141–150 of 367 posts
Why isn't this mentioned/discussed anywhere. In 2008 Microsoft offered $45 Billion to acquire Yahoo. Then Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang rejected the offer, saying that the bid "substantially undervalues Yahoo." Microsoft raised the bid to 50 Billion, and it was yet again rejected. After that MS withdrew its bid. 8 years later, at 10% the original offer!
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Verizon's wireline unit is making low single digit operating profit margins with its existing footprint. I'm pretty sure expansion into less favorable markets would push that into the red. There is a reason Google only enters carefully-vetted markets that waive the usual roadblocks to fiber buildout--it's the only way to make money in the industry. And Verizon is a public company. Investors are pushing it to ditch wi…
> Verizon's wireline unit is making low single digit operating profit margins with its existing footprint. Because they never cared about improving its efficiency. They actually noted, that when they upgrade to fiber, their expenses drop. A huge drain on their landline profits is their copper network which is falling apart. Their fiber is profitable. Investors want them to focus on wireless. As I said, if it would ha…
More generally, Verizon is legally required to keep serving the places it already served with copper. If it could save money by switching that with fiber, they'd do it. You're accusing a money-grubbing big corporation of leaving billions of dollars on the table each year.
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Well NVIDIA wanted to spin off into the CPU market also, they sorta did with them building ARM based SOC's with NVIDIA GPU's. There were also rumors of them licensing x86 from Intel. Oddly enough NVIDIA back in the day made what arguable was the best chipset for AMD CPU's - NVIDIA nForce.
NVIDIA could never have gotten an x86 license, as they would have required a ton of licensing from AMD, too. Plus it would violate the cross licensing agreement between Intel, AMD, and VIA.
"The US telecoms giant is expected to merge Yahoo with AOL, to create a digital group capable of taking on the likes of Google and Facebook." Can someone explain how combining two "past their prime" entities like Yahoo and AOL, with the Verizon telecom bureaucracy is going to produce anything "capable of taking on the likes of Google and Facebook"? Telecom companies have a pretty horrible culture. It is not one of in…
Note that Verizon has a division - Product Innovation and New Business - that is run separate from the telco business that you are mentioning. In recent years Verizon has acquired technology companies EdgeCast Networks (CDN) and upLynk (Video Streaming) which form the core of Verizon's Digital Media Services [1]. Combining these assets with AOL (AdTech) and Yahoo (if the deal happens) gives Verizon an end-to-end plat…
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Any place that doesn't already have fiber within Verizon's footprint probably can't accommodate it profitably. The margins on the places that do already have fiber are already thin. No business wants to invest in new infrastructure that isn't going to make it any money. It's not like anybody else is chomping at the bit to build fiber in those places.
It can accommodate it profitably. But any such undertaking is a long term investment, and Verizon doesn't operate in such categories. They want to rip profits faster. Also, they have internal conflict of interests. I.e. their execs are all about wireless, and simply don't care about landline business. Splitting it in two could actually help, since then they'll care about improving. > It's not like anybody else is cho…
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They will receive about $5.27[1] per share of YHOO stock they hold (or perhaps an equivalent amount of verizon stock if they do the deal that way) in exchange for the portion of the business being sold. Perhaps a bit less than this if there are transaction fees or taxes that must be paid. They will then continue to hold their Yahoo shares which will represent their holdings in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan as well as Yahoo…
Wait?! is that really how this works? What if people want to keep owning the online part of the business? Are they hooped? Seems like you could really royally screw shareholders like that (i.e. sell all the good parts and leave shareholders holding the bad parts). Their share price is about 39 USD right now, that means they sold off a huge chunk of the biz for 13% (5.27/39.38 = 0.1338) of the stock's current valuatio…
If you do a sum-of-the-parts valuation of Yahoo, you can end up seeing that the core business has a negative value. So holders of YHOO will trade something worth -1$bn for $5bn in cash, that's a pretty good deal.
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No company that sells Internet access should be allowed to also be in the content business.
What's the underlying principle there? That infrastructure providers shouldn't be in potential competition with companies that use their infrastructure as part of their own business model? By that logic, should Apple, Google, and Microsoft be required to get out of the hardware business? How would application of that principle affect things like app stores or Facebook's platform, or even Valve's Steam for that matter…
Seemed to result in some issues as I recall.
Mixing common-carrier status with provider-of-goods is quite inherently problematic.
I've got some pretty strong issues with Google's status as both search provider and other services, or with their dominant position in infrastructure, services, operating systems, applications marketplace, and on a growing basis, bandwidth provision.
Some of that is based on actual practices of the company. More is on the basis that when this has been tried before it's come to tears.
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> Verizon's wireline unit is making low single digit operating profit margins with its existing footprint. Because they never cared about improving its efficiency. They actually noted, that when they upgrade to fiber, their expenses drop. A huge drain on their landline profits is their copper network which is falling apart. Their fiber is profitable. Investors want them to focus on wireless. As I said, if it would ha…
When Verizon replaces copper with fiber, the investment gets booked as a capital asset, which doesn't count against profits. But any operational savings achieved by that will goose short term profits. So if Verizon is focused only on goosing short term profits, as you claim, they'd replace all the copper with fiber! More generally, Verizon is legally required to keep serving the places it already served with copper.…
Their execs indeed have no clue how to mange landline business or they simply don't care about it. Their whole background is wireless and they are trying to get rid of landline (selling it off).
Seidenberg was landline man through and through. He cared about improving it and moving it forward. McAdam has no clue about it and doesn't care.
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No company that sells Internet access should be allowed to also be in the content business.
Should Google be allowed to sell fiber? I think the suggestion that carriers shouldn't do this is wrong and naive and here is why: User count should not ever be exponential of customer counts. It inescapably results in fundamentally unethical business practices where users are exploited. That is google's business model and they stand uncontested today. Carriers that end up doing any amount of content monetization wil…
I'm not seeing the connection between content monetisation and Google's ads business either.
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It will be interesting to see what the deal will mean for the privacy policy of Yahoo search, and whether that will be acceptable for Mozilla.
I'll do more research on my own, but for the benefit of others reading, would you elaborate on this? Yahoo works with Duck Duck Go, so their privacy policy was good enough for them, it would seem.
DDG is itself a privacy proxy for search. Yahoo's privacy policy doesn't much matter if DDG are proxying (and anonymising) search requests. The substance of search results would matter.
(Incidentally, since the switch, and I believe DDG were using Bing principally earlier, quality seems down somewhat.)