[fleitz]

Your children also probably don't know what Petrochina is but like Yahoo that doesn't make them an unprofitable company. The nice thing about no one knowing who you are is that 22 year old college geeks don't get the idea to 'disrupt' your industry and instead focus on 'disrupting' a more well known brand like Facebook.

I'd suggest educating your children as to how to make money instead of brand recognition.

[troymc]

Yahoo! is a media company, and media is a business where brand recognition matters. Petrochina is not.

That said, Yahoo! does have some strong brands. Yahoo Finance, omg! and Yahoo Mail come to mind. (Yahoo Mail is second only to Hotmail in web-mail market share; Gmail comes in third.)

[teyc]

Does anybody else get what fleitz was trying to say here?

    The nice thing about no one knowing who you 
    are is that 22 year old college geeks don't
    get the idea to 'disrupt' your industry and
    instead focus on 'disrupting' a more well
    known brand like Facebook.

[fleitz]

What I'm saying is that you can easily get yourself into the 1% with out having to make a huge name for yourself and if you want to get REALLY rich it's also possible to do without huge branding. Although YHOO and MSFT in the tech press are 'dying' businesses in the 'real world' they are hugely profitable.

If you build yourself a business that puts you into the 1% with out making a huge name for yourself you're less likely to have your revenue stream threatened because most people aren't even thinking of competing with you.

[teyc]

I understand the point you are bringing up. However, there's one thing about tech companies is that their cashflow can only be sustained if their position were defensible. RIM and Nokia demonstrate how quickly a stellar business can fall into the precipice. In terms of business lifecycle, Yahoo is effectively a cash cow. http://www.valuebasedmanagement.net/methods_bcgmatrix.html It may generate a lot of profit, but it is in a business that isn't growing its market share, and risks not replacing its lost audience.

[tsotha]

Nobody bothers trying to catch the losers?

[shingen]

You can't disrupt Yahoo as a random 22 year old geek starting a company. The revenue streams and traffic base of Yahoo is extremely diverse.

Unless you plan to simultaneously disrupt web email, search, financial portals, sports, news, generalized all purpose portals, and on and on.

[wdewind]

Yeah but in this case the diversity is a weakness. You can't replace Yahoo! because they don't do one thing really well, they do a bunch of things mediocrely well. What is the Yahoo! brand? What do they do anymore? No one really knows, even though they do a ton, so how could you even aim to replace them at all? At best you could aim to replace Yahoo mail, and that seems like a very reasonable (though still ambitious) startup goal.

[smacktoward]

I wonder how many people said these same words to Larry Page and Sergey Brin back in 1997.

And that was when Yahoo's brand meant something!

[teyc]

Thanks.