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Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

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Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#861

Post by PythonicAlpha »

chadlavi wrote: post #458
ddingus wrote: post #318

While I'm happy for the people who made a lot of money in this transaction, I always read these announcements with a bit of angst. From a user point of view, I expect this to go like Reddit has, for example. Everyone building that value saw high use value, returns on their investment in the form of information they need, lean, easy to find, high signal to noise. Now there is a debt to be paid. The new owner needs to…

"You've read 3 of your 5 free answers this month"

> "You've read 3 of your 5 free answers this month"

The content was created by the contributors for free, it would be (legal) theft to do so.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#862

Post by xeromal »

nine_k wrote: post #695
xenadu02 wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While somewhat rare there are holding companies like Jonas Software that buy lots of smaller software companies in various markets then effectively let each subsidiary run without too much interference. Their philosophy seems to be own most or all of the competitors in a vertical market, sell the software for a reasonable (read: non-Oracle) price with ongoing maintenance, and collect the cash. I only know about them…

Berkshire Hathaway has an exactly the same approach: an acquired company keeps operating in the way which made it successful. I won't say this approach turned out bad for Berkshire or Mr. Buffett personally.

I'd say this is accurate for the most part but they bought the first company I worked for out of college and they really tightened the screws on our benefits packages under the guise of "unifications" with their existing stuff. They ended up moving me to a high deductible insurance plan which was absolute nads

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#864

Post by moonbas3 »

mssundaram wrote: post #174
croes wrote: post #115

"The group’s expansion into internet platforms began in the 1990s' spanning online consumer services, including: E-commerce - including its subsidiary, OLX (100%) Takealot.com (96%) Fintech - including its subsidiary, PayU (98.8%) Food delivery - including its subsidiary and associates, iFood (54.8%), Delivery Hero (22.3%) and Swiggy (38.8%) Etail - including its subsidiary, eMag (80.1%) Travel - including its associ…

Interesting. I've hardly heard of any of those companies - are they mostly non-US?

Some of them are present in Europe. eMag is probably the biggest e-tailer in eastern europe.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#865

Post by pmoriarty »

allendoerfer wrote: post #809
eggsbenedict wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you explain the prices of Class-C shares which don't bestow voting rights to the holder? For example, GOOG trades for over 2000 a share. In fact, it even trades at a $50 premium over GOOGL, which offers voting rights. Strange.

You don’t have to control a company personally, you can also rely on other shareholders to do that. You just have to know, somebody is voting in your interests, since you probably won’t do it (but again: you could). I don’t know whether your statement about the price difference is true and if so, I don’t know why. Maybe different free float? My statement was about inherent value not short term price negotiations via…

"You don’t have to control a company personally, you can also rely on other shareholders to do that. You just have to know, somebody is voting in your interests"

How would you know they're voting in your interests?

I've never known how any other shareholder voted in any of the stock I owned. For all I know they could have been voting completely contrary to what I'd wanted.

No. Unless you own enough of a stock to vote and make a difference, stock ownership is not about influencing a company but just about hoping the value of the stock will rise, and there are many theories about why that might happen, from fundamental to technical analysis to people who invest based on the phase of the moon, divination, tips from friends, insider trading, trend following, news, etc.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#867

Post by Shorel »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #300
travisjungroth wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, GH lags SO considerably on the size of the knowledge base, but I don't think that's very important since, due to the rapid pace of tech, content rapidly loses value with age (consider all of the jquery or flash content, or content pertaining to old versions of libraries or frameworks). This is a weakness of SO and really the whole knowledge base business model (Q&A or not). You think you're building up this n…

I think it's perhaps a little clearer to frame it this way: SO has a network effect moat, not a corpus-size moat (I don't know that SO was ever thinking the size of its corpus would stave off competitors--they probably were correctly assuming that their user-base was their moat). The network-effect moat keeps the rate-of-change of the corpus higher than competitors, which is where the value is (not the size of the co…

SO has a SEO moat.

As soon as the answers I need start appearing in some other site, I will use the new site.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#868

Post by joshlemer »

edgyquant wrote: post #705
sillysaurusx wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno. Reddit seems like an example of a successful acquisition. Conde Nast managed not to destroy Reddit after buying it. But I agree with you overall. I'm a bit nervous too. Stack Overflow is so good, and its fate is now entirely in the hands of the purchaser. EDIT: In the other announcement post ( https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2021/06/02/kinda-a-big-announ... ): Today we’re pleased to announce that Stack Overfl…

>Reddit seems like an example of a successful acquisition For whom? For people who uses it since the beginning it isn’t even the same place anymore. It’s UX (and I’m not talking about the aesthetics of the new design, I don’t mind those) is legitimately the worst I’ve ever experienced and the quality of discussion has went down the drain. Even if you find a tightly controlled community dedicated to a topic you’re int…

Have you found an online community filling the niche of old reddit?

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#869

Post by lurkerasdfh8 »

cjpearson wrote: post #401
lurkerasdfh8 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SO will never be wikipedia and that is OK. What we miss the the middle ground. And that is open for the taking! (hint) SO is transient and disposable. It is about the error message of the day and by chance hits the language/pattern of the year. Wikipedia is about stablished knowledge already accepted and published. The open spot in the middle is about accepted techniques for the pattern of the recent years. Those are…

It's debatable whether they achieved it, but at one time Stack Overflow explicitly stated that their goal was to be a middle ground between a transient Q&A site and a wiki. That philosophy is why they allow everyone (even those without an account) to edit posts and why they close duplicate questions.

They can say whatever they want. But they are not and never will be.

Their community management tools are awful and the philosophy they and the moderators abide to is that questions/answers must be closed as soon as possible.

For example: take one question such as "how to do X in Y". The answer today is "not possible". it is accepted. done. Tomorrow it is "now you use Y.abc" and that old question will never be updated because the person who asked is not interested anymore, or worse, it might even be locked. This is a very common pattern. There's also thousands of the "A: copy and past this, which i do not understand either" which completely kills any knowledgeable discussion.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#870

Post by lurkerasdfh8 »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #615
lurkerasdfh8 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the only correct answer, IMO. all the other pundits miss that if the deal was for existing source of revenue, it would have been priced as modestly as those are.

So you think there will be 4-5x as many ads and "click tiny [x] to actually see the contents" ads ? I don't see how else they can leverage the platform to make significant cash.

I don't think anything :) just that the price, if it were reflecting existing revenue sources, would be much lower.

The seller and buyer both agree that the promise of something else is what was traded, as the price proves.

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