Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses • Hacker News Board

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#181

Post by Quinner » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 5:02 PM UTC

vonklaus wrote: post #31

Paul Graham's What happened to Yahoo [0] is probably just as relevent now as when he wrote it in 2010. > One of the weirdest things about Yahoo when I went to work there was the way they insisted on calling themselves a "media company. That was a bad decision then, but at the time content and media were newer on the internet and had value. They don't anymore. Yahoo finance and fantasy sports are nice things to provid…

Except the NYT has surprisingly turned things around, considering five years ago they were a dinosaur on it's way out, much as Yahoo was and is.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/business/media/new-york-ti...

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#182

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 5:03 PM UTC

scott_s wrote: post #156

[deleted] wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

That was Yahoo's core business pre-2000. The posted asked about post-2000.

[deleted]

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#183

Post by jackgavigan » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 5:04 PM UTC

ddlatham wrote: post #164

jackgavigan wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Totally agree that any shift in the tax liability is significant. But people seem to be discussing many other consequences now: 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?

> Why would this change make any difference to those questions?

I don't think it does. I think the difference is that Starboard suggested that Yahoo sell its core business - http://www.wsj.com/articles/starboard-urges-yahoo-to-drop-al... - and Verizon's CFO suggested that they might be interested in buying Yahoo Core if it was put up for sale - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-07/verizon-wo...

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#184

Post by jackgavigan » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 5:06 PM UTC

charlesdm wrote: post #180

mkagenius wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2. She failed at financial engineering; she couldn't even get a tax free spinoff through. She managed to keep a part of Alibaba stake. This reverse spin off will also be tax free.

She's throwing the company away she is currently CEO of. The BABA stake had to be separated from Yahoo, but this is literally the worst possible way, aside from selling the shares + paying taxes, to achieve this.

What's so bad about it? The end result is the same as the original plan - one company with a stake in Alibaba, and another company with Yahoo's core businesses and the Yahoo Japan stake.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#185

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 5:07 PM UTC

fredkbloggs wrote: post #150

[deleted] wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

That wasn't the question. The question was what Yahoo's business has been for the last 15 years, not what it was when the company was founded. The actual answer is that Yahoo sells ads. That's their business model, just like it's Google's and Facebook's and hundreds of other companies', some very old and some founded yesterday.

[deleted]

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#186

Post by crudbug » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 5:14 PM UTC

profeta wrote: post #152

crudbug wrote: post #74

Yahoo management lacks vision. They had the most popular brand names in social media space, still couldn't innovate. 1. Messenger 2. Mail 3. Flickr 4. Tumblr

the funny part is, if you mixed messenger, mail and flickr (let's not forget geocities, delicious and 60% of all online stores before 2006) they could have what facebook is still trying out to be and then some.

True ! This makes the argument event better :)

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#187

Post by ddlatham » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 5:15 PM UTC

jackgavigan wrote: post #183

ddlatham wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree that any shift in the tax liability is significant. But people seem to be discussing many other consequences now: 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?

> Why would this change make any difference to those questions? I don't think it does. I think the difference is that Starboard suggested that Yahoo sell its core business - http://www.wsj.com/articles/starboard-urges-yahoo-to-drop-al... - and Verizon's CFO suggested that they might be interested in buying Yahoo Core if it was put up for sale - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-07/verizon-wo...

Right, it sounds like you agree with me. But most of the rest of the comments on this article suggest this is a significantly meaningful change.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#188

Post by dingaling » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 5:15 PM UTC

crudbug wrote: post #74

Yahoo management lacks vision. They had the most popular brand names in social media space, still couldn't innovate. 1. Messenger 2. Mail 3. Flickr 4. Tumblr

5. Groups, which was insanely massive and even after the botched Neo "upgrade" is still the mechanism for the exchange of vast amounts of information.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#189

Post by late2part » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 5:17 PM UTC

valhalla wrote: post #135

MrApathy wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm a young millennial and even though Google was more or less my first search engine/portal (I used Alta Vista until my 1st grade teacher showed me Google around '99) I also have fond memories of Yahoo!. I won a Final Four bracket against high school classmates on the site's fantasy sports page and knowing nothing about college basketball. I made $150 from that. Even though they clearly made strategic mistakes and M…

1st grade teacher, 1999. God, I'm old.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#190

Post by guelo » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 5:20 PM UTC

kaizendad wrote: post #131

chollida1 wrote: post #17

Yahoo had to do this. They had been hanging onto the belief that the IRS wouldn't tax their Alibaba spin out, a belief that they and their tax accountants alone believed. Most telling is that Yahoo was up after the markets closed on this news. Heck Bloomberg just sent me a note saying the sentiment of the news on Yahoo was very positive, even the machines like this news:) Sadly this probably means 3 things are going…

This is cleverer than people are giving them credit for. It delivers immediate value to shareholders; it delivers opportunities for long term growth to shareholders; it creates one valuable Asian property that can acquire other properties and continue to deliver shareholder value; it creates a US company that is easier to acquire than it used to be, without the Alibaba share, and thus could be bought by a big media c…

Losers are the web market in general which loses a big independent competitor, internet users which will see products shuttered or neglected, and the upcoming laid off employees. All because greedy shareholders didn't want to pay their damn taxes.