1. Describe, in brief, the histories of both of Amazon.com and Yahoo.com, and determine the core business of each. There are large numbers of companies who have developed their smart objectives to gain competitive advantages. I will discuss in this paper the different ways in which Yahoo and Amazon have taken steps to build competitive advantage and lead the industry. Amazon.com: a brief history Amazon.com is ranking as world one of the top e commerce company. It is based in Seattle and is a Fortune 500 e-commerce Company. The company founder is Jeff Bezos. He sought to take advantage of his computer science background, he saw an entrepreneurial opportunity as he observed that the Internet usage was enormously growing each year as tens of millions of new users were becoming aware of its potential uses. Bezos decided that the bookselling market offered an excellent opportunity for him to take advantage of his IT skills in the new electronic, virtual marketplace. The company was founded in 1994 and launched in 1995. His vision was an online bookstore that could offer millions more books to millions more customers than a typical brick and mortar bookstore (Hill & Jones, 2013). Jeff Bezos’s vision was to build an online bookstore that would be customer-friendly, easy to navigate, provide buying advice, and offer the broadest possible selection of books at low prices. Bezos initially focused on selling books but soon realized that Amazon’s rapidly developing IT competences could be used to sell many other kinds of products online. From 2000 to present, Amazon expanded its storefronts and began to sell a wider range of electronics and digital products, such as cameras, DVD players, and MP3 players. Bezos was formally announced as the person of the year in 1999. In this way, the company recognized its success as an online popular shopping website. Amazon.com values statement depicts its image as customer concentric company. Its employs almost 14,000 employees worldwide. Amazon’s IT department is the backbone of the company and has a huge responsibility because Amazon has to be largely reliant on its IT department. The most important technical positions at Amazon.com include Quality Assurance Engineers, software engineers, system administrator, data base administrator, web developers or projects manager. Technology provides an additional and smart edge at Amazon.com. Yahoo: a brief history: Jerry Yang and David Filo are the founders of Yahoo. It was founded in January 1994. Both of the founders studied at Stanford University in Electrical Engineering and earned PhD’s. They started the website as a hobby and wanted a quick and easy way to remember and revisit the Websites that they had identified as the best and most useful from the hundreds of thousands of sites that were quickly appearing on the World Wide Web (WWW) in the early 1990s. They soon realized that as the list of their favorite Websites grew longer and longer, the list began to lose its usefulness, as they had to wade through a longer and longer list of URLs (Website addresses) to find the specific site they wanted. In order to reduce their search times, Filo and Yang decided to divide their list of Websites into smaller and more manageable categories, according to each one’s specific content or subject matter, such as sports, business, politics, or culture. In 1994 they published their Websites directory online calling it “Jerry’s Guide to the WWW for their friends to use. Hundreds then thousands of people located and clicked on their Website because it saved them time and effort to identify the most useful sites- their Website went viral. As they continued to develop their directory, Filo and Yang found that each of the directory’s subject categories’ were also quickly becoming large and unwieldy to search, so they further divided them into subcategories