(2008)
Somehow people miss that. Smh
Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)
11–20 of 228 posts
Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)
#12That summer my girlfriend at the time and I were laughing at the different combinations of possible combined companies. Yahoogle was one. This one would have been Microhoo
Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)
#13at the time Yahoo owned something like 30% of Alibaba, which, today, would be worth maybe $200B.
Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)
#14Honestly it is pretty crazy how old Yahoo is and they are still hanging on.
But they aren’t hanging on, Yahoo! is owned by Verizon.
Why Verizon would buy a site like Yahoo is still a mystery to me, but they own a lot of other junk as well.
Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)
#15I worked at Yahoo! when this was going on, I’m amazed the share holders didn’t sue Jerry Yang and the board for avoiding this sale. Yahoo had very little of technological value and was actively trying to destroy its own search business amongst other properties at the time. They really were in a prime position and bungled it extremely badly, I think they had maybe 20% of the search market at the time.
Carol Bartz later came and told everyone it was pointless to be in the search business because Google were too big and impossible to compete with on investment. She made it very clear the equation for success was money spent === great search engine results, ignoring how Google came into being in the first place. Pure Harvard Business School spreadsheet stuff.
It still feels like a wasted opportunity to me, it seems so weak to just throw your hands up in the air and say it’s too hard to make your extremely successful search engine better.
Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)
#16Back in 2000, Telefonica bought Lycos for 12,5B$... A few years later were sold again for a few millions
The owners of the Danish Yahoo clone Jubii got rich by selling to Lycos, who sold it back to a Danish media company. It’s now owned by a Norweigen company. With each sale the site loses value.
Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)
#17Honestly it is pretty crazy how old Yahoo is and they are still hanging on.
Yeah I still have yahoo.stanford.edu in an old bookmarks file.
Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)
#18"Apollo to Buy Yahoo, AOL From Verizon for $5 Billion" from today's edition of WJS.
Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)
#19I worked at Yahoo! when this was going on, I’m amazed the share holders didn’t sue Jerry Yang and the board for avoiding this sale. Yahoo had very little of technological value and was actively trying to destroy its own search business amongst other properties at the time. They really were in a prime position and bungled it extremely badly, I think they had maybe 20% of the search market at the time. Carol Bartz late…
The answer to the puzzle is that the rule about fiduciary duty really is only relevant to who the beneficiaries are of financial transactions; it pretty much does not have anything to say about regular business decisions. No doubt some shareholders contacted their lawyers and were gently dissuaded by a legal reality check.
Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)
#20at the time Yahoo owned something like 30% of Alibaba, which, today, would be worth maybe $200B.
As far as I know its Alibaba stock got split off into its own company (Altaba)