Yahoo is acquiring HotJobs. So Yahoo is continuing with it's acquisitions. With a big number of acquisitions behind it, Yahoo is emerging as one complete solutions provider on the internet. Name any generic service(that can be used by any net user) and Yahoo seems to have it. They have built their empire with a series of acquisitions. That way, they were able to provide more services quickly than any other portals. But still it is amazing to see the speed and efficiency with which they integrate new services. And the site hardly fails to deliver.
Personally it is very difficult for me to manage without Yahoo. Lot of my friends agree with me. The thing is that I have not yet seen any other internet company that can give me the kind of services that Yahoo gives. And almost all of them for free(At least for now). The customization provided by Yahoo is also very good. Added to it is their excellent speed and very well written, user friendly pages. Here are the services that I use from Yahoo. If I were an American, I am sure the size of the list would have doubled.
1. e-mail. This is not my primary email, but I still use it.
2. stocks and business news.
3. News, India and international 4. Yahoo clubs. I am a member of Kannadigara Committee.
5. My Yahoo. Amazing is the customizablity here.
6. This weblog is on Yahoo geocities. :-)
7. Yahoo messenger
Too bad they do not have a webloggin service ;-). But I am sure they will come one with one some day.
But on the downside, if Yahoo continues to go without competition for long(which is likey to happen) it can go the way all the monopolies(MicroSoft, for example) go. Add to it is the danger that the company has database of almost every internet user in the world. Just to take my example, after Yahoo acquired geocities and e-groups, they had all my active email ids in their database. The issues of privacy and the like also come up. But so far, Yahoo comes out very clean with respect to mis-managing user data. At least I have never heard any one complaining, except for one black mark. When Yahoo acquired geocities, it tried to enforce the users to agree that all the rights for content published in the home pages will be with Yahoo. Naturally, they had to give up this clause due to heavy protests from the users(Who likes to give away content for free?). Read an instance of how users can face problems during acquisition of internet services.
I have compiled a list of acquisitions that are made by Yahoo in the past. This list may not be complete. I have used a raw technique to form this list - Search Google!!. Here is the list.
1. e-groups
2. geocities
3. broadcast.com
4. Yoyodyne Entertainment
5. hotjobs
6. launch.com
7. Online Everywhere - content management
8. HyperParallel Inc
9. DotBank
10. Four11(owners of rocketmail, now yahoomail)
11. webring
12. viaweb
