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

91–100 of 228 posts

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

#91

Post by Bukhmanizer »

cbsmith wrote: post #70
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 worked at Yahoo! when this was going on As did I > I'm amazed share holders didn't sure Jerry Yang and the board for avoiding the sale. There was a lawsuit: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/yahoo-settles-lawsuits... > Yahoo had very little of technological value and was actively trying to destroy its own search business amongst other properties at the time. I'm not sure what you are referring to there. There…

I’m a bit confused at what Bartz’ strategy was? If she deinvested in search, where did she expect Yahoo to succeed over Google?

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

#92

Post by plank_time »

I worked at Yahoo during this time. I said at the time it was so dumb for Microsoft to be wasting so much money on Yahoo and instead they should have bought massive holdings in almost every Silicon Valley company for that money, including Facebook (I think they did invest a little in Facebook). Had they done that instead they would have been worth multiple trillions now.

They really avoided a huge disaster by walking away from Yahoo, so I applaud them.

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

#93

Post by gogopuppygogo »

tolbish wrote: post #73
kreeben wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are flabbergasted by the fact Yahoo, and everyone else for that matter, thought it absolutely impossible to disrupt Google (except for perhaps a handful of hubris-riddled people at MS), please remember the general sentiment HN used to have towards Google who according to us, at that time, could do no wrong. They were infallible. They were the brightest people in the world. They were The Good Guy (TM). They wer…

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.

Mozilla (the at the time self titled browser they had before Firefox) even had tabs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Application_Suite

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

#94

Post by deshpand »

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

Mobil + Chevron => Moron

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

#95

Post by [deleted] »

hogFeast wrote: post #90
Bukhmanizer wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

[deleted]

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

#96

Post by andy_ppp »

kreeben wrote: post #64
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…

If you are flabbergasted by the fact Yahoo, and everyone else for that matter, thought it absolutely impossible to disrupt Google (except for perhaps a handful of hubris-riddled people at MS), please remember the general sentiment HN used to have towards Google who according to us, at that time, could do no wrong. They were infallible. They were the brightest people in the world. They were The Good Guy (TM). They wer…

Sure, but if you had 20+% of the search engine market it seems terrible to not even try. Maybe it would have failed and bankrupted the company but I still think it would have been an exciting sell for the employees to try to compete. There were so many extremely talented people working there.

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

#97

Post by robotresearcher »

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.

Chrome made a big thing at launch about their process isolation of tabs. Was that their innovation?

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

#98

Post by raspasov »

kreeben wrote: post #64
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…

If you are flabbergasted by the fact Yahoo, and everyone else for that matter, thought it absolutely impossible to disrupt Google (except for perhaps a handful of hubris-riddled people at MS), please remember the general sentiment HN used to have towards Google who according to us, at that time, could do no wrong. They were infallible. They were the brightest people in the world. They were The Good Guy (TM). They wer…

Nothing is perfect, all of the time.

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

#99

Post by throwaway09223 »

Many commenters seem to be under the impression that Yahoo was later sold for a mere $5B to Verizon, but this is not the case.

MSFT's bid was for Yahoo including its stake in Alibaba, which had a far greater value than the parent company itself. The Verizon deal did NOT include the stake in Alibaba. This was spun off as a separate company Altaba under the ticker AABA. (edit: I should be more precise. This is why yahoo was spun off and sold. AABA is the remainder of the company, and retained the majority of the value. I heard previous plans to spin off the stake in Alibaba weren't workable due to issues around triggering a taxable event.)

AABA's spinoff accounts for the large value discrepancy. Poorly written news articles portrayed this as losing out on a great deal but this simply was not the case.

https://www.marketcaphistory.com/aaba/

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

#100

Post by cbsmith »

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.

Inktomi, Altavista, AllTheWeb, all later under Yahoo.

No question about the "feel", but it's amazing how perception fuels reality. We did a lot of studies of this, and one of the more interesting ones was that if you told people they were seeing Google search results (regardless if they were), they'd be more inclined to rewrite their queries and look farther down in the search results, rather than try using another search engine. Beyond the obvious revenue & marketshare benefits, this helped Google two-fold technically: it gave them better data on query rewrites and search results. The hoops you had to jump through to match our exceed their performance were substantial.

Post reply on HN