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Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!
Book

Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

Nicholas Carlson
Twelve, 2015

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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Innovative

Recommendation

If Verizon’s early 2017 plan to buy Yahoo goes through, news reports say the company will take a new name, Altaba, and its sixth CEO, Marissa Mayer, will step down with a multimillion dollar severance package. In his book’s title, Business Insider chief correspondent Nicholas Carlson cites Mayer first, but he proceeds to present an inside history of Yahoo – and by extension, the Internet – from its beginnings in 1994 through Yahoo’s near total collapse in 2014 – ending before the 2017 pending sale. The successive wins and losses of Yahoo’s pre-Mayer CEOs, and the backroom plotting of its board members and investors, offer as fascinating a story as Mayer’s ill-fated attempts to “save Yahoo.” Mayer’s rise at Google provides an absorbing parallel to Yahoo’s decline, the story of Silicon Valley and the web. Her early wins and ensuing missteps read like a classical tragedy. getAbstract recommends this gripping page-turner to anyone interested in Yahoo, Mayer or the history of the Internet – right up to today.

Take-Aways

  • Jerry Yang and David Filo began Yahoo in 1994 as an online list of their favorite websites. It grew in value to $128 billion by 1999.
  • Yahoo lost 95% of its value in the dot-com crash of 2000.
  • Hollywood mogul Terry Semel joined as CEO in 2001 and brought Yahoo back from the brink.

About the Author

Business Insider chief correspondent Nicholas Carlson has won awards for his exposés of several Internet companies, including Facebook, Twitter and Groupon. He won Digiday’s award for “Best Editorial Achievement” of the year for his coverage of Yahoo. A frequent guest on CNBC, he contributes to the Bloomberg biography series, Game Changers.

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    R. P. 7 years ago
    In the beginning,Yahoo was the pioneer ,they led the way . And Google was almost unheard of back then.Facebook,YouTube were not even born.

    But their lack of foresight , poor leadership and decision making has turned Yahoo into a trashy website it is today. As Donald Trump would say......SAD!