grillcheese: Over the last decade at Yahoo...

I can remember a conversation with my dad years ago, before the dot com bust. He and I were talking about Yahoo and what a great company it was. We talked about someone that I knew that worked for the company and how lucky they were to work for a company whose stock was worth so much. Yahoo was one of the reasons that I decided to get into web design and eventually pursue a career in web development. But the party ended in 2001 and how times have changed.

What is going on at Yahoo?

Since the dot com bubble burst seven years ago it seems as though Yahoo has continued to lose ground in many areas. Yahoo's search engine has slid to 27.5% ( March 2007) of total searches. Today they announced that they were closing down Yahoo Photos, and Yahoo Auctions in the US and Canada. In July of 2006, when word of the delay of their advertising platform Panama was publicized, the result sent the stock to a 52 Week low.

Since July 2006 when Yahoo had 28.5% of the search market, Google has continued to chip away at Yahoo's dwindling share of the search pie. Today when you tell someone you are going to search for something you don't say that you are yahoo'ing something, you say that you are going to google it. Ironically, Yahoo helped Google when Google was still in its infant stages.

It's hard to believe that in 1999, executives at Yahoo negotiated a deal worth 5.7 Billion for Mark Cuban's money-losing Broadcast.com website and services. Yahoo's aim was that by purchasing Broadcast.com, Yahoo would stay ahead of it's competitors in the emerging audio and video business. A few years later, Yahoo acquired Launch Media to further bolster their dominance in streaming audio and video. Nowadays, when you think of streaming audio, do you think of Yahoo's services or do you use Itunes? When you think of online video, do you think of Yahoo Video or do you go to YouTube? Besides the few dominant players, there are thousands of other competitors offering audio, video, and podcasts. Yahoo is nothing more than one of many. With YouTube dominating online video I'm wondering what happened with broadcast.com? Yahoo has had seven years to build broadcast.com into something huge but haven't. Instead you'll be hard pressed to find anything left of broadcast.com.