Last updated on 29th July 2016
Here Is Marissa Mayer's Final Letter To Yahoo Employees, http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2016/07/25/here-is-marissa-mayers-final-letter-to-yahoo-employees/, dated Jul. 25th 2016
Ravi: Yahoo is bought by Verizon.
A small extract from the letter of Marissa Meyer CEO of Yahoo, given in the above article:
Yahoo is a company that changed the world. Before Yahoo, the Internet was a government research project. Yahoo humanized and popularized the web, email, search, real-time media, and more.
--- end small extract of Yahoo CEO letter ---
Ravi: So well said.
Hmm. This is a poignant moment for software techies and computer user techies of my generation. I started out in the software world as a trainee programmer in 1984 in a company in SEEPZ, Mumbai, when Microsoft was unknown let alone Yahoo. I used to write snail mail to India when I was abroad on assignment trips!
I got my Yahoo mail id in the late 90s sometime (which I still use but as an alternate to my gmail id which is my main mail id), and was an avid user of Yahoo search! Nowadays I rarely use Yahoo search, if at all. I guess many of today's generation of Internet users may not even know of Yahoo search due to the predominance of Google search.
Besides all the wonderful freebies that Yahoo gave (mail & search), it has become legendary for the way it was able to compete with Microsoft in the Internet space, even when Microsoft was having huge cash reserves and was a big threat to almost any software company that Microsoft targeted. Techie oldies will remember how Microsoft drove Netscape out of business - they just gave away a competing browser - Internet Explorer - free and even bundled it along with their Windows OS. Netscape became history real quick!
But Yahoo proved that the Internet space was different. Microsoft could not use its massive money power and rather questionable trade practices to knock Yahoo out of business. Yahoo had made its brand well known to Internet users. Microsoft could not destroy that brand using its money power alone!!!
Thanks a lot Yahoo! Your Internet entrepreneurship will not be forgotten for decades to come. You have given a lot to the world's Internet users, and have been the inspiration for many others to contribute to the revolutionary Internet.
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A correspondent C wrote (and was OK with public sharing):
I had not thought about Yahoo like that. Yes, they introduced the world to mail and search that we all used and took for granted. Google then did a much better job of this and combined it with a paying advertisement stream to make it commercially successful. It was frustrating to see how leaden-footed Yahoo seemed to be in responding.
I think Yahoo took too long to shed its outdated baggage (including Jerry Yang) and reposition itself in the internet market. They took a beating in China where they even provided the government with IP addresses and other details of people using Yahoo. In the meantime, the world had changed and Google dominated much of it. Taking them head-on was not sensible, yet, with its China market gone, what alternative had Yahoo left itself?
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I (Ravi - R) responded, edited:
They were the pioneers in this area. [Ravi: That is a wrong statement. It is corrected later on in the conversation.]
Pioneering is always more difficult than following through. Their story including the visit by a venture capitalist in a fancy car to their trailer which housed the Yahoo operation then, who ended up financing them, is the stuff of legends. [http://e145.stanford.edu/upload/handouts/BYERS-YahooCase-TV4ed.pdf is a 16 page study of Yahoo in its startup days (but it does not mention the fancy car of the venture capitalist).]
Google followed up by which time I think even getting venture capital would not have been that difficult
Did you read about how Sabeer Bhatia got inspired by Yahoo guys in forcing Microsoft to pay him $400 million or something like that for hotmail? It is worth reading that account. [http://www.coltech.vnu.edu.vn/~phuonghd/htt/book/interview/02-Hotmail.pdf (14 pages) has an account of the origins of Hotmail. Sabeer Bhatia says:
Two of my colleagues from Stanford had gone on to start Yahoo, and I thought, “Wow. This is just a list, a directory which tells you what is where. And somebody put $1 million in them.” I mean, that was huge. So I thought, “This Internet thing is here to stay,” and I started playing around with it and came up with the idea to do a simple-to-install database at the back end. Then you’d use the browser as the front end.
--- end short extract ---
Ravi: So Sabeer Bhatia drew some inspiration from Yahoo and came up with some idea of his own to float as an Internet product. Note that at that time Yahoo Mail was not around (as Bhatia started Hotmail before Yahoo got on to webmail).
The article also mentions the sale of Hotmail to Microsoft for $400 million but does not mention Yahoo it that context. I do clearly recall reading an article (say around 15 years ago) where Bhatia mentions attending a seminar/lecture or something like that given by Yahoo founder(s) (David Filo and/or Jerry Yang) where he/they spoke about how brand name of Yahoo (for directory search) was something that Microsoft could not effectively compete with using just money power. If I recall correctly that made Bhatia more confident that his brand of Hotmail was what Microsoft could not wipe away so easily and therefore Bhatia was able to drive up his price of sale to Microsoft to $400 million.]
...
Google was just too good for Yahoo. Then Facebook was too good for Yahoo. The product market in the USA is horrendous. My stress levels peaked when I saw how fast USA companies were introducing image indexing software with awesome features (in a CeBIT Hanover/Hannover visit I made and what I read in trade magazines) which was leaving behind the product that our startup in SEEPZ, Mumbai (Boshu Technics Corp.) was developing for an American (Indian-American owned) customer. This was in the early 90s, perhaps 1992-93.
So I can imagine what Yahoo would have faced when competing against Google and Facebook. They could not match them and so their story came to an end. But they are still the pioneers of free webmail and free Internet search (with significant number of users) - nobody can take that away from Yahoo!, IMHO. [Ravi: I was wrong here. Later conversation corrects it.]
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Correspondent C wrote:
I think Hotmail may have been the first free e-mail service. I remember getting a message in 1996 inviting me to open an account with them and turning it down: 'who would provide something free? what will they expect in return? will my information be safe?'. (I was teaching in the UK then.)
Altavista was started a little earlier, in 1995. Much earlier was the web browser Mosaic (1992).
Of course, there was an e-mail service on Arpanet by the late 1970s. I remember using it when I was teaching at CMU [Ravi: Carnegie Mellon University, USA] in 1980-81 and feeling its absence when I returned to TIFR [Ravi: Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai] in 1981. Routing was primitive and one often had to list the intermediate points between source and destination! When one route stopped working, clever students would work out another route, often quite circuitous.
When I returned to TIFR in 1981, I persuaded the systems person at NCSDCT [Ravi: National Centre for Software Development .., Mumbai] (as it then was) to start an internal e-mail service on our DEC-10 system. He created something but it was very limited: each person could send one message and until that had been read and deleted, no more messages could go from that person! He said disc space was limited so that was the best he was going to provide. He later increased that from one message to three, each not longer than a limited number of characters. I think he just did not like the idea of an uncontrolled e-mail facility!
AOL is of course much older, first as a subscription-based dial-up service for games, then broadening out into other fields like news sites. Their free e-mail service started in 1996, probably stimulated by Hotmail and Yahoo.
So I would guess 1996 is when free public e-mail started.
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Ravi responded (slightly edited):
Thanks for your detailed response which made me fact-check my pioneer statement wrt Yahoo webmail (as a significant free public webmail service).
I think you are right (about Hotmail being the first webmail product). And Hotmail seems to a joint first for non-ISP based email (webmail), along with RocketMail which was later acquired by Yahoo and perhaps made into Yahoo Mail. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook.com#Launch_of_Hotmail :
Hotmail service was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, and was one of the first webmail services on the Internet along with Four11's RocketMail (later Yahoo! Mail). It was commercially launched on July 4, 1996, symbolizing "freedom" from ISP-based email and the ability to access a user's inbox from anywhere in the world.
--- end wiki extract ---
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Mail
Yahoo made a deal with the online communications company Four11 for co-branded white pages. Marvin Gavin, who worked at Four11 as director of international business development said, "We always had a bias about being acquired by Yahoo. They were more entrepreneurial than Microsoft. We had a great cultural fit – it made a lot of sense." The real point in acquiring Four11 was the company's Rocketmail webmail service, launched in 1997. In the end, Yahoo! acquired Four11 for $96 million. Yahoo announced the acquisition on October 8, 1997, close to the time that Yahoo! Mail was launched. Yahoo! chose acquisition rather than internal platform development because, as Healy said, "Hotmail was growing at thousands and thousands users per week. We did an analysis. For us to build, it would have taken four to six months, and by then, so many users would have taken an email account. The speed of the market was critical."
--- end wiki extract ---
Ravi: So Yahoo Mail hit the web over a year after Hotmail (and RocketMail). That clearly shows that Yahoo Mail was NOT the pioneer in webmail. I was wrong about my earlier statement.
AOL was not available in Mumbai or even India, in the mid-to-late-90s if I recall correctly. BSNL/MTNL was the service provided in Mumbai then, for both companies and homes, if I recall correctly. I came to know of Yahoo Mail first and not Hotmail. I think among my colleagues (then I was with Mastek as a consultant) Yahoo Mail was the webmail of choice. I did not know many people in my circle of contacts who used Hotmail then. I think that's why I was under the wrong impression that Yahoo Mail was a pioneer in webmail.
...
Altavista never seemed to make it big among regular users. I had used it at times but for me it was like an alternate search engine to Yahoo search.
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C responded (slightly edited):
1. Altavista seemed to be the search engine of choice for a lot of people, until Google came along and they saw how superior it was.
2. Gmail started as a beta and you had to be invited to participate. Those who could join got 10-20 invitations they could send to their friends to join. Google did not accept direct applications (I know, I tried!). I don't know when it stopped being a so-called beta version.
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Ravi wrote:
Yes, I too recall about Gmail beta and the need to be invited. I was offered an invitation by some young colleagues as well as senior students (M.Tech. (Comp. Sc.) students) in the Sai university (maybe in 2004/05 when I had already moved to Puttaparthi and was serving in the Sai university) who were onto it but I resisted for some time. Eventually I decided to take up an offer of an invite (I think an M.Tech. CS student passed on the invite to me) and got a gmail id. A few years down the line, that gmail id (the same one that I am using to send this mail) had become my main mail id (and the Yahoo mail id had become an alternate email id)!
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[I thank Wikipedia and coltech.vnu.edu.vn, and have presumed that they will not have any objections to me sharing the above extracts from their websites (small extract from coltech.vnu.edu.vn) on this post which is freely viewable by all, and does not have any financial profit motive whatsoever.]
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