Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 228 posts

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

#41

Post by wyre »

bazooka_penguin wrote: post #37
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…

Pure Harvard Business School spreadsheet stuff. Business degrees might be destroying the nation.

All we need is a peer reviewed study proving it.

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

#42

Post by after_care »

duxup wrote: post #10

Maybe I remember it wrong but even in 2008 I felt that there was at that point some question of what ... Yahoo was / would be. IIRC Yahoo at that point was a big name that wasn't irrelevant, but whatever they would be in the future seemed like it would have be be akin to creating new product(s) / company / sea change type move. It was hard to imagine them becoming worth 66% more anytime near that time (even without h…

Microsoft was try to buy market share in the search engine. This is when they were making a play for Bing to be a market contender in Search. We don’t know what would have happened if Bing had 20% market share out the gate, as well as access to Yahoo expertise/tech. A significant share of Search today would be worth significantly l more than $44B, and this deal would have been a fair gambit for Microsoft to make.

It was a very good offer, but it wasn’t enough for Yahoo to sell. Perhaps a larger offer would have helped, but I think Yahoo had an inflated opinion of their own worth.

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

#43

Post by menzoic »

scarface74 wrote: post #30
trinovantes wrote: post #22

It's amazing how much the internet has changed in just 13 years. Makes me wonder if the tech giants of today will become irrelevant by 2030s or we're past the point where the giants are rich enough to just buy up anything with potential while their original products fade into obscurity.

If you look back a decade, things haven’t changed that much. Facebook was public, growing, had figured out mobile and had already acquired Instagram. It was by far the top social media company. Amazon had taken over online retail. It was already a behemoth. AWS was in its infancy, but it was growing. Apple was already the most valuable company in the US. Microsoft had been one of the top 10 most valuable companies fo…

Google is well diversified. You even mentioned Youtube and Android. GCP isn't at the top but it's huge. Google docs/business suite is taking over, it's the goto for startups. They have a mobile carrier business. Self driving cars (although its dropping in valuation but they do have a large stake in Uber). Google is now Alphabet which it restructured into because of its diversification.

Small nit: FB wasnt public 10yrs ago but your point is valid either way.

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

#44

Post by wpietri »

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 when the web was exploding: only 19% of people used the web at Google's launch; by 2008 it was circa 70%. [1]

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. That, plus the way the size of the web had exploded [2] in the decade since Google's launch suggests to me that competing with Google would have been extremely expensive. The way that other people have tried and failed since points that way too, as Google's market share is even larger now than it was in 2008.

[1] See https://www.statista.com/statistics/185700/percentage-of-adu... and https://www.statista.com/statistics/214662/household-adoptio...

[2] From 1997 to 2008, there were more than 100x more websites, and I expect those websites got larger both in number of pages and per-page size. https://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/

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

#45

Post by 300bps »

mrweasel wrote: post #14
rapsey wrote: post #8

Honestly it is pretty crazy how old Yahoo is and they are still hanging on.

But they aren’t hanging on, Yahoo! is owned by Verizon. Why Verizon would buy a site like Yahoo is still a mystery to me, but they own a lot of other junk as well.

I think Verizon would buy Yahoo so they could further monetize their subscriber base.

Buy Yahoo.com, make Yahoo.com the default home page of every customer.

They do this in other ways - I'm a FIOS customer and I don't use their DNS because you will see ads anytime you mis-type a domain name. You can turn this off with their not-so-simple instructions that any Baby Boomer will be completely unable to do:

https://www.verizon.com/support/residential/internet/home-ne...

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

#46

Post by ihsw »

bazooka_penguin wrote: post #37
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…

Pure Harvard Business School spreadsheet stuff. Business degrees might be destroying the nation.

> The road to hell is paved with Ivy League degrees.

Source: Thomas Sowell on "Intellectuals and Society"

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

#47

Post by tommysydney »

acheron wrote: post #24
samgranieri wrote: post #12

That summer my girlfriend at the time and I were laughing at the different combinations of possible combined companies. Yahoogle was one. This one would have been Microhoo

Late 90's joke: Yahoo and Netscape are going to merge and move their headquarters to Israel: Net'n'Yahoo

one-man co outlasted the two big techs!

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

#48

Post by ReggieCommaRose »

menzoic wrote: post #43
scarface74 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look back a decade, things haven’t changed that much. Facebook was public, growing, had figured out mobile and had already acquired Instagram. It was by far the top social media company. Amazon had taken over online retail. It was already a behemoth. AWS was in its infancy, but it was growing. Apple was already the most valuable company in the US. Microsoft had been one of the top 10 most valuable companies fo…

Google is well diversified. You even mentioned Youtube and Android. GCP isn't at the top but it's huge. Google docs/business suite is taking over, it's the goto for startups. They have a mobile carrier business. Self driving cars (although its dropping in valuation but they do have a large stake in Uber). Google is now Alphabet which it restructured into because of its diversification. Small nit: FB wasnt public 10yr…

Google is well diversified in its business endeavors but hasn't been capitalize on that for a better diversified revenue stream.

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

#49

Post by LunaSea »

menzoic wrote: post #43
scarface74 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look back a decade, things haven’t changed that much. Facebook was public, growing, had figured out mobile and had already acquired Instagram. It was by far the top social media company. Amazon had taken over online retail. It was already a behemoth. AWS was in its infancy, but it was growing. Apple was already the most valuable company in the US. Microsoft had been one of the top 10 most valuable companies fo…

Google is well diversified. You even mentioned Youtube and Android. GCP isn't at the top but it's huge. Google docs/business suite is taking over, it's the goto for startups. They have a mobile carrier business. Self driving cars (although its dropping in valuation but they do have a large stake in Uber). Google is now Alphabet which it restructured into because of its diversification. Small nit: FB wasnt public 10yr…

Youtube is a net loss and GCP has a 4.6% market share so I wouldn't really count this as diversified since very little of their overall revenue comes out of these two projects?

Google docs / business is interesting but I'm not sure they make much money out of it and are scatting on the freemium tier success.

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

#50

Post by duxup »

after_care wrote: post #42
duxup wrote: post #10

Maybe I remember it wrong but even in 2008 I felt that there was at that point some question of what ... Yahoo was / would be. IIRC Yahoo at that point was a big name that wasn't irrelevant, but whatever they would be in the future seemed like it would have be be akin to creating new product(s) / company / sea change type move. It was hard to imagine them becoming worth 66% more anytime near that time (even without h…

Microsoft was try to buy market share in the search engine. This is when they were making a play for Bing to be a market contender in Search. We don’t know what would have happened if Bing had 20% market share out the gate, as well as access to Yahoo expertise/tech. A significant share of Search today would be worth significantly l more than $44B, and this deal would have been a fair gambit for Microsoft to make. It…

I just don't know what Yahoo... ever thought it would be.

It felt like a company that had success, and then never could find a way out of being old Yahoo while the world changed around them.

Post reply on HN