Non-fiction 08 Nov 2005 15:51
Inside Yahoo!
Inside Yahoo!
Karen Angel
Despite its title, this book feels very much like something written entirely from the outside. Honestly, it looks like the author spent a considerable amount of time reading newspaper and magazine articles and wrote a long summary in the form of a book. You don’t feel a connection with the characters; they are all presented more or less as faceless businessmen (even Filo and Yang, who are not exactly your regular executive).
From the point of view of someone reading this book in 2005, the main problem is that it ends in late 2001. It covers the Internet bubble and the subsequent crash, but not the recovery shown by the company afterwards. At the end of the book, it looks like Yahoo! is a company deeply in trouble that may not survive independently for long; and we all know that this is not how the story ends.
It’s sort of a business book, and reads like a Wall Street Journal report. So, it’s not the best book for geeks or other technology-oriented readers; it does present a very good chronology of the bubble years and of the relation between Yahoo! and its competitors during those interesting years. But if that’s not what you are interested in, it will be a very boring book.
