Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Warren Buffett and Dan Gilbert Unite in Bid to Acquire Yahoo

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 135 posts

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

#121

Post by jeroen »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #30

I find these things amusing "according to people who aren't authorized to speak publicly" except that they are talking to a reporter so that's kinda public. But really what they want to do is let potential other players know that "oh yeah, its real, we're bringing it and we're gone sell this thing, if you want a piece of this you better wake up and call us or your going to lose out." kind of vibe which attempts to in…

> "according to people who aren't authorized to speak publicly" except that they are talking to a reporter so that's kinda public.

They are speaking publicly, but they "aren't authorised" to do so.

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

#122

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

gcb0 wrote: post #114
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo! Japan is a separate company from Yahoo, Inc. It was formed as a joint venture between Yahoo, Inc. and SoftBank, thus both of them holding a stake.

and what reason it had to jump on alibaba?

Yahoo had a smart CEO who realised Alibaba's potential, that's all.

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

#123

Post by vldx »

simula67 wrote: post #112
gtk40 wrote: post #52

Looking forward to a redesign of Yahoo! to match Berkshire Hathaway's website: http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/

I can't believe that is the website for the company which made Buffet the second richest man on the planet.

I like it very much, because it's a good example of counter-signaling.

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

#124

Post by Communitivity »

Idea which I find interesting, but is probably not on target, is BH leveraging their investments in Yahoo and Apple to have Apple take over Yahoo. The sense of style which Apple cultivates applied to digital content curation, combined with a personal digital assistant tweaked for librarian reference desk responses (Viv-ianne the Librarian).

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

#126

Post by ytjohn »

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…

I don't know how monetizable it is, but yahoo groups is still very actively used. It's amazing the number of times I'm trying to find information about a bit of software or hardware, and find myself landing on a yahoo groups archive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Groups#Site_statistics

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-burrus/yahoo-groups_b_1...

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

#127

Post by vonmoltke »

simula67 wrote: post #111
dmix wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I forgot they bought Tumblr = 50 million visitors/month https://siteanalytics.compete.com/tumblr.com/ Yahoo Answers is still a big useless SEO machine = 50 million users/month https://siteanalytics.compete.com/answers.yahoo.com/ Yahoo Sports is very popular from what I understand = 12 million users https://siteanalytics.compete.com/sports.yahoo.com/ Yahoo Finance, ditto = 14 million visitors/month https://siteanalyti…

Except for Finance and maybe Tumblr, aren't all these services fading ? * Yahoo Answers Quora ( 100M users [1] ) and Stack Exchange is now the default question & answer sites. * Yahoo News and Yahoo Sports Google news and search ( 44% of Google searchers scan the news results [2] ) already provide these features. I used to use Yahoo Live Scores, but now I use Google. * Yahoo mail Gmail ( 1B users [3] and grew 100 Mil…

> * Yahoo News and Yahoo Sports

> Google news and search ( 44% of Google searchers scan the news results [2] ) already provide these features. I used to use Yahoo Live Scores, but now I use Google.

Yahoo Sports is a lot more than just sports news and scores. The traffic is heavily driven by fantasy sports, which Google doesn't have.

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

#128

Post by [deleted] »

nommm-nommm wrote: post #97
samstave wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But who cares about yahoo? (Serious question) yahoo should just die. Please tell me why it shouldn't

Yahoo owns both Tumblr and Flickr. Alexa ranks Yahoo News the 8th most popular news source on the Internet. More popular than Fox News, BBC, and WSJ. Yahoo Mail is still used by millions.

[deleted]

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

#129

Post by hellodevnull »

nommm-nommm wrote: post #97
samstave wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But who cares about yahoo? (Serious question) yahoo should just die. Please tell me why it shouldn't

Yahoo owns both Tumblr and Flickr. Alexa ranks Yahoo News the 8th most popular news source on the Internet. More popular than Fox News, BBC, and WSJ. Yahoo Mail is still used by millions.

This community often seems to think that something is dead just because people don't use it in SCs or in startups, completely forgetting the average person. By their logic Windows is dead, Oracle is dying etc. the only successful companies are Google and Apple.

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

#130

Post by astrodust »

Coneylake wrote: post #108
astrodust wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

MySpace completely failed to stay with the times post-acquisition, they kept focusing on catering to big-name bands rather than the huge base of individuals. Over time people grew tired of MySpace being indifferent to them and moved on. Today the same type of crowd has made Snapchat a huge success.

AOL remained fixated on catering to their existing customer base and trying to grow high-margin dial-up revenues. They squandered their capital even harder than Yahoo did, as there's not a single AOL branded anything that's a best-of-breed. Everything about the company is second rate. Consider this: They bought the internet's darling company, Netscape, and could not make a nickel off of it or even keep the brand alive in any useful sense despite investing heavily in a series of increasingly bizarre reboots.

Facebook, by comparison, will not hesitate to incorporate features from other competing products if they think they're going to drive the platform forward and has made a number of strategic purchases like Instagram and Oculus to help cement their relevance.

I'm not even a fan of Facebook, but I admire their tenacity and their incredible ability to survive in an industry littered with the wreckage of previously huge social empires.

Post reply on HN