91–100 of 367 posts
I did a little work as a developer for Verizon's ecosystem back in 2007. Let me just say, from what I could see, they were a huge, bureaucratic company without a single redeeming cultural trait. The managers seemed like a bunch of frat boys who had been raised up into positions of authority through some inscrutable lottery, and none of them seemed to possess an iota of analytical capability or human management talent…
Yeah, they have billions to spend on buying companies like Yahoo, but they can't upgrade all their rotting copper to fiber optics. That's Verizon for you.
So less than 1/5 of a linkedin. Is Yahoo's core business really that bad?
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No company that sells Internet access should be allowed to also be in the content business.
Having a web content business incentivizes ISPs to provide faster internet. Case in point: Google Fiber
Case in point, Comcast is capping their Internet in order to hinder competing video services, but their own video is not capped.
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Why the heck do people use 'bn' for billion and 'mm' for million? I've seen VC @fredwilson use 'mm' many times on his blog (avc.com), and IIRC I read some reasoning for it, either there or elsewhere, which made some kind of sense (they said Roman numeral for 1000 is M, so for million we use MM, though not sure if that is quite right logic), but why then the inconsistency between 'mm' and 'bn'?
I used to work in finance, and there is a bunch of obscure terminology and conventions, adopted from different cultures (eg you can trade a "Lakh" of silver). See how the currency sign for GBP looks like a capital L? and the currency sign for shillings and pence was "s" and "d"? (now the uk use "p" for pence since decimalisation). So "Lire", "Soldi" and "Denarii" were the denominations of Italian currency in the the…
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It's hardly a unique case, AMD is worth less now than what it paid for ATI back in the day.
That really had to be the dumbest moves in computing history. "What does the #2 CPU maker need to become #1? The #2 GPU maker, obviously!"
Verizon shouldn't be allowed to own any web properties. They inject a unique subscriber identifier into your HTTP requests unless you turn it off. http://www.verizonwireless.com/support/unique-identifier-hea...
I wonder what's Mozilla's reaction to this, if they haven't done so before
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That really had to be the dumbest moves in computing history. "What does the #2 CPU maker need to become #1? The #2 GPU maker, obviously!"
The idea was that a CPU + GPU company would be a lot stronger than themselves trying to defend against their respective #1 competitors. Instead, both the CPU and GPU market leaders got stronger and leveraged their massive capital to turn the #2 into a very, very distant #2.
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The other alternative (and it scares me too!) is that Kardashians gossip was carefully measured to actually be what the most people respond to...
Yes, scary. And given Mayer's penchant for numbers your suspicion is almost certainly the case. It reminds me of Henry Ford saying "If I asked people what they wanted they'd say a faster horse". Mayer was suppose to lead the company not be a poll-following huckster.
Less than the $5.7 billion Yahoo! paid in 1999 for Mark Cuban's Broadcast.com: http://money.cnn.com/1999/04/01/deals/yahoo/ Times -- and fortunes -- change.
Had to look it up, for curiosity: In April 1999, Yahoo! acquired the company for $5.7 billion (or over $10,000 per user) in stock. [...] The company had 570,000 users. -- Wikipedia These 570k users only listened to audio, seems like the biggest waste ever. Cuban got a bunch of (undeserved?) money and Yahoo lost the same amount. Feels like a pointless transaction.