161–170 of 300 posts
What's the difference aside from the tax liability? Either way you wind up with two companies. One with the Alibaba shares, and the other with everything else.
Matt Levine wrote a good piece on this a week ago: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-12-02/yahoo-is-lo...
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I can't speak for chollida1, but for me as an "older millennial" (28) Yahoo was how I came to discover the internet. Between the chats, instant messenger, search before Google, multiplayer games online with strangers (albeit simple ones like chess and poker), and Geocities it was my first taste of the types of things I do online to this day. I think it's okay to mourn a bit for how we remember the company.
As an even older millennial (35), I have very fond memories of Yahoo. I remember receiving a two-disk copy of Netscape Navigator from a local ISP at a computer show in early 1995 and setting the home-page immediately to Yahoo. At the time I remember seeing hard copies of "The Internet Yellow Pages" at the local Barnes and Noble, but most search was through Yahoo or Alta Vista. Back then AV had several fewer orders of…
cough
Dude, give up the skinny jeans :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X
"Generation X, commonly abbreviated to Gen X, is the generation born after the Western Post–World War II baby boom. Demographers and commentators use birth dates ranging from the early 1960s to the early 1980s."
I 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.
Exactly. Yahoo had the largest Hadoop cluster in 2009. They used it for their search engine. They were the driving force and sponsor of Apache projects like Lucene and Hadoop. Then suddenly they outsourced their search engine business to Microsoft Bing. Last time I checked meta search engines like DuckDuckGo rely on Yahoo's BOSS API to access Bing's search engine.
(I do wonder if iterations of this pattern panned out better when paired with not-Microsoft)
What's the difference aside from the tax liability? Either way you wind up with two companies. One with the Alibaba shares, and the other with everything else.
There is no difference aside from the potential tax liability but the tax liability is potentially huge. We're talking over $9bn. Matt Levine wrote a good piece on this a week ago: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-12-02/yahoo-is-lo...
Does this mean the end of Yahoo?
Is it being acquired?
Are they shutting down Flickr or Tumblr?
Why would this change make any difference to those questions?
Yahoo bought my favorite task manager, and killed it. Yahoo bought Flickr, and has been slowly killing it for years. Yahoo bought delicious.com, said they were going to kill it, but later sold it. Most of the users that left never came back. Has Yahoo done anything worthwhile in the last 15 years besides disrupt innovation in a bad way?
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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 w…
Part of this may be related to the lack of direct monetization opportunities from Flickr. If you take the example of Instagram, the enormous number of users they have have created, "Instagram celebrities" out of thin air, with people securing modeling contracts or product endorsement deals simply by being popular on the network. I'm sure some photographers are getting business opportunities by posting their work as w…
Flickr/Yahoo! have taken some steps related to allowing users to monetize their photos over the years. There's been an agreement with Getty and they've done some other things as well. At its heart, though, flickr started out with very much a community orientation and, while they haven't necessarily done the best job of it, they've maintained more of a community than a commercial flavor.
Aside from the young, female, and attractive though, it's pretty hard to commercialize a flickr presence in any significant way. Even microstock sites which are explicitly about selling aren't a great source of income for most.
Oh just give this poor old dog the old Yeller treatment already. I don't know what's more sad, the fact that Yahoo has fallen from where it once was, or that it's falling so slowly and that it's new CEO, once thought to be it's saving grace, is letting the bleeding continue for seemingly as long as she possibly can. I can't imagine the morale issues in the trenches of Yahoo, it's gotta be just horrible in there.
> Oh just give this poor old dog the old Yeller treatment already. I don't know what's more sad, the fact that Yahoo has fallen from where it once was, or that it's falling so slowly and that it's new CEO, once thought to be it's saving grace, is letting the bleeding continue for seemingly as long as she possibly can. And why not? In what kind of reasoning, if you could continue to make money and employee thousands o…
I sure would. I've seen that happen at a couple of companies where I know people and it's entirely depressing. Slowly declining revenue on the path to planned death means:
* knowing that the next round of layoffs will always be soon
* having a hard time retaining people
* having a very hard time hiring people
* nobody wanting to do deals with you
* having to pay way over market to keep the people you have
* workers much more inclined to negative behaviors
* no sense of promise in the future
I would much rather sell individual pieces to companies that can make use of particular assets, move as many people as possible to other companies, and then gracefully wind down whatever's left.
In my view, profit isn't why we do things, it's just how we measure sustainability of a venture. Maybe there are people out there who would be happy working in a dying company trying to suck every last nickel of profit out. But those aren't the kind of people I'd hire on the way up, so there's no way I'd ask them to spend years being miserable on the way down. I'd also be reluctant to sell my customers to somebody who would be happy doing that; I wouldn't trust them to do right by the users.
When Yahoo finally dies, my main concern is what happens to the @yahoo.com email address I've had for a couple of decades, and which now lives next to my name in countless address books. Does it perpetually forward to an address I choose? Does Yahoo try to charge for this? Do Russian identity thieves buy the domain and make my life hell?
What's the difference aside from the tax liability? Either way you wind up with two companies. One with the Alibaba shares, and the other with everything else.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And she's probably dealing with a lot of anger around not getting to do her turnaround. Whether they were working or not, she was surely emotionally invested in her efforts to rebuild Yahoo as a company and now that is being rejected.
It's devastating when you are pouring your heart and soul into something and then the company just kills it and it's beyond your control. I'm sure a lot of us have been through that (I've been through it twice now, at Palm when HP killed webOS, and at Nokia when they announced they were giving up on phones), and I don't think it's any easier at the top level.
Though those eye-watering golden parachutes can't hurt...