PERSPECTIVE
Beyond Intelligence:
The Simple Practice Of
Staying Relevant!
By Dr. Wale Akinyemi
The Failure Of Intelligence
Mention the words Google or Facebook
or Twitter today and they are household
names in many parts of the world. However
it was not always like this. There was
another king before these kings emerged.
This other king ruled the internet like a
colossus. The king was at a time literally
synonymous with the internet.
In the words of Jeremy Ring, a one-time
sales executive at this tech giant, “Our
Company was five years old,” and “We
were worth more than Ford, Chrysler, and
GM combined. Hell, we were worth more
than Disney, Viacom, and News Corp
combined. Each of those great American
brands could have been swallowed up by
us.[1]” This internet behemoth was worth
a whopping 125 Billion dollars at its peak
but was sold to Verizon for a mere $5
Billion. What a tragic end to what was
once a promising story!
It all started in January 1994 as a website
named Jerry and David’s guide to the
World Wide Web. In April of the same
year, it was renamed to - ‘Yet Another
Hierarchically Organized Oracle" or
Yahoo as it would come to be known. In
January 1995, the Yahoo.com domain was
created and the rest they say is history.
Yahoo dominated the internet. For many
people, the Yahoo email address was
the first email address they had. Tech
columnist Dan Tynan writes in Fast
Relevance is the power that is greater
than money, greater than titles, greater
than power and is beyond intelligence.
The decline of any entity can always be
traced back to the day when it began
to lose relevance. It has destroyed com-
panies, nations, religious movements,
theories, kings and queens as well as
emperors and dynasties. Irrelevance is
a tsunami that sweeps away everything
in its path and not even prayer can save
the most pious from the consuming
power of irrelevance.
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MAL32/19 ISSUE
Company that many of the apps and
services we now take for granted were
either invented at Yahoo or quickly found
a home there. Before there was a YouTube,
there was Broadcast.com, which turned
into Yahoo TV. Before Instagram, there
was Flickr. Before Evernote, there was
Yahoo Notebook. Before Spotify, Yahoo
Music; and on and on.
Yahoo had a golden opportunity to buy
Google for $1 Million – an opportunity
that they missed. They had an opportunity
to buy Facebook for $1.1 Billion and yet
again, they missed this opportunity over a
paltry sum of $300 Million. They offered
$800 million instead of the $1.1 Billion
that was asked for. They also missed
opportunities to acquire Ebay and even
YouTube. In 2008, Microsoft would have
paid $44.6 Billion to acquire Yahoo but
the offer was turned down by Jerry Yang
the then CEO of Yahoo.
They have gone through a barrage of
CEOs, the last of which was Marissa
Mayer who failed to turn the giant
around. Yahoo messenger was classic. For
us to be communicating with someone on
the other side of the world and actually
see that they were typing was novel! As
technology evolved, someone seemed to
have put glue on the Yahoo foot. They
were just not moving and were missing
all the opportunities that could have kept
them relevant.
Jan Koum and Brian Acton were former
Yahoo employees who seemed to have
discovered something that again maybe
the leadership of the company did not
see. Yahoo messenger was great but its
home was on the computer. The entry of