Yahoo, the first Internet business to be valued at over US$100 billion, recently announced that it would sell its core Internet assets to anyone offering a price of US$4 to 8 billion.
According to the current responses from the market, however, buyers only want to offer US$3 billion at most. Compared to Yahoo’s previous glory when it had a US$130 billion value, mainland Chinese financial writer Bi Yajun described this as “giving food to a beggar.”
Having been through staff redundancy and huge drops in income and share price, Yahoo started its takeover auction in the city of Sunnyvale near San Francisco, California, on April 18.
According to its 2015 financial report, Yahoo posted a net loss of US$4.36 billion for the year. Because Yahoo held shares in the Internet giant Alibaba, its share price rose dramatically in 2014 and 2015; however, with the decline of Alibaba’s share price from the end of 2015 until now, indicating Yahoo’s last glory has disappeared.
Yahoo’s Mistakes
Yahoo was created in 1994 and initially developed rapidly, but over its 22 years of operation, its business has lacked a clear market position.
Financial writer Bi Yajun stated in a recent article that in 2005 Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang correctly predicted the big Internet trend: that community, content, search, and individuality were the four core strategies of the Internet’s future development.
“However, although he predicted the future trend correctly, Yahoo has failed to use it to gain success. This was Yahoo’s fatal wound,” Bi wrote. He went on to analyse the situation.
From its beginning, Yahoo was a search engine. Along the way, however, Yahoo thought that if it only relied on search, the content would still be from other people, so it also wanted to control the content.
Then Yahoo hurried to become a portal and media company. After that, according to Bi, something absurd happened: while the global Internet businesses were rapidly moving towards using technology to drive content, this dominant internet company Yahoo, was focusing on manually creating content.
Soon a tragedy occurred, according to Bi. The way of using technology to drive content developed quickly and evolved to the point that no matter how much manpower Yahoo put in, it still couldn’t create as much content as technology-driven content.
At that point, Yahoo suddenly realized that Google’s empty search column had already become the best way to help people obtain the best information. In people’s minds, the best way to search for content lay in Google Search, which had content from other people.
Bi believes that the second mistake Yahoo made was that “it missed the opportunity to utilize mobile Internet. Otherwise, it might have had a chance for another run. But now it has fully died.”
In the big tide of the mobile Internet market, Yahoo has never developed a great, useful, popular product, Bi thinks. It also missed the chance to snatch the high ground by taking over a successful mobile Internet product.
It had the chance to pay US$1 billion to take over Facebook, which has a current market value of US$300 billion. Yahoo let Facebook go because they wanted to pay US$150 million less than the asking price. This decision cut off Yahoo’s last hope of getting out of its impasse.
Chinese Internet Panic
Luo Zhenyu, creator of “Logical Thinking,” a mainland Chinese knowledge-styled TV talk show, commented on the Chinese Internet panic of 2015 in his New Year speech.
“On November 11, 2015, Alibaba’s daily turnover had reached 97.2 billion RMB,” Luo said in the speech. “However, I heard that in the media community, people were spreading Jack Ma’s internal speech.”
Luo quoted Jack Ma’s speech: “Alibaba’s company and business are both very good. Many Internet companies would like to cooperate with us. If Baidu wants to exchange with us, surely we won’t do it. However, if Ma Huateng [founder of Tencent] wants to exchange with us, we probably need to consider it”.
Luo added, “Ma Huateng has already got the mobile Internet’s platform, but even he has fear about the undetectable future”.
In a meeting in the town of Wuzhen in Zhejiang Province a while ago, Ma Huateng showed his deep worry about which new product will replace WeChat.
Internet Safety
The issue of Internet safety has also come to the fore lately. In 2014, the private photos of Jennifer Shrader Lawrence and many other female Hollywood movie stars were released on the Internet.
Snapchat had 13 gigabytes of its users’ photos released to the public. In addition, the retail payment tool CurrentC, which was developed by Wal-Mart and other big retail businesses, had its users’ email addresses released during its trial period.
With the rapid development of mobile Internet, the number of mobile Internet users has increased hugely. Since mobile Internet devices store large amounts of personal data, the issue of safety has gradually appeared.
Although mobile Internet has made our life more convenient, the negative effects caused by its safety incidents are also very large. This has made some users who wished to give it a try step back, and it has also scared the established users.
The protection of Internet safety will likely shadow the development of the Internet.
On June 2, Mary Meeker, of KPCB (Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, Byers) called the “Internet Queen” by Barron Magazine, released her Global Internet Trends report on the Internet following her presentation at the Internet Trends 2016, Code Conference on June 1.
As well as providing a comprehensive analysis of Global trends she also comments on data privacy and data safety concerns.
In 2015, the development of the Internet entered an age of “big data.” The research and discussion regarding data has become endless.
During the age of competing for Internet data transfer, whoever obtains a huge amount of data might win a huge amount of business. Even the interactive voices and machines, which are becoming smarter and smarter, are all relying on data to function.
Mary Meeker highlights data safety issues as becoming more and more worrying. Recent incidents caused by data include the 2013 Snowden incident in which classified information from the US government’s National Security Agency was leaked, as well as the recent encryption dispute between Apple and the FBI. She also mentions that the number of stolen global data records since 2013, has reached 4 billion.
According to the KPCB report, 50 percent of Internet users are very worried about their data privacy and how Internet companies use their personal data. These worries mainly include sale of personal data, storage of personal data, and obtaining personal data and personal identities.
Although the Internet has a wide influence on people, how to control it and use it well is an ongoing issue in front of us.
Translated by Lily Zhang. Edited by Sally Appert.
