compiling a directory of frequently visited websites, writing software to facilitate Internet searches and categorizing their "search engine" and then placing it on their home page.
April 1994 Birth of Yahoo! as Yang and Philo rename their directory.
January 1995 Mark Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, proposed hosting Yahoo! on your server and make it the default directory for the company's web browser.
April 1995 Yahoo! received a $1 million investment from venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.
August 1995 After hiring Tim Koogle as General Manager and Jeff Mallet as Chief Administrative Officer, the leadership team writes their first business plan.
April 11, 1996. Yahoo! issues 2.6 million shares at $13 per share. By the close of trading, the rate jumped to 154%.
April 12, 1996. Investors start to disappear, and Yahoo! falls to half the price of the previous trading day.
January 14, 1997. Yahoo! announces first quarterly profit of $92,000.
April 1997 According to PC Meter research, Yahoo! ranks first among Internet search engines.
May 7, 1997 Yahoo! announces that for the previous month, across all Yahoo! traffic reached 1 billion web page views.
July 29, 1997 Yahoo! announced a three-for-two share split.
November 10, 1997. Mediamark Research Inc. announced Yahoo! the online service with the largest audience in the US: 25.4 million users, i.e. 63% of the total adult Internet user.
January 14, 1998. Yahoo! announces an estimated net income of $0.05 per share.
April 8, 1998 Yahoo! sets a new record of 95 million web page views per day in March, up 46%.
July 8 1998. Yahoo! announces a two-for-one share split.
17 декабря 1998. More than 3,000 merchants have used Yahoo! Shopping for a month since its creation.
January 12, 1999. Yahoo! announces a two-for-one share split. Tim Koogle is named chairman of the company and Jeff Mallet is named president.
May 25, 1999. Over 5,000 merchants have taken advantage of Yahoo! store.
December 27, 1999. Orders received by Yahoo! Shopping are up more than 385% over the previous year.
January 11, 2000. Yahoo! reports that the number of users doubled in 1999 and now exceeds 120 million.
January 11, 2000. Yahoo! announces a two-for-one share split.
April 5, 2000 Yahoo! reports revenue of $228 million and an estimated net income of $63 million.
June 26, 2000. Yahoo! enters the highly competitive business-to-business market with the announcement of the corporate Yahoo!
June 28, 2000. Yahoo! signs an agreement to acquire eGroups, an e-mail group communication service provider.
August 1, 2000. Nielsen//NetRatings' first worldwide internet index calls Yahoo! the world's leading web asset with over 62 million users, which translates into a mind-blowing audience reach of 54%.
Chapter 1 Understand the surrounding reality and its possibilities

Space age cowboys explore new frontiers

A story about one of the Internet's pioneering companies, or "pioneers," as they are often called on the Web, or even about the Internet itself, is a bit like a story about the Wild West. The only difference is that the journalists who wrote about the Wild West embellished their description, and simply made up a lot - and in some places they obviously lied - in order to attract and keep the attention of readers. On the other hand, the Internet is a very real thing. There is no need to lie here. In fact, the truth is so compelling that it sounds as unrealistic as good science fiction when it comes to rampant growth or extraordinary inventions. We have never seen anything like it on our planet and we will never see anything like it in the future.

Let's start with a look at the inhabitants of the Internet or the number of Internet users. Currently, the number of Internet users roughly corresponds to the number of US residents. But five years ago it was approximately equal to the number of inhabitants of the state of Arizona. Pretty impressive. But this is only the beginning.

It is assumed that in the next five years the number of Internet users will be comparable to the population of China. Keep in mind that this figure is debatable. It should be noted that these figures are taken from the number of servers (computer systems with Internet addresses), networks and domain names with an account. For good statistics on the growth of the Internet, its sites, servers, domains and networks, see Hobbes' Internet Timeline v.5.0, copyright Robert Hobbes' Zakon, provider - Internet Society [ISOC], Reston, Virginia, website address - http://www.isoc.org. Therefore, the real figure may be more or, which is unlikely, less than the estimated one.

What will be next? Recently, Joe Connolly of the Wall Street Journal, speaking on CBS News Radio (May 4, 2000), quoted an expert attending an investment conference as saying that the Internet will grow until it is in every machine, in every home, in every pocket. Joe Connolly thinks it will take another ten years. So the phenomenon called the Internet is an epic that will continue to amaze us even more in the future than it has hitherto.

Now let's succumb to this charm, using the example of two geeks - Jerry Yang and David Philo, who were candidates for a doctorate in electrical engineering at Stanford University. On the one hand, they were kids - just having fun pointing websites on the Internet and creating directories from all the sites they found on the Web. On the other hand, they had an idea to put their site indexes on the Internet so that people they knew could use them to make searching easier. And finally, passion played a role here - the more they did it, the more they liked it and the less time they had to study. You can quote from the history of Yahoo!:

“During 1994 they (Yang and Philo) transformed Yahoo! into a database tailored to the needs of the customer, specifically for the needs of thousands of visitors site that began to use the services of Yahoo! through a tightly connected online community. They developed software that allowed them to efficiently find, identify and edit data stored on the Internet.”
It was similar to the work done by catalog compilers in large bookstores decades ago. Here lie the prerequisites for the creation of a great shared story of enrichment. Twenty years ago, it would have been just two boys cataloging their stamp collection, or a compiler tagging texts for a thematic catalog to send to bookstore customers. And of course, then the story would have had a completely different ending.

Environment

The difference between Philo and Young, who had fun cataloging and indexing, and some researcher in a public library, is the environment. Young and Philo worked with an unprecedented medium - the Internet. Environment – настолько важная часть нашей истории, что нам придется сделать небольшое отступление и взглянуть на нее поближе.

What is the Internet?

It is a worldwide means of communication. And:

• it is the World Wide Web;

• it grows exponentially;

• it has evolved into what is commonly referred to as the "information superhighway".

Users are mainly today's youth and consumers, from teenagers to middle-aged people. However, the composition of the audience is changing rapidly. For example, a few years ago Internet users were mostly males. Now the division of the audience by gender has become almost fifty-fifty. In 1997, most Internet users were from England and the United States. Now millions of people in South America and Asia use the Internet. In China alone, there are four developing portals that have appeared very recently.

Why is the Internet such a significant phenomenon?

• It provides worldwide access to information and worldwide connectivity.

• He made the information public.

• Every year its depth and breadth of coverage grows exponentially.

Why is the Internet growing so fast?

Information on the Internet is of great value, especially when:

• regularly updated;

• is interactive;

• available twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year;

• has a high download speed (modem, ISDN (integrated digital service network), cable TV, DSL (digital subscriber line), T-1);

• the number of users is growing by 10% per month;

• information includes data, as well as voice, audio and video components;

• the cost of communication and data transmission is low and becomes cheaper every year, and in some cases communication services are free.

Finally, although the Internet was originally a research environment and then a consumer environment, it has now become a working environment for various firms and companies - just as quickly as it happened to consumers. Why?

The Internet provides companies with a huge number of advantages in dealing with customers, suppliers and business partners. For example:

• it is available twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year;

• transfer of information faster than by mail, Federal Express and even by fax;

• the data is legible and neat (faxes are often difficult to read and handwritten letters are often illegible);

• the information collected is more up-to-date than in printed publications (due to reduced processing time);

• consumes less resources (paper);

• cheaper than other media;

• Enables end-to-end commercial transactions directly with consumers in real time.

Putting all of the above together, it's easy to see how young businessmen from Yahoo! founded just five years ago, have found themselves at the forefront of space age cowboys exploring new frontiers. (Fast forward for a moment: Yahoo! has a market capitalization of $67 million, which is only half of what it was in 1999.)

At first glance, one can argue that in such a wave of general enthusiasm for the Internet, which happens once in a lifetime, success is enough to be in the right place at the right time. But that would be too easy. The “remains” of the victims of the first generation of the Internet boom are already scattered everywhere. Many of them were saved by taking over the big companies (Netscape, CompuServe), while others simply went under.

What does the name mean: brand