Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008) • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by eloisant » Mon, May 03, 2021, 3:50 PM UTC

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…

Except for Amazon, that would still be extremely successful without AWS, the others had their original business model disrupted.

So far Google still have a stronghold on search, they've been able to secure it with Android and Chrome by controlling the devices, they seem to be doing fine.

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

#82

Post by Huffers2 » Mon, May 03, 2021, 3:53 PM UTC

meestaahjoshee wrote: post #76

tolbish wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tabbed browsing and incognito mode were incredibly innovative. edit - Looks like Firefox introduced both. But Chrome was incredible in comparison at the time. I recall thinking Firefox was no longer worth it. I made the move back to Firefox a few years ago.

firefox definitely had tabbed browsing and private mode before chrome was released. pretty sure opera had tabbed browsing as well. i just recall chrome being very minimal, clean and fast when it was first released. plus as kreeben said, Google was pretty revered at the time.

You're right. Opera had tabbed browsing before Firefox existed, and Firefox had tabbed browsing before Chrome existed.

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

#83

Post by utopcell » Mon, May 03, 2021, 3:59 PM UTC

LunaSea wrote: post #49

menzoic wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

YouTube is a net loss ? Where is that coming from ? It brought in $6BN revenue just in Q1 [1].

[1] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2021Q1_alphabet_earnings...

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

#84

Post by utopcell » Mon, May 03, 2021, 4:02 PM UTC

mrbonner wrote: post #60

Verizon sold Yahoo and AOL to Verizon for less than $5B today. The Hadoop ecosystem founded in Yahoo by Doug Cutting would probably cost a lot more than $5B in value today. I can’t wait to see how FAANG turns out in 10 years from now.

Let's not trivialize the value that was added to Hadoop from many other companies since its early Yahoo days.

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

#85

Post by Bukhmanizer » Mon, May 03, 2021, 4:04 PM UTC

cbsmith wrote: post #78

wpietri wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

> 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. That's the myth, but it's pretty far from the reality. Long before Google became such a dominant player, competing search engines had matched or exceeded its quality, compute cost, and ability to scale. > All at a time when the web was exploding: only…

> Long before Google became such a dominant player, competing search engines had matched or exceeded its quality, compute cost, and ability to scale.

Just curious, which ones? I remember Google felt so far above any other search engine for a very long time.

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

#86

Post by duxup » Mon, May 03, 2021, 4:09 PM UTC

eloisant wrote: post #79

duxup wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was there an understanding in 2008 that Yahoo... couldn't just "be Yahoo" going forward without falling behind / fading away and would have to really change dramaticly? I ask because it seemed like there were attempts but they were sort of fits and starts and meanwhile most of Yahoo still seemed like just old Yahoo... It does seem like a continuous failure in leadership at Yahoo to really change much at all. There we…

No, in 2008 Yahoo was already seen as a failed company. The biggest mistake they did in the late 90's is to stop being a tech company and be a "media company" instead. So in 2008 they were still big but mostly running on momentum they built during the 90's and a couple acquisitions. They had Yahoo!Mail that was popular, their homepage was still popular because some people forgot to try something different, Flickr tha…

Yeah that's a valid point about MS, they were healthier as far as having products and income but ... weren't at that point yet reborn / looking for their own way forward.

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

#87

Post by scarface74 » Mon, May 03, 2021, 4:12 PM UTC

eloisant wrote: post #81

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…

Except for Amazon, that would still be extremely successful without AWS, the others had their original business model disrupted. So far Google still have a stronghold on search, they've been able to secure it with Android and Chrome by controlling the devices, they seem to be doing fine.

Android (profit of $23 billion from 2010-2016) hasn’t really done that great for Google. They still have to pay Apple a reported $12 billion a year+ to be the default search engine for iOS devices.

Apple’s business model has always been to sell “computers” at high margins. They had record Mac revenues last quarter. All of their other devices are just computers with different form factors running a variant of the same OS, most with a variant of the same processor.

Office and Windows have been the main driver for MS for over 25 years.

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

#88

Post by scarface74 » Mon, May 03, 2021, 4:15 PM UTC

utopcell wrote: post #83

LunaSea wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

YouTube is a net loss ? Where is that coming from ? It brought in $6BN revenue just in Q1 [1]. [1] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2021Q1_alphabet_earnings...

“Revenue” is not the same as “profit”

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/03/google-still-isnt-telling-us...

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

#89

Post by xtracto » Mon, May 03, 2021, 4:17 PM UTC

alexjplant wrote: post #77

tolbish wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tabbed browsing and incognito mode were incredibly innovative. edit - Looks like Firefox introduced both. But Chrome was incredible in comparison at the time. I recall thinking Firefox was no longer worth it. I made the move back to Firefox a few years ago.

Revisionist history... Firefox and loads of niche browsers (MyIE2/Maxthon which I used in the era where IE was sometimes mandatory for site compatibility) had tabbed browsing.

Somehow it feels like Opera invented most of the features contemporary browsers have. I remember using Opera on an off from the late 90s to late 2000s.

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

#90

Post by hogFeast » Mon, May 03, 2021, 4:18 PM UTC

Bukhmanizer wrote: post #85

cbsmith wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That's the myth, but it's pretty far from the reality. Long before Google became such a dominant player, competing search engines had matched or exceeded its quality, compute cost, and ability to scale. > All at a time when the web was exploding: only…

> Long before Google became such a dominant player, competing search engines had matched or exceeded its quality, compute cost, and ability to scale. Just curious, which ones? I remember Google felt so far above any other search engine for a very long time.

Essentially all of their tech was taken from Robin Li and AltaVista/DEC. Brin did a lot of the implementation work, Page did nothing (a lot of the work he did do, didn't scale, and was highly inferior to existing work as he wasn't a strong programmer...I think he provided a server room or something, he was the snake oil salesman).

The actual technological innovation in the search product was minimal (the stuff they did later to scale was pure innovation, but that came much later). They largely purchased their position (for a good price).