EXCLAMATION “YAHOO!” DISTANCES ITSELF FROM STAGNANT INTERNET COMPANY
SAN FRANCISCO - In the latest sign that the one-time internet giant Yahoo! is in dire straits, the company is now on the brink of losing it’s longest-standing partnership. “Yahoo!”, the centuries-old exclamation of joy, is searching for a new image, and it is not clear if it’s plans fit the business model of a company that’s about five years behind it’s competition.
When Yahoo! and “Yahoo!” originally joined forces in 1994, it seemed a match made in heaven. “Yahoo!”, the expression, had been in steep decline since the late 1950s, when a new generation of exclamations were on the rise. The major lexicon shift of the 1960s, in no small part the work of Rock & Roll, LSD, John F Kennedy and Satan, saw exclamations such as “Jeepers!”, “Willikers!” and “Gee Golly!” give way to the likes of “Far Out!”, “Groovy!”, and, by the mid-70s, “Please Pass The Cocaine.”
By the 1980s, when “Radical!” “Awesome!” and “Seriously, Pass the Fucking Cocaine”, were the young-guns in the exclamations industry, “Yahoo!” had cut it’s work force by nearly 90% and were flirting with Chapter 11.
Meanwhile, a small silicon-valley start-up with the dream of organizing and monetizing the infant internet, awash with venture capital, was searching for a non-traditional name. “At the time, we wanted a name that would express the feeling of using our product. You just type in whatever you want, hit ENTER, and in about a half hour you have a huge list of angle-fire websites at your disposal! … so long as nobody picked up the phone,” said Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang. “We were in serious negotiations with the folks over at “Yipee!”, but somebody mentioned that it was sort of gay, so we backed out. Then we were in preliminary talks with “Oh Boy!” but, again, the gay thing, and eventually we were approached by the people at “Yahoo!”, and the partnership has been very lucrative ever since.”
However, the crowded, slow, pretty-much-useless-for-anything-except-pictures-of-boobs-that-took-forever-to-download, internet of the 1990s, soon gave way to the sleek, fast, and rather useful internet of today, and Yahoo! has remained one step behind the competition.
It lost search and email to Google (a company that remains successful despite the fact that it includes no exclamation marks at all), never took instant messaging away from long-time rival AOL, and it never managed to get into the business of social networking, software development, content creation or aggregation, or anything else that the internet is useful for. The only business remaining in the black for Yahoo! is it’s expertise in banner ads- the final holdover from the wild days of the early internet.
“This is not the company we partnered with in the ’90s,” said a spokesman for “Yahoo!”. “At that time, we were getting involved with a company that filled a need. The internet needed corralling, and that’s what they did quite well. But now they no longer serve that function. They’re basically the Detroit of the internet - it used to be useful, but now it’s just sort of creepy and depressing, and that’s not something that “Yahoo!”, the exclamation, needs to be associated with.”
The exclamation’s plans are uncertain, but there is some serious discussion of re-branding. “We’re figuring out our market niche,” the spokesperson said, “people might not have the appropriate exclamation for, say, being on a roller coaster, finding out that they were not dead but in fact just in a light coma, or after an especially good ejaculation. Try it next time, it’s pretty darn satisfying. The possibilities are endless.”
