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Warren Buffett and Dan Gilbert Unite in Bid to Acquire Yahoo

nytimes.com

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Re: Warren Buffett and Dan Gilbert Unite in Bid to Acquire Yahoo

#101

Post by lesdeuxmagots »

EdHominem wrote: post #50
ergothus wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a consumer, it might make sense to say this. From a business perspective (he says having no business experience or expertise), Yahoo is a collection of assets: Code, people, branding, community. They aren't in first place, and they aren't profitable at the moment, but I think the case that they have zero or negative value is a bit simplistic. Put it another way: Would you rather throw a pile of money at trying to…

Yes, of course it has some teardown value. Billions in Ali Baba stock if nothing else. But that's not what you're suggesting - doubling down by doing more of what they've been doing. This assumes that what they're doing has some useful foundation you can find and build on. There are essentially zero Yahoo users, especially of any service that's remotely monetizable. People who use Yahoo are people whose ISP set it as…

Yahoo has over 1B MAUs. One. Billion. The vast majority of those don't even touch the homepage.

Re: Warren Buffett and Dan Gilbert Unite in Bid to Acquire Yahoo

#102

Post by dgacmu »

tomkin wrote: post #91
pkaye wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to give shareholders a return through stock growth or through dividends.

Mega-companies will only ever end up eventually creating a G+. 300 smaller companies each doing a few things well. That is true growth. Every time you use the word "growth" to describe "success", you will find that you only have new mouths to feed.

That's patently false. Pun intended. Innovation is not limited to startups. Underneath the hood, there's an absolutely massive amount of r&d and innovation that goes into Intel's chips year on year. Google's progress in machine learning for speech and photos is impressive. The big companies often do very well innovating. Intel producing another innovation that drives a billion dollars of sales isn't as exciting as a startup doing the same, but both are real.

Re: Warren Buffett and Dan Gilbert Unite in Bid to Acquire Yahoo

#103

Post by matwood »

lesdeuxmagots wrote: post #101
EdHominem wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, of course it has some teardown value. Billions in Ali Baba stock if nothing else. But that's not what you're suggesting - doubling down by doing more of what they've been doing. This assumes that what they're doing has some useful foundation you can find and build on. There are essentially zero Yahoo users, especially of any service that's remotely monetizable. People who use Yahoo are people whose ISP set it as…

Yahoo has over 1B MAUs. One. Billion. The vast majority of those don't even touch the homepage.

Yep. I regularly use http://finance.yahoo.com/ and http://sports.yahoo.com/fantasy/ when in season. The finance site is one of the better ones. Google has not updated theirs in so long I'm surprised they have not just turned it off.

Re: Warren Buffett and Dan Gilbert Unite in Bid to Acquire Yahoo

#105

Post by Animats »

astrodust wrote: post #95
Animats wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has a P/E ratio of 9.82. (2015 actual). That's what a mature, profitable company looks like. AAPL isn't overvalued. That's the sort of thing Buffet buys. IBM is at 9.90. Compare P/E (last full year numbers): Google: 31.12 Facebook: 80.41 Salesforce: 948.63 Twitter: (loss) LinkedIn (loss)

The Salesforce one is the best. They're off the planet.

That just means low earnings. At zero earnings, P/E goes to infinity. For losses, P/E goes negative. (Negative values aren't usually considered numerically meaningful; it's customary to just indicate a loss.)

Re: Warren Buffett and Dan Gilbert Unite in Bid to Acquire Yahoo

#106

Post by anonql »

I'm weary of this. As a Detroiter I'm not a fan of Gilbert.

Though the prospect of bringing a large tech co to Detroit is nice, Gilbert and his people are very unpleasant to work with. They pay lip service to the importance of technology but generally don't respect tech people, or know how a real tech company operates. Not to mention their questionable morals (politically manipulating the State of Ohio so they could have a casino monopoly, instant mortgages, reverse mortgages, etc.).

Firstly, the Bizdom incubator was a mess. Very poorly run. Not a single successful business came out of it. No actual founders taught students. Just ex-QL people or trusted friends; the only thing in common was that none of them had ever started or ran a startup. Most of the startups that gained any traction did so by selling to Gilbert's other companies rather than proving that they have a real market - lots of incest going on.

On top of that, some entrepreneurs got straight-up screwed. At a minimum, by highly abusive investment terms (such as Bizdom owning 67% of the company and having the ability to modify operating agreements at will) - and to top it off, multiple founders in their system have had their ideas ripped off by Gilbert's people.

That's on top of their ridiculous real estate ventures. Such as offering startups hip, beautiful office space in Downtown Detroit - in exchange for a percentage of their company (I hear it's over 10%, with very few people biting). The startups that went through their investment funnels were "heavily encouraged" to get space there.

My guess is that if he gets Yahoo, he'll open up an office in Detroit, try to QL-ify it (i.e. make it a sales company that is a fairly close parody of Glengarry Glen Ross), it will flounder for a few years, and either get sold again or just die.

I really wish Detroit had a better advocate.

Re: Warren Buffett and Dan Gilbert Unite in Bid to Acquire Yahoo

#107

Post by cscurmudgeon »

tosseraccount wrote: post #49
bmuon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big misconception: Yahoo is profitable, it's just not growing.

Check. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/19/yahoo-qua... Yahoo announced falling revenues and a quarterly loss of $99.2m on Tuesday - from April 19, 2016

Just one quarter due to accounting. Annually quite profitable. Ugh, I wish the Guardian was more financially literate.

Re: Warren Buffett and Dan Gilbert Unite in Bid to Acquire Yahoo

#108

Post by Coneylake »

astrodust wrote: post #96
kiproping wrote: post #68

Is the death of Yahoo due to poor leadership or did it just die a natural death like myspace or AOL

There was nothing natural about the death of either of those. Both were accelerated by an indifference to their platform. Facebook could have gone the same way but they've largely stayed vigilant about being relevant to people.

I kind of want you to give me some examples of both of your points, please.

Re: Warren Buffett and Dan Gilbert Unite in Bid to Acquire Yahoo

#109

Post by cscurmudgeon »

daemin wrote: post #43
avar wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's true. Even badly performing companies like Yahoo! aren't only priced as a sum of their physical assets, but also intangible ones, e.g. the skills of their employees, their market position etc.

Someone actually did a calculation of this just recently, like about a month ago max. Adding up the Alibaba stake, the Yahoo Japan stake, the office and associated infrastructure, that summing those up totalled far less than the current share price. Somewhere around -8 billion IIRC.

That someone was someone who didn't know basic addition (tax liability).

Re: Warren Buffett and Dan Gilbert Unite in Bid to Acquire Yahoo

#110

Post by drdeca »

bzbarsky wrote: post #58
EdHominem wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, of course it has some teardown value. Billions in Ali Baba stock if nothing else. But that's not what you're suggesting - doubling down by doing more of what they've been doing. This assumes that what they're doing has some useful foundation you can find and build on. There are essentially zero Yahoo users, especially of any service that's remotely monetizable. People who use Yahoo are people whose ISP set it as…

A fair number of people use Yahoo mail and Yahoo search. It's not a majority of the market by any means, but it's still tens to hundreds of millions of users all told.

They also own tumblr iirc.

I don't know if tumblr is profitable, but it has many users.

edit: whoops this was already mentioned a number of times in other comments.

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