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Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#201

Post by allendoerfer »

unexistance wrote: post #179
allendoerfer wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's Encrypt is Mozilla's reaction.

I'm not the most versed in encryption & stuff, so does Let's Encrypt prevents / subvert Verizon's HTTP modification? EDIT: ah it's supercookie[1] and apparently a full protection is "Only a VPN or Tor" [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/verizon-x-uidh

With HTTPS you are protected against this, the EFF is saying, that a "full protection is only a VPN or Tor", because you have no control over whether the website offers HTTPS or not.

In each of these cases the traffic is encrypted, Verizon can read only gibberish and cannot know where to insert its tracking code, while with HTTP it sees exactly where the HTTP headers end and can add another to them.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#202

Post by systemshacker »

dogma1138 wrote: post #18
cs702 wrote: post #4

Less than the $5.7 billion Yahoo! paid in 1999 for Mark Cuban's Broadcast.com: http://money.cnn.com/1999/04/01/deals/yahoo/ Times -- and fortunes -- change.

It's hardly a unique case, AMD is worth less now than what it paid for ATI back in the day.

This is not the same company. AMD had fabs then (real men have fabs) which were spun out. Interestingly the headline in news now is that AMD stock more than doubled recently based on strong sales of GPUs and gaming :) That ATI IP might be saving their bacon right now.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#203

Post by _yosefk »

sandstrom wrote: post #27
cs702 wrote: post #4

Less than the $5.7 billion Yahoo! paid in 1999 for Mark Cuban's Broadcast.com: http://money.cnn.com/1999/04/01/deals/yahoo/ Times -- and fortunes -- change.

Had to look it up, for curiosity: In April 1999, Yahoo! acquired the company for $5.7 billion (or over $10,000 per user) in stock. [...] The company had 570,000 users. -- Wikipedia These 570k users only listened to audio, seems like the biggest waste ever. Cuban got a bunch of (undeserved?) money and Yahoo lost the same amount. Feels like a pointless transaction.

"Do you know what ROI stands for? Radio on the Internet."

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#204

Post by paganel »

subsection1h wrote: post #167
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #159

To the guys on this thread who talk like they're some mini-pundits who know it all saying this is what Yahoo gets for walking away from larger valuation offers from a decade ago: No one thinks you're intelligent for pointing out something years after the fact. Tech companies come and go, and I would bet that a lot of the hottest tech companies right now will meet the end just like Yahoo did in a decade (or less). Ima…

Are you seriously suggesting that when Microsoft made its final offer in 2008, Yahoo was one of "the hottest tech companies"?

Not the OP, but I remember that from a developer's perspective (mine) Yahoo was pretty hot back in 2006-2007. Their dev center and API's were on par with Google's, if not better, while Yahoo Pipes was a very cool and interesting thing which has not been successfully replicated until now. Companies like FB were cool only because they had an exponential user growth and because of the rumors of them poaching engineers from Google or Yahoo for insane financial packages. That started to change around 2010 I'd say, when the FB devs started to open themselves up more to the world.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#205

Post by pcwalton »

byuu wrote: post #112
yulaow wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well to defend them they needed a solution to fight the incoming intel cpu with integrated gpu. They needed ATI portfolio and knowledges.

The integrated GPU really didn't need that kind of power, though. Anyone playing more than solitaire is going to get a discrete GPU anyway. They could have snapped up a smaller chipset maker for a tenth of the price. Instead they entered both the integrated and discrete GPU markets, when they were already a market underdog that already struggled in the CPU market. They paid way too much for ATI, and then spread thems…

> Anyone playing more than solitaire is going to get a discrete GPU anyway

That's not true. The PC enthusiast market is a small segment of the overall PC market, and that's not even counting mobiles. Lots of people play non-graphically-intensive games.

More importantly, GPUs are hugely important for things that aren't games. Honestly, the fact that video needs hardware acceleration (which is part of the media/GPU block) means that there's a reasonable argument that games aren't even the most important practical function of a GPU.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#206

Post by charlesdm »

dangrossman wrote: post #196
dpark wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, it's a pretty complete travesty. 8 years later the stock is still almost 20% below the $45B offer price, which was by the way a 60% premium over the market cap at the time. I still have trouble wrapping my head around why Microsoft even made the offer, but I have even more trouble understanding why Yahoo rejected it.

In those intervening 8 years, Yahoo sold a big chunk of its BABA stock back to the company. If they kept the number of shares they had at the time Microsoft made the offer, that asset alone would be worth $48B today. If you add in the Yahoo! Japan holdings, the company would be worth at least $56B, even if the core Yahoo! business were worth nothing. It wouldn't have been a bad buy for Microsoft.

BABA wasn't public back then, though. It was inherently hard to value.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#207

Post by scrollaway »

OneNoteIsFree wrote: post #164
saryant wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I have a number of friends at Verizon Labs doing some pretty cool work with Scala and Haskell.

Just using cool functional languages has little to do with this work culture. Lets not propagate this notion please.

That's not what parent said. You read what you want to read, but parent only said they're doing "cool work" and that cool work happens to be in Scala/Haskell.

Sigh.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#208

Post by charlesdm »

riyadparvez wrote: post #134
MichaelGG wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To accurately judge though, we need to know how many people/companies are offered large sums and decline, and how that works out. It might still have been a bad decision that just happened to work out.

It's the same story as college dropout entrepreneurs, who became very successful and made million dollars. But, how many college dropouts are out there who are barely earning their livelihoods?

I would assume both are highly situation dependent.

If things seem to be going relatively well, and you've already taken $10-20-50m off the table, what's the point in selling? At that point it's only really cash in a bank account that you then need to manage and reinvest. Obviously, if you feel the wheels are going to come flying off, sell.

Same for a college degree. If you're a self motivated person and a learner, you don't need it. But if you need your hand held, you won't achieve much. Degree or no degree. More than anything this has to with the person and his/her work ethic and intellectual curiosity.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#209

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

doppp wrote: post #168

Can someone change the title to include the fact that this purchase is for the search and advertising operations part of Yahoo? Everyone here thinks it's for the entirety of Yahoo. It's like they didn't bother to read the article.

I'm not yet convinced that isn't a case of inaccurate precis by the BBC. Other sites are reporting it's all Yahoo's tech/content (i.e. not China/Japan investments).
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