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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

#41

Post by detaro »

kmfrk wrote: post #38

While Flickr has decent export tools (you just get your photos without tags, descriptions - literally anything else), Tumblr's have always been non-existent aside from an unofficial, macOS-only tool by Marco whose download link ( https://marco.org/2009/12/10/the-tumblr-backup-app-is-ready-... ) no longer works. Anyone recommend a Tumblr export tool? The best, as far as I can tell, is jekyll-import ( http://import.jek…

At least they also have an API, more than I expected: https://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/api/v2

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#42

Post by nickpsecurity »

kennywinker wrote: post #33
randomname2 wrote: post #16

YHOO used to be valued at $112B at its peak.

It's turns out valuations are imaginary numbers that mean nothing? I once sold a $1 beer to a friend for $2. Let's back-of-the envelope that: 100% markup, $1 profit. If I buy and sell 1 billion beers per year, that's a profit of $1B/year. Ok, so given a 5 year return on investment, that means my beer business is valued at $5 billion. Nice! Anybody interested in investing please get in touch I'm raising a series A.

Nah, you have to have explosive growth numbers with little context implying it will continue. So, cut deals to sell it at a restaurant, then a local event, and then one stadium. Numbers in individual beers will be multiplying. Clearly it will be millions or hundreds of millions of units in a year or two. So, maybe $5 billion to buy it while it's hot?

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#43

Post by vram22 »

randywaterhouse wrote: post #19
unchocked wrote: post #12

I remember being shocked when Yahoo spurned MSFT's $44+ billion offer in 2008. Goes to show, when someone offers you 11 figures for a failing company, sell because the offers aren't going to get better.

Interesting to consider the reasons for the past valuation -- before everyone realized Alibaba was blowing up (I believe it was So, in 2016 dollars we're talking $5bn for their core web business vs. 50bn+ (2016 dollars) for the 2008 MSFT offer.

Why the heck do people use 'bn' for billion and 'mm' for million? I've seen VC @fredwilson use 'mm' many times on his blog (avc.com), and IIRC I read some reasoning for it, either there or elsewhere, which made some kind of sense (they said Roman numeral for 1000 is M, so for million we use MM, though not sure if that is quite right logic), but why then the inconsistency between 'mm' and 'bn'?

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#45

Post by monocasa »

yulaow wrote: post #29
byuu wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That really had to be the dumbest moves in computing history. "What does the #2 CPU maker need to become #1? The #2 GPU maker, obviously!"

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

Yeah, exactly. If they didn't have their APUs, they wouldn't have hardly anything anymore.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#46

Post by ChuckMcM »

tomp wrote: post #35
sandstrom wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yahoo! didn't lose anything, only its investors did (as it paid with stock, not cash)... But then, they would have lost a lot anyways, because the whole market was overvalued.

I certainly see it differently. Investors have bought and sold Yahoo! stock all along. Had they bought it when the deal to buy Broadcast was announced and sold it 5 years later, they would have tripled their money.

Are there Yahoo! investors who have lost money? Sure. That is true for every stock that is traded. Are their investors that made money? Sure, same deal.

If one wanted to evaluate the performance of Yahoo! management in 1999 then one way to approach it would be to answer the question, "Given what Yahoo! knew at the time of the acquisition, what would have been a better use for that stock?" I personally can't imagine what that would have been.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#47

Post by andy_ppp »

What the hell has Marissa Mayer been paid for?

Everything about this smells like Yahoo! is being run by idiot MBAs with some spreadsheets somewhere totally misunderstanding that technology can empower people to do fantastic things including those working within Yahoo! - instead it's been hamstrung by each property not being held accountable to it's competitors effectively.

I would have started competitors (startups) internally for all of Yahoo!'s key products (buy Y.com and test them under that) and told the current product owners if their products were not better faster than these startups could build them they'd be replaced.

The decision to sell search because they were not able to match the investment Google and Microsoft were putting in is another example; if you can't beat someone financially you need to be better than them. To have just given up based on "only" having a few billion to invest is absurd.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#48

Post by shostack »

ptio wrote: post #32
bogomipz wrote: post #20

"The US telecoms giant is expected to merge Yahoo with AOL, to create a digital group capable of taking on the likes of Google and Facebook." Can someone explain how combining two "past their prime" entities like Yahoo and AOL, with the Verizon telecom bureaucracy is going to produce anything "capable of taking on the likes of Google and Facebook"? Telecom companies have a pretty horrible culture. It is not one of in…

Note that Verizon has a division - Product Innovation and New Business - that is run separate from the telco business that you are mentioning. In recent years Verizon has acquired technology companies EdgeCast Networks (CDN) and upLynk (Video Streaming) which form the core of Verizon's Digital Media Services [1]. Combining these assets with AOL (AdTech) and Yahoo (if the deal happens) gives Verizon an end-to-end plat…

Yeah, this is all about digital media. Cross device tracking (see aol deal) will be helped by this purchase and tying it in for a video platform with those ridiculously high video CPMs seems to be what they are going for.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#50

Post by dmfdmf »

x0x0 wrote: post #30
aceperry wrote: post #5

I hope yahoo mail sticks around. I've been using it since forever, and would hate to change to gmail. Yahoo mail is kind of slow, but gets the job done, gmail is too chaotic for me. Maybe I'm old school about that, but I'm all in on yahoo mail.

yahoo mail is incredibly valuable -- it's a feeder (clicks and identity) to all of their content sites. It's really one of yahoo's gems. The new owner will probably take better care of it than yahoo did.

That was my take and when Mayer took over I was hopeful she'd sink some resources into the servers and fix the performance issue. Nope. Its as bad and slow as ever, all my clients that use it complain but there is nothing I could do save moving them to gmail. This was a major misstep in my opinion as Yahoo mail is the company "face" to many users. The Yahoo home page was horrible when she took over but at least she had the sense to put an end to the zooming cars and flying coke cans & etc that marred the user experience. Unfortunately, the home page news links have deteriorated to People Magazine level of coverage which has also hurt their brand. Want to know what the Kadashians are up to, the latest Taytay breakup new? Go to Yahoo.
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