Respect, old boy Cringely actually got this one right: http://www.cringely.com/2015/11/30/soylent-green-now-made-wi...
Thanks for posting this. Great analysis about IBM and Google Cloud in this article as well.
Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses
111–120 of 300 posts
Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses
#112Watching Mayer on CNBC right now. Really sad, she has that 1000 yard stare look in her eyes.
I don't like this expression, but weren't the "optics" of that just terrible? She looked and sounded really really tired. The Chairman is not telegenic AT ALL. And they were sitting about as far apart from each other as possible while being at the same desk.
Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses
#113Honest question: what has been Yahoo's core business for the last 15 years?
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Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses
#114The one and only question I need to ask: will flickr stay alive? The rest had been obsolete for a while anyway.
Guessing we are either going to see major changes in pricing structure, or a shutdown of Flickr. Pretty bummed.
If you look at the landscape of "flickr-like" companies, it looks as if you can make a business out of it (Smugmug, 500px) but it's probably not a huge opportunity business given how many such efforts have been shuttered or allowed to largely languish over the past 15 years or so.
The reality is that most people are just fine with uploading their camera phone pics to Facebook and be done with it. The number who are willing to spend $25-50 per year for a premium site is probably a pretty small percentage--and would be even smaller if you up that to $100+.
Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses
#115Marissa Mayer and Maynard Webb were on CNBC this morning talking about the spin:
Part 1: https://amp.twimg.com/v/76b8a5e2-9a6c-40c3-9c1b-e2c8bcf91159 Part 2: https://amp.twimg.com/v/ce42d263-7b9c-4716-8d06-b320ed243606
Mayer seems completely bored by the whole thing and keeps passing stuff off to Webb as "board level consideration". Doesn't make me excited for Yahoo whatsoever.
Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses
#116Watching Mayer on CNBC right now. Really sad, she has that 1000 yard stare look in her eyes.
I don't like this expression, but weren't the "optics" of that just terrible? She looked and sounded really really tired. The Chairman is not telegenic AT ALL. And they were sitting about as far apart from each other as possible while being at the same desk.
Yeah, the body language, positioning, phrasing....her constantly referring to what the board was going to do..it was just a bad look.
Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses
#117To come in as an outsider and try to save an ailing web giant nearly everyone had already written off is no easy feat. Wall St. is valuing things like Tumblr at zero and so now she has to do a 180 and unwind this company, maximally and efficiently, while pregnant with twins. Naturally we're inclined to armchair QB, but I think the hand she took over when she sat down at the table was bad. While she never went "all in…
I hope she doesn't think she's going to be working from home.
Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses
#118I never understood farming out their search engine to Bing in the first place. Google literally prints money with their adwords search business. Seems instead of attempting to innovate they just threw in the towel and gave up? I just find it hard to believe that Google is the only way you can run a successful search engine.
Google's search engine runs at a loss to support their advertising business, and haven't had any serious competition in that sector since they bought Doubleclick (which looks a bit antitrusty in my eyes but what do I know). Yahoo doesn't have much of an ad business so there's not a lot of value in running their own search. They're good at their core business of being a portal, with some parts implemented themselves a…
By your definition ANY media company runs at a loss. "NBC runs at a loss to support their advertising business", "CNN runs at a loss to support their advertising business", "New York Times runs at a loss to support their advertising business and subscription businesses" etc
Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses
#119I wonder what will happen to their fantasy football product. It's wayyyy better than their competitors
It is odd that Yahoo's stake of the fantasy sports market constantly goes unmentioned while daily fantasy startups like Draft Kings is currently bathing in VC cash and media coverage.
Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses
#120Certainly the end of the beginning. Yahoo!, one of perhaps a handful of companies, was the first "Internet"[1]. Those companies blazed an interesting trail and brought the mainstream population of the US into the "online" world. That they emerged across the chasm that was the dot.com crash, was a testament to the amount of momentum they carried with them.
I have a tremendous amount of respect for them, but even with Marissa at the helm the biggest challenge they have not seemed able to overcome, was to tranform into something more 'web 3.0' ish.
I would not be surprised in the slightest if Microsoft spun out Bing as a subsidiary, and absorbed the assets and IP of Yahoo! into their own search centered business with a portal attached.
By resizing that combined business to be profitable based on the search and ad revenue I expect the case could be made for that as a long lived entity that remains when Google implodes. And having an already separate (or separable) would allow Microsoft to step away to avoid anti-trust concerns while keeping a partial interest to capture the value appreciation.
[1] the 0th Internet was what emerged right after HTTP started propagating, GNN, bookmarks etc.