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Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)

reuters.com

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Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)

#141

Post by cxr »

alexjplant wrote: post #77
tolbish wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tabbed browsing and incognito mode were incredibly innovative. edit - Looks like Firefox introduced both. But Chrome was incredible in comparison at the time. I recall thinking Firefox was no longer worth it. I made the move back to Firefox a few years ago.

Revisionist history... Firefox and loads of niche browsers (MyIE2/Maxthon which I used in the era where IE was sometimes mandatory for site compatibility) had tabbed browsing.

Indeed, it would be nice if the tendency of people to jump into a conversation and start spewing absolute nonsense were subject to harsher social consequences.

But it was not just niche browsers. By the time of Chrome's debut (2008), just about every browser had tabs—including Internet Explorer:

"With the release of Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, all major web browsers featured a tabbed interface." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#History>

Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)

#142

Post by ericbarrett »

alexjplant wrote: post #77
tolbish wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tabbed browsing and incognito mode were incredibly innovative. edit - Looks like Firefox introduced both. But Chrome was incredible in comparison at the time. I recall thinking Firefox was no longer worth it. I made the move back to Firefox a few years ago.

Revisionist history... Firefox and loads of niche browsers (MyIE2/Maxthon which I used in the era where IE was sometimes mandatory for site compatibility) had tabbed browsing.

It had tabbed browsing, but at the time Chrome came out there was no or limited tab process isolation for FF.

I used to work with a guy who always invoked Firefox in gdb so that when it crashed, he could fix the bug (null ptr deref etc.) and continue. As a “tab hoarder” he would lose a day or two of context and productivity otherwise.

Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)

#143

Post by Macha »

mrweasel wrote: post #33
banana_giraffe wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sale also includes AOL, and brands like TechCrunch and Engadget. Still not sure it adds up to $5 billion, though.

Perhaps the sites are only valuable as a bundle? The brand value of both AOL and Yahoo has to add up to something, but TechCrunch and Engadget is most likely just thrown in for free to get rid of both sites. On its own I believe that Yahoo Finans could be a profitable little site.

Techcrunch/Engadget came in to Verizon with AOL, and the media sites (well those that Verizon hasn't sold off seperately over the years) are a big part of the value bundle for Verizon Media. Having just the sites without the adtech business means you're losing money running the sites, having the adtech without the sites mean you don't have a guaranteed anchor inventory.

Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)

#144

Post by coryrc »

cbsmith wrote: post #78
wpietri wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you on almost all of this, but can you explain why you think it's incorrect that Yahoo wouldn't have to spend a lot of money to keep up with Google? Google's origin story doesn't seem relevant to me, in that Google won because they made radical leaps forward in search quality, compute cost, and and compute scale. As well as company culture around innovation/continuous improvement, I suspect. All at a time wh…

> Google's origin story doesn't seem relevant to me, in that Google won because they made radical leaps forward in search quality, compute cost, and and compute scale. That's the myth, but it's pretty far from the reality. Long before Google became such a dominant player, competing search engines had matched or exceeded its quality, compute cost, and ability to scale. > All at a time when the web was exploding: only…

I was an AltaVista user. Then I started having to use a meta search. Then Google came along and it always worked. Who cares if the others caught up? I had no reason to look for over a decade. But now I feel the amount of money to be made means search will never be good again: you can pay people pennies to get a few more pennies for yourself, just to bury the better stuff given freely.

Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)

#145

Post by jrib »

tolbish wrote: post #73
kreeben wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are flabbergasted by the fact Yahoo, and everyone else for that matter, thought it absolutely impossible to disrupt Google (except for perhaps a handful of hubris-riddled people at MS), please remember the general sentiment HN used to have towards Google who according to us, at that time, could do no wrong. They were infallible. They were the brightest people in the world. They were The Good Guy (TM). They wer…

Tabbed browsing and incognito mode were incredibly innovative. edit - Looks like Firefox introduced both. But Chrome was incredible in comparison at the time. I recall thinking Firefox was no longer worth it. I made the move back to Firefox a few years ago.

chrome's big win was that it was fast. When it came out firefox felt super sluggish and it was a refreshing change.

That and better isolation of tabs so that one tab wouldn't ruin your entire browser experience with some javascript that was thrashing.

Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)

#146

Post by duped »

fiftyfifty wrote: post #113
andy_ppp wrote: post #15

I 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…

I never understood why Yahoo got so wrapped around the axle with the search engine business. I used to use Yahoo a lot to start my web browsing and I liked the fact that it wasn't a search engine. They provided broad categories that you could click on and you could keep drilling down to more specific categories until you found relevant websites. Not always the best way to search the web but it was great when you didn…

One sad niche they missed was fantasy sports. Yahoo fantasy leagues were great, with configurable rules and such.

Now fantasy is a big business and deeply tied to legalized sports gambling. That could have been worth hundreds of millions in revenue for Yahoo.

Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)

#147

Post by [deleted] »

Bukhmanizer wrote: post #131
cbsmith wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is doing that (particularly with YouTube), as is everyone else. I don't think they break down the search vs. other ad business any more, but at last check it was still the biggest single source of revenue for the company (admittedly, I believe YouTube and adsense collectively generate more revenue for them now, but both of these are primarily showing ads on other people's content).

Ah ok, so her strategy was to pull out on search, but focus on higher quality/yield ads? It still seems like a bit of a losing strategy as I don’t see any reason for people to stay with Yahoo.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)

#148

Post by scarface74 »

utopcell wrote: post #140
scarface74 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether it’s a net loss or barely profitable, it still doesn’t move the needle as far as Google’s income. Even if it did - it is still mostly search advertising. That’s not diversification.

Search revenue was $31,879 billion in Q1 and YT revenue was $6,005 billion. It doesn't seem like you're paying attention.

You’re still conflating “profit” with “revenue”. No one is doubting that YouTube’s revenue is substantial. There is doubt that it’s profit is substantial. If it isn’t contributing any meaningful profit to Google’s bottom line, it isn’t successful.

Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)

#149

Post by 1024core »

oefrha wrote: post #51
_ea1k wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could be wrong, but I don't think that was enough to push it back above the 44.6B valuation.

Yahoo used to have a 15% stake in Alibaba. Alibaba’s market cap today is ~643B according to (ironically) Yahoo Finance. Edit: Apparently they used to hold 30%, but sold half of that for peanuts in 2012.

Jack Ma refused to take Alibaba public until Yahoo sold half of its stake back to him (for peanuts).

Carol Bartz really screwed Yahoo over in its dealing with Alibaba. Yahoo had 2 seats on the 5-seat board of directors and Bartz couldn't be bothered to appoint directors to those. When she became CEO, Jack came to meet her and she dressed him down in front of his underlings: a big slap in the face to Jack. These two incidents made sure that he was as uncooperative as could be. He took Alipay out from under Yahoo and never informed Bartz.

Whatever you may say about Marissa Mayer, when she became CEO her first priority was to fix the broken relationship between Alibaba and Yahoo. She smoothed things over, and Jack let Yahoo keep the 15% stake, instead of asking for all of it back. She made Yahoo many billions with her moves.

Re: Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)

#150

Post by sbierwagen »

duxup wrote: post #57
andy_ppp wrote: post #15

I 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…

Was there an understanding in 2008 that Yahoo... couldn't just "be Yahoo" going forward without falling behind / fading away and would have to really change dramaticly? I ask because it seemed like there were attempts but they were sort of fits and starts and meanwhile most of Yahoo still seemed like just old Yahoo... It does seem like a continuous failure in leadership at Yahoo to really change much at all. There we…

pg wrote the famous "What happened to Yahoo?" article in 2010: http://paulgraham.com/yahoo.html
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