Strategic Management of Amazon and Yahoo.com The recent advancements in technology, computing, and Internet technologies have seen a rapid rise in the number of online businesses. Cases in point are the Amazon.com and Yahoo.com that took the globe by storm at the end of the 20th the century. Broadly speaking, e-commerce has become one of the most lucrative platforms to conduct businesses (Nabi, & Luthria, 2002). In this paper, two relating Amazon and Yahoo are reviewed. First, I seek to find out the source of Amazons success as a leading online retailer in 2011. The study will also establish whether Yahoo's business model functionally geared for success during the same year. In addition, the distinct business strategies of each of these entities and the way the strategies resulted in comparative advantages are also analyzed.

Amazon.com, the world's largest online retailer, is an American company that was established in 1995 by Jeff Bezos. The headquarters are in Washington DC. Having started as a book selling business, the company has grown exponentially over the last 17 years to incorporate several other products. These products include music, DVDs, video games, toys, software, and video among many other home improvements goods. As at the moment, this company boasts of customer base of 22.5 million across 150 different countries all over the world. On the other hand, Yahoo.com is a multinational Internet corporation based in Sunnyvale, California. It was set up by Jerry Yang and David Filo, who are both electrical engineering graduates from Stanford, in 1994 (Canzer, 2006). The corporation is largely known for its Web portal and search engine known as Yahoo Search. In addition, it offers several other related services such as Yahoo Directory, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo Mail, Advertising, Finance, and Yahoo News. Recently, Yahoo also ventured into social media services (Nabi, & Luthria, 2002).

Amazon strategic organization entailed a combination of informational elements such as a virtual storefront...

Though Amazon has heavily ventured in information and technology, with strategic focus on software instead of hardware, its operations by that time were mostly limited to packing and shipping. The management key propositions for customers buying their products over the Internet include convenience, wide selection, fair prices, and enhanced customer service (Kasabov & Warlow, 2012). Its web store has always remained operational 24/7 and offers additional services, for instance book recommendations and reviews. Amazon has expanded its database and fortified it such that customers can use database such functionality to locate the out-of-print titles. This has been made possible by different search criteria employed. Furthermore, in Amazon's website, stock availability is clearly displayed for every product and, for those products yet to be released, customers are allowed to pre-order so that shipment can be made upon availability (Hitt, Hoskisson & Ireland, (2013).
Another strategic management technique employed by Amazon is "one-on-one" customer relations. In other words, Amazon puts "each customer at the centre of her own universe." Jeffrey Bezos, company's CEO, sums up company's personalization effort by submitting that: "if we have seventeen million customers, we should have seventeen million stores." One-2-one relationship has further been applied to the company's marketing strategy. From Amazon's web page, someone may notice that further recommendations of other products based on your previous purchases are made after a purchase has been made from the site. In addition, further recommendation of additional products based on other consumer who bought similar products to the one currently purchased are displayed (Nabi, & Luthria, 2002).

Concerning Yahoo Inc., it changed its mission statement from being just a "search portal" to "to focus on connecting people with their passion, communities, and world's knowledge." Essentially, Yahoo's mission…