In 1995, two Stanford students, Jerry Yang and Divia Filo co-founded Yahoo! which has slowly become the second most popular search engine in the world.
Terry Semel now assumes Yahoo! Chairman’s duties. Many reported about public and investor’s displeasure with ex-CEO Terry Semel’s. BBC says the reason for why Terry Semel had to leave was due to Yahoo’s poor performance: "When the first internet bubble burst they made what seemed to be the next clever move – hiring Terry Semel, the co-chief executive of old-media giant Warner. The man understood content, Hollywood, audiences – and was supposed to take Yahoo to the next level. Mr Semel quickly proceeded to turn Yahoo into a media and content company fit for the internet age. On paper (or the computer screen) it seemed to be a great strategy. There was just one hitch: Yahoo’s problem was not the lack of content. Terry Semel tried to turn Yahoo into a media company. Rather, it was the fact that Yahoo failed to focus on its core business: helping web users to find information. While Mr Semel accumulated content, Yahoo’s website got ever more cluttered and difficult to navigate, and the quality of its search engine fell well behind that of archrival Google. This is the main reason for Yahoo’s underperformance: Google’s search results made Yahoo’s endless lists of sorted results somewhat irrelevant”.
Looking optimistic, Yang says, “The time for me is right. The time is now. The Internet is still young, the opportunities ahead are tremendous, and I’m ready to rally our nearly 12,000 Yahoos around the world to help seize them.”
Jerry Yang, 38 years old, was born in Taipei, Taiwan but moved to California in the US when he was 10.
