clear in the first sentence Yahoo\u2019s core business: \u201Ca globally-branded Internet navigational service that is among the most widely-used guides to information and discovery on the Web.\u201D Yeah, there\u2019s a bit of flag-waving: \u201CYahoo! is one of the most visible and recognizable names associated with the Internet,\u201D but it was also true. Yahoo was probably the Internet\u2019s first globally recognized brand.\nNow let\u2019s compare this with a company overview from today\u2019s Yahoo:\n\nYahoo! is the premier digital media company. Our vision is to deliver your world, your way. We do that by using technology, insights, and intuition to create deeply personal digital experiences that keep more than half a billion people connected to what matters the most to them \u2013 across devices, on every continent, in more than 30 languages. And we connect advertisers to the consumers who matter to them most \u2013 the ones who will build their businesses \u2013 through our unique combination of Science + Art + Scale.   Founded in 1994 by Stanford PhD candidates David Filo and Jerry Yang as a way for them to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet, Yahoo! has grown into a company that helps consumers find what they are looking for and discover wonders they didn\u2019t expect. We keep consumers plugged into the topics and people they care about, helping them get more out of the digital world so that they can get more out of life. \nToday, Yahoo! stands out as one of the most visited and most trusted Internet destinations because we uniquely pair innovative technology with a human touch to personalize the digital world. Our business focuses on creating a content, communications, and community platform that delivers rich consumer experiences and advertising solutions across the screens of people\u2019s lives \u2014 from desktops to mobile devices, from tablets to connected TVs. Yahoo! is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., and has more than 13,700 employees in 25 countries, provinces, and territories.\n\nYahoo now says it\u2019s a media company. Many companies could describe themselves this way, but it doesn\u2019t put a pin on what Yahoo actually does. The next sentence is downright inspiring. It\u2019s also blissfully free of concrete information about what Yahoo is or does. The third sentence is longer, but no more illuminating. Yahoo uses \u201Ctechnology, insights, and intuition\u201D to \u201Ccreate deeply personal digital experiences.\u201D In fact the whole first paragraph does little to describe Yahoo\u2019s myriad services.\nParagraph two is part history, part exposition on what Yahoo does, though it\u2019s not very specific, \u201Ca company that helps consumers find what they are looking for and discover wonders they didn\u2019t expect.\u201D Okay, so that sort of indicates search \u2014 I think.\nThe third paragraph finally dives into what Yahoo is all about now. This is the money sentence, \u201COur business focuses on creating a content, communications, and community platform that delivers rich consumer experiences and advertising solutions across the screens of people\u2019s lives \u2014 from desktops to mobile devices, from tablets to connected TVs.\u201D So Yahoo is now a content company (they do create a fair amount of it). Still, I think the key word in there is \u201Cplatform\u201D. Yahoo! Now thinks it\u2019s a platform, though no one else does. No one is building apps for Yahoo. Yahoo builds for itself and people use its services. \nThe thing that launched Yahoo, the browse-tree directory, which I admittedly never thought was scalable, is hidden. You can find it under the \u201Cmore\u201D button on Yahoo\u2019s homepage. No one uses it. Yahoo today is really, primarily, a portal to content (its own and third-parties), information and tools. Yahoo won\u2019t describe itself that way because \u201Cportals\u201D is very late 1990s. \u201CPlatform\u201D is so very 2012. Facebook is turning itself into a platform, Twitter was a platform, though it\u2019s pulling all those third-party services back in, Google is a platform, though it tends to use its vast resources to build everything by itself.\nNot knowing what you are is, obviously, a big problem, one that Thompson may be trying to address with this staff reduction so he can finally see the forest for the trees and shift Yahoo from content back to \"innovation\". I would suggest however, that Thompson reread these two passages, it may help him understand where Yahoo got lost and how to find its way back."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2012/04/05/yahoo-then-and-now/>