If there is any interest, I'm trying to start a meta discussion on successful acquisitions. I'm genuinely interested in examples, as I can think of none: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738288. All the ones I've been part of (five now), have been total crap.
Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr
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Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Window and the Mirror As part of our research, we interviewed Alan L. Wurtzel, the Level 5 leader responsible for turning Circuit City from a ramshackle company on the edge of bankruptcy into one of America's most successful electronics retailers. In the 15 years after its transition date in 1982, Circuit City outperformed the market 18.5:1. We asked Wurtzel to list the top five factors in his company's transform…
Yeah so much for Good to Great, companies that are supposed to be long-term winners and yet 2 years later Circuit City was already showing severe strain, and 7 years later it was completely bankrupt.
Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and there are without question issues with a number of companies on that list.
However, that does not change the manner in which the leadership of the companies viewed their contemporary success and how it came about.
I found it extremely interesting that such high-level leaders could swallow their pride and attribute success to good fortune. It is trivially simple to dismiss luck as a huge factor due to our own egos being in the way, and the fact that these people were so publicly adamant about their lucky streak suggests to me a level of humility rarely seen in that echelon of executive power.
Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr
#123Does anybody here think that this is a good deal for Yahoo?
It'll take at least a year before we have any idea. For now, just grab the popcorn. It's going to be fun to watch. Remember people thought Facebook was crazy to pay $1 Billion for Instagram. Now it's probably worth several times that...
"Now it's probably worth several times that..." to Facebook.
Facebook acquired Instagram because they were worried about the rapid growth of a photo sharing app that didn't involve Facebook. The Instagram purchase was a very expensive insurance policy.
Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr
#124Maybe 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…
I think luck was a big part of it. Plus, Tumblr is a really cool name (compared to Posterous ), it's catchy, unique, and 'hip'.
I was going to suggest it could have been something as simple as a name. Posterous is a proposterous name. It's horrible. Tumblr is an equally shitty Web2.0 crap name, in the same vain as the ghastly i prefix. iYahoor!
Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Perhaps, but what do think of the JCPenny catalog?
Proves the point: No JCPenney Catalog, profits falling, oust the new CEO.
Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr
#126Earlier 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.
I think the majority of the anti-Yahoo bias is simply from the company still being alive, despite not having done anything right the last decade. A functioning market needs companies to fail quickly.
Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr
#127Does anyone know a tumblr-like service that's open-source that I can stick on my server (Nginx/PHP-FPM/MySQL). I should point out WordPress is far too heavy for a Raspberry Pi, I need something lightweight.
Jekyll?
There's not much more than a repo and text files on the admin side, but enables super-fast blogging on light hardware.
Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Johns…
> Case in point, look at how badly JCPenney fared after Apple retail exec, Ron Johnson, became CEO for just 17 months Not that I'm disagreeing with anything you're saying, but I would like to point out that the changes Johnson implemented are now widely seen as terrible mistakes on his part, alienating huge swaths of the existing customer base. The problem wasn't that "fiefdoms" got in the way of reform, it's that th…
Right, but it's hard to tell what are just inherently bad decisions and what are bad decisions given the context and company culture. Some of Johnson's bad decisions were because they didn't gel with JCPenney's culture...however, to my point, it's possible that Johnson's choices could've worked great if the JCPenney's culture were more flexible.
Yes, it's the CEO's job to make decisions based on what she has at hand and what she knows of the ship she's steering. But I think this underscores the point that the nature of the ship is as important to the CEO's initaitives as the quality of the initiatives themselves.
So to say, "let's ignore that Yahoo (in the opinion of some) has been a creaky, slow-moving ship for the last 10 years and see it as an entirely new ship now that it has a new CEO" simplifies the situation a little too much.
Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Apple as a whole is pretty anti-porn, and they dominated the profits (though not necessarily market share) in the smartphone/tablet market for a long time.
What? Their entire brand is "look how sexy we are".
Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
I think most, if not all, of those heaping scorn on Yahoo! would definitely like to see Yahoo! succeed and provide some viable competition to Google and Facebook.