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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)

#151

Post by chrisco255 »

wpietri wrote: post #44
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'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…

> It seems to me that by 2008, there were fewer easy innovations lying around to make. Or if there were, Google was well prepared to match them.

Except for privacy-centric search. This is what DuckDuckGo has capitalized on and it's worked out for them. Neither Microsoft with Bing nor Yahoo was able to see this as a niche to compete.

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

#152

Post by subpixel »

Bukhmanizer wrote: post #118
subpixel wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was in no small part about selling ads on Yahoo-owned media or through a Yahoo ad network.

Isn’t that what Google was doing?

It's been a long time but I seem to recall Yahoo's approach being decidedly old school. They were trying to create or buy must-read and must-watch content to sell ads against. The marketing message was that at Yahoo.com you will find all the news and entertainment you could ever need!

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

#153

Post by [deleted] »

andy_ppp wrote: post #96
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…

Sure, but if you had 20+% of the search engine market it seems terrible to not even try. Maybe it would have failed and bankrupted the company but I still think it would have been an exciting sell for the employees to try to compete. There were so many extremely talented people working there.

[deleted]

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

#154

Post by kreeben »

Rapzid wrote: post #139
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…

Well I'm not going to apologize for installing Chrome then or now lol. It was a fantastic piece of tech with the tab process isolation and V8 helped to revolutionize what "webapps" were capable of.

I wish for us all that some day the internet as it is today would fracture and split into one webapps realm and one hypertext realm so that those who can't stand it when you want to click on something and you do, once the page finishes loading you end up clicking the top page ad instead of the button you aimed at, could go on doing the things we thought we could do, back in the day.

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

#155

Post by umeshunni »

ignoramous wrote: post #26

The years from 2006 to 2010 gave rise to today's BigTech. Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google were pioneers in the data-centers space. Amazon was only beginning to turn-up the heat. In retrospect, given the engineering talent and expertise at Y! at the time, it is a shame that in light of AWS' success they did not invest in Infrastructure-as-a-Service when their "web services" org was already churning out a range of tools…

> Cloud computing could have saved Y!'s bacon, even as a late entrant (MSFT re-launched Azure in 2010)

MSFT could rely on a large enterprise-focused sales team with existing relationships with CIOs. Y! would not have had that luxury.

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

#156

Post by chaostheory »

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…

> 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.

I disagree. Inktomi, Altavista, and AllTheWeb weren't even close in terms of search result revelance and the number of pages they indexed. Every time they attempted to close the gap, Google would just widen it with stuff like real time search, their revolutionary maps UI, and gmail.

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

#157

Post by tenebrisalietum »

kreeben wrote: post #154
Rapzid wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I'm not going to apologize for installing Chrome then or now lol. It was a fantastic piece of tech with the tab process isolation and V8 helped to revolutionize what "webapps" were capable of.

I wish for us all that some day the internet as it is today would fracture and split into one webapps realm and one hypertext realm so that those who can't stand it when you want to click on something and you do, once the page finishes loading you end up clicking the top page ad instead of the button you aimed at, could go on doing the things we thought we could do, back in the day.

The Gemini protocol is actively doing this.

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

#158

Post by meekaaku »

wavefunction wrote: post #126
Huffers2 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. Opera had tabbed browsing before Firefox existed, and Firefox had tabbed browsing before Chrome existed.

I could be wrong but it looks like Opera introduced tabs in 2009 with v10.5 while Firefox's first release was in 2002. Unless we're referring to different things.

No. Opera from early 2000s atleast had tabbed browsing. It also had gestures, paste-and-go, open non-hyper plaintext links in tab etc.

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

#160

Post by ahepp »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #62

>Verizon will get $4.25 billion in cash from the sale along with its 10% stake in the company. Verizon and Apollo said they expect the transaction to close in the second half of 2021. Version paid $4.4 billion for AOL and $4.5 billion for Yahoo and now sell it for $4.25 billion w/10% stake. Am I missing something? why company (Version) just waste money like this? https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/verizon-sells-yahoo-an…

>The strategy reflected a mindset that was once widely shared among the world’s biggest telecoms companies, which sought to benefit from an explosion in digital media consumption by becoming owners of content rather than mere network operators, or “dumb pipes”.

"Apollo buys Verizon media assets including Yahoo for $5bn"

https://on.ft.com/3uk5DMk

Paywalled, but link should be good for 3 visitors. I can post another if anyone is desperate to read.

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