54).
Indeed, the fact that the company's leadership team survived at all during its formative years speaks highly of the founder's vision and perseverance. In fact, Jerry Wang was originally rejected by a venture capital firm for suggesting to use what Hargrove (2001) indicates was "such a ridiculous name as Yahoo" (2001, p. 271). As Ashby and Miles (2002) also emphasize, countless up-and-comers at the time failed to make good on their plans for growing their businesses during the 1990s for a variety of reasons: "The decade departed in a rush of technology-driven euphoria that is not likely to be seen again for a long time; 21-year-olds are not likely to have another opportunity to raise millions of dollars on the strength of simplistic business plans favored simply because they contained the word 'Internet'" (p. xvii).
Despite these early problems with financing and credibility, the company's co-founder Wang and others believed that the time was ripe for their brand of online offerings and made a major management decision to allocate $4 million for a year's worth of media advertising, including television and radios spots, that helped fuel the company's early growth and ultimate success. Although hindsight might be 20-20, this was a lot of money for the upstart company and such an investment in promoting the company must be credited to the company's visionary leadership. According to Angel, "Hungry for more first-mover points, Yahoo plunked down some $4 million (small change compared to the $50-odd million it spends on advertising today) for a year's worth of TV and radio ads aimed at winning consumers' emotional allegiance.... Each of the quirky, entertaining ads closed with the now-famous 'Do you Yahoo! ' tag line and the signature yodel: Ya-hoo-oo-oo!," which are likely familiar to anyone who watched television or listened to the radio in the past decade or so (Angel, p. 55).
The company was also faced with some fierce competition from other Internet service providers, especially AOL, MSN and for a time, Terra Lycos, which by April 1999 had secured more than half of the available Internet users (Angel). In response, Yahoo's leadership team determined that the best way to differentiate its services from its competitors was by adding more and better services than what was available elsewhere. In this regard, Angel reports that, "Yahoo had to be nimble in order to regain its leadership by winning the majority of new Web users -- and keeping the ones it already had from straying to a competitor. The best way to do this at the time was to add the best new services -- thus, the steady stream of exploratory talks with upstarts and even competitors, like Excite" (pp. 150-151).
These initiatives managed to pull Yahoo out of its management and economic doldrums and helped it regain a leadership position in the industry. For example, by October 2001, Yahoo occupied by number three spot among Internet service providers, lagging behind only AOL-Time Warner (following its mega-merger, the largest of its kind up until this point in time) and Microsoft as shown in Table 2 and Figure 2 below.
Table 2.
Comparison of U.S. visitors to ISP providers: Month of October 2001.
Provider
Number of visits (in millions)
AOL Time Warner
Microsoft
Yahoo
Terra Lycos
X10.com
Vivendi-Universal eUniverse Network
Source: Dingle & Hughes, 2002, p. 76.
Figure 2. Comparison of U.S. visitors to ISP providers: Month of October 2001
Source: Based on tabular data in Dingle & Hughes, 2002, at p. 76.
The fact that some of these ISPs have gone the way of the wind and others are scarcely recognizable today is proof positive of the soundness of the management decisions made by the company's leadership team during this turbulent period in its history. From a strictly pragmatic perspective, then, the company's leadership did win that round and went on to form strategic partnerships with a wide range of vendors and telecommunications companies in ways that enhanced its services while also providing it with the clout it needed to stay the course while its competitors fell by the wayside. For example, Angel reports that, "Yahoo's next generation of deals were geared toward getting its expanding cadre of services in front of more new PC users. In early January 1999, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard (HP) inked a deal for My Yahoo to be the start page on new HP Pavilion PCs. A week later, Yahoo and IBM announced a similar deal for new IBM Aptivas. Distribution deals with Toshiba and Micron followed" (p. 151). The company's leadership philosophy at this pointing time was to concentrate on growing its business through acquisitions and via cross-promotions with content providers (Angel).
As noted in the company overview above, today Yahoo offers both consumer and business services for a vast array of products...
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