Yahoo! joins the long list of hugely famous brands that vanish into thin air. The reasons can be many and varied: from innovation to scandals.
The news is just breaking: Yahoo! is changing its name, ownership and business sector, and is also losing Marissa Mayer at the helm. It is the final chapter in the story of what, until not so long ago, seemed one of the most promising and brilliant internet companies in the world. But Yahoo! is certainly not the only empire to crumble in the face of a changing world. Here are four notable examples.
Founded in 1994 as a hobby by two students, Yahoo! reached its peak in the early 2000s, attaining an estimated value of around 125 billion dollars. So much so that it could afford, in 2008, to turn down advances from Microsoft, which launched a takeover bid of 44.6 billion dollars and then raised it (in vain) by a further 5 billion. Criticised by shareholders, founder Jerry Yang stepped down.
This was the period in which the vertiginous decline began. While Facebook gained ground and Google continued to refine its algorithms, Yahoo! fell behind. In 2012, Marissa Mayer was appointed chief executive, launching a full-scale shock therapy. On one hand, Yahoo! acquired Tumblr for 1.1 billion dollars. On the other, it laid off 20 per cent of its workforce (nearly 3,000 people). Profits collapsed quarter after quarter; by the end of 2015 losses exceeded 4 billion dollars.
In the summer of 2016 came the turning point, with the purchase of its internet services by Verizon for 4.8 billion dollars. Yahoo! will have to bid farewell to part of its board of directors, Mayer included, and to its brand. Under the new name of Altaba, it will become a kind of investment company and will hand its internet services over to Verizon. The telecommunications giant will have to do its best to erase from users' memories the scandal of the hacker attacks that in recent years compromised 1.5 billion Yahoo! accounts.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, oil wells were discovered one after another in Texas. It was during this period that Texaco was born, quickly becoming one of the supremely powerful "seven sisters" of oil, with deposits across half the world. In the 1960s it began operating in Ecuador as well, in the Lago Agrio area, where, in extracting oil, it ended up destroying more than two million hectares of Amazon rainforest, contaminating the water and permanently damaging the health of the local population. This would give rise to one of the longest and most fiercely contested environmental battles in history, for which in 2011 it was sentenced to pay 19 billion dollars in damages. And that is certainly not the only legal problem involving Texaco: it also had to pay enormous damages of 10 billion dollars after losing a lawsuit against Pennzoil. From the 1990s onwards, a series of alliances with other companies in the sector began, culminating in the merger with Chevron, completed in 2001. Gradually, the Texaco brand disappeared.
It all started with Pong, that rudimentary black-and-white video game in which the two players — nothing more than white dashes — have to knock a ball back and forth between them. It was the very first video game in history and the first major success of Atari, which from the 1970s onwards was one of the largest and most celebrated companies in the world producing consoles, arcade video games (the coin-operated cabinet machines that packed bars for decades) and computers. In this case, the story shattered against the wall of technological innovation. Atari was unable to keep pace with the competition and gradually faded into obscurity. After a whirl of acquisitions and changes of ownership, in 2013 it filed for bankruptcy. The brand, greatly diminished, still survives and may attempt yet another relaunch in the coming months.
"The mother of all scandals." That is how the story of Enron ended, without glory. Founded in 1920, it had started out quietly extracting and refining oil and natural gas. From the 1990s onwards it had experienced a genuine boom, becoming the seventh-largest American company, with offices across half the world. Unfortunately, it was all false. Revenues, profits, debt. Behind Enron's splendour lay a gigantic accounting fraud, perpetrated over many years. When in 2001 the SEC (the equivalent of our Consob) uncovered it, there was nothing left to be done. Within the space of two months Enron collapsed, leaving tens of thousands of employees out of work and dragging down with it the dozens of smaller companies that depended on its operations. Arthur Andersen, which had certified its accounts, also shut its doors.