61–70 of 300 posts
The one and only question I need to ask: will flickr stay alive? The rest had been obsolete for a while anyway.
Guessing we are either going to see major changes in pricing structure, or a shutdown of Flickr. Pretty bummed.
So now Yahoo stock is basically going to be a faux Ali Baba stock. This totally seems like a healthy thing and evidence that there is nothing at all wrong with our market system.
A company makes an amazing, generation defining large bet on a startup in a fantastic market. Which pays off as one of the best investments in history.
That same company then proceeds to do _nothing_ with its actual business. It purchases a series of tiny startups that go _absolutely nowhere_, the acquired talent of which create _zero value_.
And, simultaneously, new, younger competitors start eating their lunch in every one of their established markets.
If that's not unprecedented, I'd love to hear the other example. That situation would have to be just as fascinating.
The one and only question I need to ask: will flickr stay alive? The rest had been obsolete for a while anyway.
My guess, someone will buy it and it'll languish for a year or two as the product strategy is developed and migration of technology occurs, then the new vision by new owners will be executed.
The one and only question I need to ask: will flickr stay alive? The rest had been obsolete for a while anyway.
Guessing we are either going to see major changes in pricing structure, or a shutdown of Flickr. Pretty bummed.
Personally, I'd find it something of a bummer if flickr were to go away or seriously decay. I could switch but it would be a definite pain. (I also find flickr a great source of CC photos.)
I'm not sure I quite understand. The article puts Yahoo's Alibaba stake at 31bn. Google finance is reporting Yahoo's market cap as 32.75bn. Does this mean that Yahoo's non-Alibaba value is a rounding error?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Google's search engine runs at a loss to support their advertising business What? I have never heard that AdWords runs at a loss and find it incredibly dubious.
I think he's saying search itself runs as a loss-leader to get people into their hugely profitable AdWords product. In other words, they spend money in search in order to make money via ads. But yeah. The two go hand in hand, so I'm not sure I'd say search is a loss-leader.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Sadly this probably means 3 things are going to happen in the next 6 months" (Genuine question, not snark). Why "sadly"? Companies, even technical companies, get obsolescent and die all the time. Maybe it is just Yahoo's time to go.
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.
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.
Google's search engine runs at a loss to support their advertising business, and haven't had any serious competition in that sector since they bought Doubleclick (which looks a bit antitrusty in my eyes but what do I know). Yahoo doesn't have much of an ad business so there's not a lot of value in running their own search. They're good at their core business of being a portal, with some parts implemented themselves a…
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…
Wish I could find the article I read this in (googling around has failed me), but I believe around 2010 they also started bringing in execs and business people from Hollywood/MSM and there was a big clash of cultures.
http://www.cnet.com/news/yahoos-ceo-reaches-out-to-hollywood...
http://www.cnet.com/news/google-vs-yahoo-clash-of-cultures-1...
http://www.wired.com/2007/02/yahoo-3/
http://metue.com/06-18-2007/yahoo-ceo/
The Wired article looks particularly painful. If memory serves, Yahoo first declined to buy proto-Google for one million. Then again in 2002 for 5 billion.