Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon • Hacker News Board

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#211

Post by twblalock » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 7:39 AM UTC

droopybuns wrote: post #174

manigandham wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> User count should not ever be exponential of customer counts. This makes no sense. This is the backbone of the entire internet. Ethics and the value that users get from a company/service are all subjective, there's no hard rule that you can lay down like this.

It makes plenty of sense. I am annoyed that you cast me as illogical simply because you disagree. Something has changed in modern discourse and your reaction has become distressingly common. Here is an article from 2012, enumerating the same point: http://www.forbes.com/sites/marketshare/2012/03/05/if-youre-... Here is another from 2010: http://lifehacker.com/5697167/if-youre-not-paying-for-it-you... If this is a new…

The fact that an argument has been mentioned before has nothing at all to do with whether or not it is a good argument.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#212

Post by twblalock » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 7:43 AM UTC

macspoofing wrote: post #127

Macha wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also changed the decision process from "Pick 1 of Intel and AMD, plus pick 1 of nVidia and ATI" to "Pick Intel/nVidia or AMD/AMD" for companies like Dell/HP etc. so AMD and ATI's weaknesses compounded each other from then on.

You think Dell or HP would ever have sidelined Intel? AMD was going to get shafted, no matter what.

Dell and HP would have sidelined Intel in a heartbeat if they could have made more money by switching to AMD.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#213

Post by easytiger » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 8:03 AM UTC

sandstrom wrote: post #27

cs702 wrote: post #4

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.

Adjusted for inflation that's about $8.25 billion

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#214

Post by zouhair » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 8:35 AM UTC

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #64

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…

Most people have no other options in life.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#215

Post by beachy » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 8:37 AM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #207

OneNoteIsFree wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just using cool functional languages has little to do with this work culture. Lets not propagate this notion please.

That's not what parent said. You read what you want to read, but parent only said they're doing "cool work" and that cool work happens to be in Scala/Haskell. Sigh.

I didn't agree with the sentiment either but I think you're stretching here.

If I say "they're doing cool work with clay and steel" that means the coolness is intrinsically linked to those things. That's how I'd read it anyway.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#216

Post by bogomipz » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 8:56 AM UTC

orionblastar wrote: post #84

Basically everything Yahoo tried to do basically failed to earn income, and Google came along and did those things better. Verizon can get more users from Yahoo and merge them with their AOL users. No doubt this bigger user base can be sold advertising to earn more money. Firefox stopped supporting Google searches and switched me to Yahoo, will this Yahoo change no longer support Mozilla and be taken off the list?

Who are the AOL users? Are these folks in rural areas out of the reach of broadband? I've heard that there are still dial up users. This however would be odd with Verizon business plans as they have been divesting themselves of copper plant.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#217

Post by bogomipz » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 9:03 AM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #207

OneNoteIsFree wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just using cool functional languages has little to do with this work culture. Lets not propagate this notion please.

That's not what parent said. You read what you want to read, but parent only said they're doing "cool work" and that cool work happens to be in Scala/Haskell. Sigh.

He said they were doing "cool work" in response to a post about a notoriously bad work culture. So that response was in fact on point.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#218

Post by scrollaway » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 9:21 AM UTC

beachy wrote: post #215

scrollaway wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what parent said. You read what you want to read, but parent only said they're doing "cool work" and that cool work happens to be in Scala/Haskell. Sigh.

I didn't agree with the sentiment either but I think you're stretching here. If I say "they're doing cool work with clay and steel" that means the coolness is intrinsically linked to those things. That's how I'd read it anyway.

You can do boring work with clay and steel, and you can do cool work with clay and steel. Saying you're doing cool work with clay and steel doesn't imply that "it's cool because it's clay and steel".

There's two ways to read it definitely, but I have a problem when someone decides to read it one way, and complains about that particular interpretation of what they're reading...

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#219

Post by syshum » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 9:39 AM UTC

Macha wrote: post #98

devonkim wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It also changed the decision process from "Pick 1 of Intel and AMD, plus pick 1 of nVidia and ATI" to "Pick Intel/nVidia or AMD/AMD" for companies like Dell/HP etc. so AMD and ATI's weaknesses compounded each other from then on.

AMD had about as much of a Chance at breaking in the to Intel Dominated OEM market as Linux had to become the default operating systems on all Consumers PC's

MS and Intel both put EXTREME pressure and incentives on OEM (and both were accused of Anti-Trust Violations) to keep their defacto monopolies

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#220

Post by syshum » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 9:44 AM UTC

blahi wrote: post #10

hkmurakami wrote: post #7

>Shortly afterwards, Verizon announced it would start combining data about its mobile network subscribers - which is tied to their handsets - with the tracking information already gathered by AOL's sites. I was talking to a friend who is in the Telecom industry in Japan, and apparently this sort of arrangement is not legal there. EU is generally wary of such arrangements as well. So this is a merger whose product syn…

The problem with yahoo was never quality of the traffic. They have the most coveted audiences cornered. Their problem is the lack of good ad units. They have banners... That's unacceptable in 2016.

>> That's unacceptable in 2016.

The fact that simple Banner ads are no longer acceptable is the reason I use uBlock Orgin....