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Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

finance.yahoo.com

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Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#71

Post by aetimmes »

ajays wrote: post #61
citricsquid wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A portion of the recent disdain / negativity seems to come from the recent cull of work from home employees and statements regarding the value of working from an office to Yahoo, there was quite a bit of anger directed at Mayer for that.

You must be new around here (said in jest). HN has had an anti=Yahoo bias for a long time; the reasoning behind the bias keep changing ("layoffs", "delicious", "WFH", etc.), but it always seems to be there.

If Google continues its current growth trajectory and Yahoo! sticks around, I wonder how long it will be before people start rooting for Yahoo! as the "underdog".

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#72

Post by danso »

shanelja wrote: post #45

There seems to be a massive anti-Yahoo struggle going on in HN at the moment but I feel we need to look at this impartially. For better or for worse, the fate of the company is tied directly to the actions of Marissa Mayer now, this is no longer 1999 and Yahoo is no longer the same company. They have this image (which they rightly deserve) of being a big, bumbling ancient Behemoth of a company which provides no real…

These are good points, but I don't think it's possible to not see Yahoo as a behemoth. It's a big company, with lots of executives and fiefdoms. Just because there's a new CEO doesn't mean the kind of change that needs to happen will happen (and conversely, it's wrong to lay all the blame at Meyer's feet if things don't turn out well).

Case in point, look at how badly JCPenney fared after Apple retail exec, Ron Johnson, became CEO for just 17 months: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/business/ron-johnson-out-a...

The fact that Yahoo can lay down $1.1 billion in cash is a show of how big the company is. That is both an asset and a liability, when it comes to the existing corporate power struggle.

edit: I'll give an example of which I'm familiar with, as a user: Flickr. I joined Flickr after Yahoo acquired it and have been a happy, paying user for nearly 4 years. However, I'd be at a loss to count all the new drastic feature additions that have come in all that time:

1. A new mobile app (which I don't use)

2. a nicer horizontal-masonry-like gallery layout...which, flabbergastingly, only applies to some collections of photos and not others

3. HTML5 uploader

And yet still, I count myself as a happy Flickr user, which means that prior to Yahoo's acquisition, Flickr was a great service to begin with. From what I can tell, as a data-minded person, Yahoo has done very little with all the interesting data that comes in these voluntarily organized and submitted photos. I don't get much help with auto-tagging or auto-grouping of collections. The Flickr logged-in homepage is nothing but a short list of the last few people who "favorited" a photo...there's been almost nothing done in four years to get me to engage more with the Flickr network.

And Flickr's domain covers items of a very discrete nature...easier to do interesting analysis and data-operations on than I feel one could do with Tumblr.

So while Flickr's relative stagnation is not Meyer's fault...the fact that we can say, "Well, it's not her fault that Flickr is meh five years in a row" goes to show you how massive a company Yahoo is and how hard it is for everything to move/change even when a new CEO comes in.

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#73

Post by adventured »

btipling wrote: post #14

Maybe this could have been Posterous had they won that battle with Tumblr. Posterous had the superior product early on, but for some reason it never caught on. I wonder how that works, who wins for what reasons. It does not seem to be for product or technology reasons as I think Posterous had Tumblr beat. It's almost luck and magic who picks up the right kind of early users that lead to success. Admittedly it did see…

The critical question to be asked in response to your premise is: the superior product for what?

Tumblr had a vastly superior product for the market it has been focused on.

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#74

Post by d23 »

dabeeeenster wrote: post #17
neya wrote: post #11

The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance the user experience. A closer look: "to create advertising opportunities...that enhance the user experience." Yahoo, Seriously?

You can argue (half reasonably I think) that a more targeted advert is better for the user...

I certainly enjoy them a lot more. I saw an ad for an inexpensive VPS service on Facebook a few days ago that I wouldn't have heard about otherwise. It's a lot better than random Vistaprint ads.

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#75

Post by agotterer »

I hope this isn't a silly question... Reports say that tumblr is running low on cash and could only afford to operate for the next few months. This deal is going to take a few months (article says next quarter) to close. Is it not possible that they would run out of money before the deal officially closes?

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#76

Post by gyardley »

venomsnake wrote: post #18
jordn wrote: post #5

I do like how this article from yahoo finance has this heading and subheading: Yahoo! to Acquire Tumblr Promises not to screw it up Fair enough. That probably is most people's biggest concern and expectation of what Yahoo will do.

Does yahoo have a good track record of acquiring services and not frakking them up? Not a troll question, I stopped using yahoo in 1999 but for the occasional openid.

Not really, but during the '00s Yahoo had a management culture where decisions were made by (painful, painful) consensus. Generally this led to stagnation in the acquired services, and when you're stagnant, you get lapped.

Meyer seems determined to change this, though. Impossible to tell how much headway she's made from the outside, but she's certainly saying the right things here. We shall all see in due time.

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#77

Post by durin42 »

freehunter wrote: post #27
Swizec wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Porn. Tumblr has porn. As always, when two technologies are battling, the one porn picks will win.

Except HD-DVD. In that battle, it was the one who had a video game console backing the standard versus the one with porn but a console maker only paying lip service to the technology.

The way I remember it, Sony refused to let the porn industry print bluray discs, and the HD-DVD backers just didn't care, but bluray started winning as soon as Sony relented.

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#78

Post by paganel »

benjamincburns wrote: post #63
Swizec wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Porn. Tumblr has porn. As always, when two technologies are battling, the one porn picks will win.

That's a strange and interesting theory. I can think of a few anecdotal places where this is the case, but I wonder if anyone has done a study of porn as a predictor of platform success/failure... Edit : Just thinking about the business of porn, this is probably a decent heuristic for simplicity and cost effectiveness. Porn is usually very low budget (compared to other mass market media), with a very high volume of c…

> but I wonder if anyone has done a study of porn as a predictor of platform success/failure...

For better or worse, FB could be a good example of "platform success" that partially relies on that. It's not porn per se, just beach/bikini photos of one's lady-friends, or his work-mates, or the wife's friends.

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#79

Post by lifeformed »

agotterer wrote: post #75

I hope this isn't a silly question... Reports say that tumblr is running low on cash and could only afford to operate for the next few months. This deal is going to take a few months (article says next quarter) to close. Is it not possible that they would run out of money before the deal officially closes?

I'm sure Yahoo could help them out with that.

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#80

Post by wmf »

freehunter wrote: post #27
Swizec wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Porn. Tumblr has porn. As always, when two technologies are battling, the one porn picks will win.

Except HD-DVD. In that battle, it was the one who had a video game console backing the standard versus the one with porn but a console maker only paying lip service to the technology.

Hadn't porn already moved on to the Internet by the time Blu-ray/HD-DVD were released?
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