Why Yahoo! did not become Google

Birth at Stanford

Yahoo! was first founded by two students at Stanford University in 1994 encompassing its Founders' name initially before being "re-Founded" in 1995 as, well, Yahoo! It started out as a search engine, or directory of websites.

In 1996, two students at Standford University (what? again?) started a little research project about an improved system of website searches, which lead to them Founding, two year later in 1998, what we now know as Google (basically the same project from two years earlier, becoming a company), in a friend's garage.

State in 2016

As of 3rd February 2016, in the United States, the CEO of Yahoo!, herself a former employee of the younger company (by three years round-about, technically) called Google, signalled the company, as in Yahoo!, is open to sale according to the blaring strip at the bottom of the screen on Bloomberg.  Google, meanwhile, in the year 2015, gave birth to it's own parent, Alphabet. Google is the most dominant internet or internet-related company in the world as of 2016, and has been in that position for a while, while growing into a technology company beyond just the internet, such as hardware for example.

Forget operating or net incomes. The revenues of Yahoo! and Google in recent years at least, have been telling of different fortunes. While Yahoo! is a giant employer with 11,000 employees, with 15% of that figure possibly facing departures, at the time of my writing this, Google, or rather Alphabet now, has a family exceeding 61,000 and is growing.

The Difference

Yahoo! was ground-breaking when it arrived into existence to squash the futures of the likes of Lycos, Altavista and Infoseek. Yahoo!, was the future, before it existed, or was even fathomed by its Founders. When Yahoo! arrived, the future that it was meant to be, arrived, and became the present, which was destined, to become a past. Google, took the present and worked on the future. And it has been in the business, of building futures ever since.

Yahoo!, working on the present, saw itself at various intervals of its story, in decline or defeat, in the market space. Google, working on the futures of different things, to write the future for our world, as its core business in reality (not technology in case you thought that is what it did), kept growing, and outgrowing, Yahoo!

The difference wasn't in the timing. The difference was in the concept of time, for each. With its focus on the future, Google secured its future. Google, was, is and will be, from the way it operates, future-proof. Yahoo! has seen ups and downs, every time a present phase passes. Yahoo! has not been, is not, and does not indicate for the time ahead at least at the present point, that it will be, future-proof.

Yahoo! at some point hired an ex-Google employee to be it's CEO to fix its present, Google at some point hired the best Futurist it could get its hands on at the time, to work on its continuing work of building the future.

The Result

When Yahoo! began in 1995, as a company, it could have found itself on the trajectory of growth, expansion, success and entrenchment that Google or Alphabet is now on (and has been on from the very early days). If only, like Google, it had given the due importance to Futurology. It could have been Google. It isn't.

Harish Shah is Singapore's first local born Professional Futurist and a Management Strategy Consultant. He runs Stratserv Consultancy. His areas of consulting include Strategic Foresight, Systems Thinking, Scenario Planning and Organisational Future Proofing.