Yahoo!

Yahoo! Mail

Yahoo! Mail
Top: A typical Yahoo! Mail inbox. Bottom: Yahoo! Mail beta.
Maintainer:	Yahoo!
Genre:	E-mail, webmail
Website:	http://mail.yahoo.com/

Yahoo! Mail is a Web-based e-mail (Webmail) service from Yahoo! It is one of the largest e-mail providers on the Internet, serving millions of users. Yahoo!'s competitors include Gmail, AIM Mail, and Hotmail.

History

J. J. Healy, Yahoo!'s resident investment banker who had been hired in November 1996, was the man dealing with every Yahoo! acquisition. Few months before, the portal had looked into buying a yellow-page directory called BigBook. Getting a Merger and Acquisition specialist certainly a smart way to extend the network; this was precisely what Healy was there for.

"No one knows your business like your employees" he said. According to him, the main question to consider is "should we build, buy or rent?" In fact this really depends on the growth of the competitors and the current position of the company. The main reason to buy things was gaining speed to market "you say, 'If we don't have it in two, four, or six months, what is that going to mean to our market position?'"

The growth of internet users eventually boosted the e-mail technology, this also created a very competitive landscape where the winner was the first one to launch an e-mail service to attract potential users. Why was e-mail so important? Simply because it was the key feature a portal could offer as it would mean a regular visit from the user on the network.

At the middle of this battle, you would find Excite, Lycos, AOL, or Microsoft. There was one challenge: to acquire Four11.

Yahoo! already had made a deal with the online communications company for co-branded white pages.

Gloria 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