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Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

wsj.com

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Re: Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

#111

Post by worklogin »

67726e wrote: post #50
earlyriser wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: why do you say luckily?

No the commenter you're asking, but I've never had a constructive conversation with "those types" - the kind who go out of their way to talk about getting laid off from a tech company. Of all the ones I've spoken with, it followed the pattern of "BigCo outsourced jobs to those darn Foreigners, and I got laid off, and it will happen to you too!". In particular I worked with a former DBA for IBM at a grocery store in h…

>if low wage, and probably lower skilled workers can take your job, you probably suck

Or the company is short-sighted, undervalues the skill and experience of onshore jobs and overvalues the $$ they're saving on paper. I bet a buffalo nickel you've never personally seen how offshoring affects a team/department.

Re: Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

#112

Post by wpietri »

epmatsw wrote: post #84
aylons wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but why do you believe WhatsApp is overvalued? They have an incredible mindshare, it is the only app (besides Facebook), that I see moms and grandmas using on a daily basis. Heck, my mom talk to me mostly through it. She evens send me emoticons, pictures and voice notes!

I've never seen a person in the US actually use WhatsApp to talk to another person in the US. I used to occasionally see someone use it to talk to friends who were traveling abroad, but that's mostly been replaced by iMessage or Hangouts at this point.

Whatsapp is hugely popular in many places, just not here:

http://www.statista.com/statistics/291540/mobile-internet-us...

Re: Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

#113

Post by sangnoir »

epmatsw wrote: post #84
aylons wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but why do you believe WhatsApp is overvalued? They have an incredible mindshare, it is the only app (besides Facebook), that I see moms and grandmas using on a daily basis. Heck, my mom talk to me mostly through it. She evens send me emoticons, pictures and voice notes!

I've never seen a person in the US actually use WhatsApp to talk to another person in the US. I used to occasionally see someone use it to talk to friends who were traveling abroad, but that's mostly been replaced by iMessage or Hangouts at this point.

Outside of the US, not everyone has a phone capable of running iMessage or Hangouts. WhatsApp happily runs on feature-phones, because of network effects, many people who can run iMessage/Hangouts and WhatsApp

Re: Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

#114

Post by chiph »

While I don't doubt that Verizon will be able to convert some of those AOL subscribers to faster broadband service, I suspect a lot of them either can't upgrade, or won't upgrade. The dial-up subscribers are mostly a cash cow ($180/yr each, about 12 years to recoup the investment) and everyone is talking about them, but I wonder if there are other AOL properties that Verizon also values that can help justify the premium they paid.

Re: Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

#115

Post by acomjean »

I used to use AOL. Before broadband to the home, AOL had lots of modems and local access numbers. I traveled a fair bit and that was really useful, for my monthly alotment of 3 hours.... This was a while ago (AOL was giving away floppy disk before CDs.)

It was a walled garden, and since most people were on AOL, besides email there wasn't much outside communicating. Frankly at the time there wasn't nearly as much on the web. When AOL unleashed their users on the web it was a big deal.

AOL really got killed by broadband to the home, which they couldn't offer.

I hope that this doesn't turn into a onerous add push at Fios and DSL users. Verizon does some strange things like redirecting missed DNS hits to an ad page.

Re: Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

#116

Post by sangnoir »

chii wrote: post #82
aylons wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but why do you believe WhatsApp is overvalued? They have an incredible mindshare, it is the only app (besides Facebook), that I see moms and grandmas using on a daily basis. Heck, my mom talk to me mostly through it. She evens send me emoticons, pictures and voice notes!

has your mom or other people you know ever paid for whatsapp? I know i've never seen anyone pay, just anecdotally.

I've paid for myself and my mother-in-law (you can pay for a contact's subscription)

Re: Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

#117

Post by jmngomes »

pyvpx wrote: post #100
tw04 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the least bit bizarre, but it is EXACTLY what people are (or should be) afraid of. The people who own the pipes should NOT own the content, or they will be incentivized to leverage their monopoly on our computer screens to provide unfair advantages to their content. The FCC should have drawn a line in the sand and been done with it before the Comcast deal was allowed to go through (but of course the head of…

if so, then why should the pipes be privatized at all? in that case, the pipes should be built out and maintained at a governmental-level and leased back at a uniform/standardized price to all providers.

It makes sense to me that the government should own "the pipes", and then lease them to competing firms, as these are a vital communication infrastructure.

Re: Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

#119

Post by wpietri »

r00fus wrote: post #87
georgeott wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They owned a closed "Walled Garden" version of the internet. Once the open internet took off, AOL was doomed.

They had years to invest in the open internet, buy out a successful internet venture, or adopt internet features into their offering. They failed to do all of the above, and are now in the dustbin of history (and to me, are solely remembered for their acquisition of nullsoft who then created Gnutella - predecessor of P2P file sharing services).

I think they are a great Innovator's Dilemma example. Quarter to quarter and manager by manager they could always do better denying the coming reality.

I'd bet there were plenty of people within AOL who knew they were fucked in the long term, and I'm sure some of those actually tried to change things. But it's extremely hard to do anything that threatens existing revenue streams. Eventually the innovative people leave and you're left with the people who can't see the decline or are ok with trying to squeeze the last few drops of cash from the remains.

And really, in some ways they're only around now because they did manage to change a little. They've collected some decent content brands, which was basically an investment in the open internet.

Re: Verizon to Buy AOL for $4.4B

#120

Post by jamesjyu »

darklajid wrote: post #106
aylons wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but why do you believe WhatsApp is overvalued? They have an incredible mindshare, it is the only app (besides Facebook), that I see moms and grandmas using on a daily basis. Heck, my mom talk to me mostly through it. She evens send me emoticons, pictures and voice notes!

It's .. an IM app (and arguably it wasn't a good one/a broken one for quite a while). Like AOL offered? ICQ? MSN? Okay, all dead. Xmpp? Skype? Lync? Hangout? Telegram? TextSecure? etc. etc. I'm sure I forgot lots of somewhat sensible/popular options. Basically it's not doing a lot, there are lots of alternatives, I see no way to keep users - or make them pay anything. I mean, I guess they pay with their privacy and/o…

"To see the value, you .. need to find value in something?"

I disagree. I think everyone is capable of empathizing with a market and understanding why something would bring value, even if it doesn't bring value to you specifically.

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