History of Yahoo!
On March 8, 1997, Yahoo! acquired online communications company Four11. Four11's webmail service, Rocketmail, became Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! also acquired ClassicGames.com and turned it into Yahoo! Games. Yahoo! then acquired direct marketing company Yoyodyne Entertainment, Inc. on October 12, 1998. In January 1999, Yahoo! acquired web hosting provider GeoCities. Another company Yahoo! took over was eGroups, which became Yahoo! Groups in June 2000. On March 8, 1998, Yahoo! launched Yahoo! Pager, an instant messaging service that was renamed Yahoo! Messenger a year later.
List of mergers and acquisitions by Microsoft
On December 31, 1997, Microsoft acquired Hotmail.com for $500 million, its largest acquisition at the time, and integrated Hotmail into its MSN group of services. Hotmail, a free webmail service founded in 1996 by Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia, had more than 8.5 million subscribers earlier that month.