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Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

ir.yandex

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Re: Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

#81

Post by smugglerFlynn »

sam_goody wrote: post #67

The only time I ever saw a car without a driver was on a visit to Israel. On the highway to Tel Aviv (intercity - not a side road), there was a car with Yandex Auto Drive (in Hebrew) plastered all over it, driving in the lane next to ours. We had plenty of time to look - there was no driver at all, or they were sitting so low they would not have been able to see the road. Made me realize that some companies fly under…

They also own largest Taxi service in Russia (Yandex Taxi), largest food and home goods delivery service (Yandex Lavka), and largest car sharing service (Yandex Drive). Yandex Taxi has been testing self-driving cars in Moscow for years.

Interesting to note is that all of these lines of business were created as in-house startups, not through acquisitions. In the local business community they are famous for doing the internal sandboxing and investing just right.

However, Yandex has mixed results outside of the Russian market, as far as I'm aware. E.g. former two services are driven locally by extremely low wage workforce from ex-Soviet countries, I'd guess their business model has this ingrained, and just does not work the same in markets with more expensive labor.

Re: Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

#83

Post by kredd »

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #13

>(Russian Google) Are there people here who don't know Yandex? Genuinely curious, if you didn't know what it is I'd like to hear from you.

It’s the same as saying Naver (SK Google), or Weibo (Chinese Twitter), and so on. They’re primarily used by their local residents, and have little traction outside, despite having millions of active users. Giving a clarification makes it a bit more clear.

Re: Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

#84

Post by busterarm »

ziddoap wrote: post #79
fragmede wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This community's favorite thing is to complain about something that's ill defined. A post about BGP without saying it's the border gateway protocol will have its comments go off on a stupid tangent of if an HN reader should be expected to know what BGP is. (seriously people, go Google the term and don't demand everyone spoon-feed your intellectual midgetry!) Thus, an explanation that Yandex is Russian Google is to tr…

Nevermind. I was wrong. Asking someone to write out an acronym is too much.

HN as a community still expects itself to have a niche audience and isn't ready to deal with how large it actually is yet. Knowing acronyms like that in this context is thought to be table stakes for participation from most people.

What you're asking from them is still a bit much right now.

Re: Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

#85

Post by ziddoap »

busterarm wrote: post #84
ziddoap wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nevermind. I was wrong. Asking someone to write out an acronym is too much.

HN as a community still expects itself to have a niche audience and isn't ready to deal with how large it actually is yet. Knowing acronyms like that in this context is thought to be table stakes for participation from most people. What you're asking from them is still a bit much right now.

Nevermind. I was wrong :)

Re: Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

#86

Post by hobs »

HideousKojima wrote: post #78
roenxi wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think there is little hope of normalizing relations with Russia After 9/11, the US maintained productive relations with the Saudis. They're actively supporting Israel through the Gaza business. They have a long history of propping up dictators and thrashing countries for hard-to-articulate reasons (I still don't get exactly what the point of Afghanistan or Iraq was, even accepting the blunt "oil" that is sometime…

>(I still don't get exactly what the point of Afghanistan or Iraq was, even accepting the blunt "oil" that is sometimes given out). Are you serious? At least on the Afghanistan one? The war in Afghanistan began because the Taliban refused to extradite Osama Bin Laden (and several other terrorist, but Osama was the biggest one), it's pretty straightforward.

No, the taliban did not refuse to do that - Bush refused to take him

* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.te...

* https://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=80482&page=1

Re: Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

#87

Post by busterarm »

ziddoap wrote: post #85
busterarm wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN as a community still expects itself to have a niche audience and isn't ready to deal with how large it actually is yet. Knowing acronyms like that in this context is thought to be table stakes for participation from most people. What you're asking from them is still a bit much right now.

Nevermind. I was wrong :)

From lazy software types who pride themselves on terse communication?

We literally hold contests for having the most wacky code in the least characters and you want someone to go from typing "BGP" to "Border Gateway Protocol"?

Nobody goes around ELI5ing every term in existence to speak to the least educated audience. It's painful in communication and annoying. There's a base level of understanding expected from the audience you're writing for. I agree that BGP might be on the fringes of that but still in the target. Would you expect someone to do that for you with HTTP? TCP?

It's cool to be nice but at some point the ask is ridiculous.

Re: Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

#88

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

roenxi wrote: post #74
throwaway_20357 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is little hope of normalizing relations with Russia, so unfortunately these "Western assets" need to be written off anyway. A large part of them ($98bn) came from Cyprus which might just be round-tripping Russian money.

> I think there is little hope of normalizing relations with Russia After 9/11, the US maintained productive relations with the Saudis. They're actively supporting Israel through the Gaza business. They have a long history of propping up dictators and thrashing countries for hard-to-articulate reasons (I still don't get exactly what the point of Afghanistan or Iraq was, even accepting the blunt "oil" that is sometime…

This is a genuinely interesting take despite me disagreeing with the analysis.

At the end of the day, people like when the day follows is the same as the previous one. This allows people to plan ahead, live life and so on. It allows business to run uninterrupted. Russia was upending existing post-ww2 order. It was initially doing it slowly. Slowly enough that no one in the west cared to do anything. Obama famously sought a 'reset' with Russia at the time.

Even in Ukraine, it was not until after Crimea that there was even an appetite and realization that it won't magically stop.

This is probably one of the few spots where we are kinda close, but US already made BRICS a reality with current sanctions regime making it even more relevant. The decisions being made now are a big gamble and I would like to hope that those are made consciously with some forethought. That said, remembering 9/11 Afghanistan, it is merely a hope.

That, sadly, we won't know until it all plays out. Who knows what life will look life 50 years from now?

Re: Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

#89

Post by Hamuko »

alephnerd wrote: post #62
severino wrote: post #60

I wonder how will Yandex Mail work after this (or maybe currently?) in regards to data protection. I know there exists mail.yandex.com and mail.yandex.ru... is the former, or will it be, based in the Netherlands, meaning that access from western countries with a court order would be granted?

Yandex Mail is part of the Russian business that is getting divested based on the press release. Yandex is basically splitting it's Russian assets (Search, Mail) from it's EU assets (a couple moonshots and a DC). It looks more like a Russian company divesting from the EU than the other way around tbh. "The Purchaser consortium, led by members of the senior management team of our Russian businesses" "YNV will retain a…

I wonder how the Finnish data center is doing. At the start of the invasion, their electricity provider ended their contract and they were running the data centre on diesel alone.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/05/yandex_datacenter_in_...

Re: Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

#90

Post by bmacho »

lofaszvanitt wrote: post #70

Just don't fuck up the image search. That's the best tool out there, but in the last few months, it got worse :(.

Google image search went from good to dead in the past ~2 years, first they've hidden the features like search on image, or jump to image, then they completely removed them.
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