Yahoo 2015 Annual Report Download - page 32

Any failure to scale and adapt our existing technology architecture to manage expansion of user-
facing services and to respond to rapid technological change could adversely affect our business.
As some of the most visited sites on the Internet, Yahoo Properties deliver a significant number of
products, services, page views, and advertising impressions to users around the world. We expect
our products and services to continue to expand and change significantly and rapidly in the future to
accommodate new technologies, new devices, new Internet advertising solutions, and new means of
content delivery.
In addition, widespread adoption of new Internet, networking or telecommunications technologies, or
other technological or platform changes, could require substantial expenditures to modify or adapt
our services or infrastructure. The technology architectures and platforms utilized for our services are
highly complex and may not provide satisfactory security features or support in the future, as usage
increases and products and services expand, change, and become more complex. In the future, we
may make additional changes to our existing, or move to completely new, architectures, platforms
and systems, such as the changes we have made in response to the increased use of mobile devices
such as tablets and smartphones. Such changes may be technologically challenging to develop and
implement, may take time to test and deploy, may cause us to incur substantial costs or data loss,
and may cause changes, delays or interruptions in service. These changes, delays, or interruptions in
our service may cause our users, Affiliates and other advertising platform participants to become
dissatisfied with our service or to move to competing providers or seek remedial actions or
compensation. Further, to the extent that demands for our services increase, we will need to expand
our infrastructure, including the capacity of our hardware servers and the sophistication of our
software. This expansion is likely to be expensive and complex and require additional technical
expertise. As we acquire users who rely upon us for a wide variety of services, it becomes more
technologically complex and costly to retrieve, store, and integrate data that will enable us to track
each user’s preferences. Any difficulties experienced in adapting our architectures, platforms and
infrastructure to accommodate increased traffic, to store user data, and track user preferences,
together with the associated costs and potential loss of traffic, could harm our operating results, cash
flows from operations, and financial condition.
We rely on third parties to provide the technologies necessary to deliver content, advertising, and
services to our users, and any change in the licensing terms, costs, availability, or acceptance of
these formats and technologies could adversely affect our business.
We rely on third parties to provide the technologies that we use to deliver the majority of the
content, advertising, and services to our users. There can be no assurance that these providers will
continue to license their technologies or intellectual property to us on reasonable terms, or at all.
Providers may change the fees they charge users or otherwise change their business model in a
manner that slows the widespread acceptance of their technologies. In order for our services to be
successful, there must be a large base of users of the technologies necessary to deliver our content,
advertising, and services. We have limited or no control over the availability or acceptance of those
technologies, and any change in the licensing terms, costs, availability, or user acceptance of these
technologies could adversely affect our business.
Our business depends on continued and unimpeded access to the Internet by us and our users.
Internet access providers may be able to block, degrade, or charge for access to certain of our
products and services, which could lead to additional expenses and the loss of users and advertisers.
Our products and services depend on the ability of our users to access the Internet, and certain of
our products require significant bandwidth to work effectively. Currently, this access is provided by
companies that have significant market power in the broadband and internet access marketplace,
28