Founded in 1994 by Web-surfing Stanford University grad students, Yahoo! grew from a tiny

upstart surrounded by Silicon Valley heavy weights to a powerful force in Internet media.

Yahoo! worked hard to be more than just a search engine. The company proudly proclaims it

is “The only place anyone needs to go to find anything, communicate with anyone, or buy

anything.” Its range of services includes e-mail, news, weather, music, photos, games, shopping,

auctions, and travel. A large percentage of revenues comes from advertising, but the company also

profits from subscription services such as online personal ads, premium e-mail, and small-business services.

Although Yahoo! strives to achieve a competitive advantage over rival Google with its vast array of original content, Google’s ascension to the runaway leader in search, e-mail, and related services has made it a darling with advertisers. Yahoo!’s acquisition of photo-sharing service Flickr, social bookmark manager Del.icio.us, and online video editing site Jump cut strengthened its capabilities. Yahoo! has also continued to grow globally in Europe and Asia, helped in part by the acquisition of Kel koo, a European comparison shopping site, for $579 million, and of 46 percent of Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce company, for $1 billion in cash. Discussions with Microsoft about a possible merger culminated in a 10-year deal in June 2009 that gave Microsoft full access to the Yahoo!

search engine, to be used in future Microsoft projects for its own search engine, Bing. CEO Carol Bartz faced many questions, however, about how Yahoo! should best move forward.