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

Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 186 posts

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#171

Post by anigbrowl »

anton_tarasenko wrote: post #6

Yahoo controls 8% of search traffic and costs $4bn. Google controls 64% of search traffic and costs $558bn. That's a 17-fold difference in the price for 1% of the traffic. Even more if you take US search traffic only (to exclude Yahoo Japan). Verizon can get rid of the costly parts of Yahoo (mostly its media business) and have its own small Google to make cash. That was $1.8bn per year in 2015, while Yahoo's overall…

I question the long-term value of being the 3rd or 4th biggest fish in the pond. I mean it's not chopped liver but the gap is always gonna be widening due to network effects.

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#172

Post by anigbrowl »

bduerst wrote: post #45
vinhboy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know man. but if you loan me $4bn I will buy Yahoo and run it myself. I too don't understand how they can't make Yahoo a success. They have a couple of great products that people use like Fantasy sports and Finance. And mail would be just fine if they'd remove all the crap so it would run faster. Lots of non techy still uses yahoo mail, and that won't change as long as the service exists.

I dunno - I feel like it's committing Dunning-Krugers to say, "Just run Yahoo! better, sheesh." because there's a ton we can't see on the surface of the company, looking in, that the business currently has to cope with. If anything, these two hacks being announced years later, along with their voluntary NSA backdoor, demonstrates that Yahoo! has skeletons in their closet.

It is, but at this point what have shareholders got to lose? By the way, I'm available. I went on record in my book 21 years ago that Yahoo was my favorite web directory (the term 'search engine' hadn't been coined at that point) so I've been following Yahoo since not long after it was a gleam in Jerry Yang's eye. At this point I figure that makes me as qualified as anyone else to run it.

Inquiries to my username...@gmail. Go on Yahoo board, ask me why I switched and you might learn something useful.

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#174

Post by closeparen »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #118
bmh100 wrote: post #57

One benefit of these incidents at Yahoo! is that they represent salient, clear examples of the cost of poor information security. CIOs and security directors will be able to point to this deal as evidence that poor security can have material impact on the business and destroy massive shareholder value, even years after the fact. A 6.5% intra-day dip sends a clear message. Even a CFO can now see that information secur…

This is a really important point. Yahoo!'s troubles help make a quantitative point to people who care only about money. Having been in the role of advocating investing in security the typical questions are; * "Will the product run faster?", * "Will the customers get better service?", * "Will someone choose us over a competitor because of this?" Generally 'no', 'no', and 'hard to quantify' so the answer to the funding…

A strong security posture is not a perfect security posture. It seems likely that someone will invest in security, get hacked anyway in a really sophisticated way, and feel that they wasted all that money.

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#175

Post by 6nf »

user5994461 wrote: post #127
ChuckMcM wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really important point. Yahoo!'s troubles help make a quantitative point to people who care only about money. Having been in the role of advocating investing in security the typical questions are; * "Will the product run faster?", * "Will the customers get better service?", * "Will someone choose us over a competitor because of this?" Generally 'no', 'no', and 'hard to quantify' so the answer to the funding…

Don't quantify security. Just do it. If people ask, just doing my day job' edit: care to explain the downvotes?

Sometimes it's better to ask forgiveness afterwards than to ask for permission beforehand.

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#176

Post by davidgerard »

pjc50 wrote: post #13
davidgerard wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Import to Wordpress. They've been chronically unable to monetise Tumblr. Assume they could Geocities you at any moment.

You can't forcibly migrate other people to wordpress, and its their blogs which have the value. Tumblr is an important community even if it does have a few weirdnesses and inconsistent policy enforcement.

I'm active on Tumblr. The trouble is it's owned by Yahoo, doesn't make a lot of money (if it's even in the black) and has resisted all attempts to monetise it. (Advertisers seem to want something like a blogging Pinterest, not extended political ranting.)

At this point there's the ArchiveTeam and that's about it, so we actually have something to point at when we're talking about what a great website that sure was back then.

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#177

Post by jlebrech »

bogomipz wrote: post #155
bduerst wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IP. Yahoo!'s patents are valued between $4B and $8B, depending on who you ask.

I mentioned this in another comment but how does Yahoo even know that its intellectual property wasn't taken? Is it unreasonable to suspect that a company that has had multiples breaches of security of this extent might also not have had its IP taken out from underneath them as well?

when you patent something it's always in the public domain, that's the point of patents, except that the ownership isn't public domain just the knowledge of a particular tech. but yes, nothing guarantees that tech they had in the pipeline isn't being stolen right now.

but if the details of a patent have been stolen the patents still have value, except for when the exact implementation of a patent can be circumvented due to access to plans.

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#178

Post by jlebrech »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #70
iaw wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure thing! Imagine if I had two friends, Google and Yahoo. Both are asking me if they can borrow a dollar. Over the last few years when Google borrows a dollar it gives back an extra 3.5 cents the next year as a thank you. On the opposite side, when Yahoo has borrowed a dollar they've lost 13 cents within the next year. Left to their own devices, Yahoo will implode and be out of money in under 7 years, likely much s…

Halve staff?

or skeleton crew and only make $100m profit for 10years before they finally die off.

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#179

Post by mholmes680 »

hughw wrote: post #133
mholmes680 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Anecdotally, my mother called me last night asking what she needed to do about Yahoo's new breach. I said, no no, dont worry we already changed your password. She said nope, NEW news! My mother (and her news) heard this loud and clear. Thats a problem, and VZ has every right to renegotiate -- this has passed the point of "we're yahoo so we're big and an unlucky target". This is, in my mother's words, "what th…

If you changed her password in September, you shouldn't have to change now, right? Since the "new" breach is from 2013.

quite honestly, I'm about to start changing her password monthly for Yahoo... because I can't think of any reason to trust them.

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#180

Post by mholmes680 »

__derek__ wrote: post #161
hughw wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you changed her password in September, you shouldn't have to change now, right? Since the "new" breach is from 2013.

That's the thing: people who don't understand this news may now think that this is an ongoing, regular thing with Yahoo. If they react by switching, Yahoo will only be left with people's spam-collecting accounts.

On top of that, I thought I understood this news, then got a prompt from yahoo logon that I may have been compromised. So, I mean, I still don't understand the implications and I consider myself considerably more tuned in than my mother.
Post reply on HN