I did a little work as a developer for Verizon's ecosystem back in 2007. Let me just say, from what I could see, they were a huge, bureaucratic company without a single redeeming cultural trait. The managers seemed like a bunch of frat boys who had been raised up into positions of authority through some inscrutable lottery, and none of them seemed to possess an iota of analytical capability or human management talent.<p>I left that position and later worked for a bunch of tech startups and larger companies that, while not perfect, at least had enough good people in them to redeem my view on the human race.<p>I cannot imagine why anyone would actually work as a mid-level worker in Verizon unless you had absolutely no other options in life.
Verizon shouldn't be allowed to own any web properties. They inject a unique subscriber identifier into your HTTP requests unless you turn it off.<p><a href="http://www.verizonwireless.com/support/unique-identifier-header-faqs/" rel="nofollow">http://www.verizonwireless.com/support/unique-identifier-hea...</a>
Yahoo got all cash, which is nice as it gives them more flexibility, the last thing they'd want after the Alibaba spin off fiasco is to have to try and sell 4.83 Billion in Verizon stock.<p>Bloomberg just put up a head line saying that Yahoo will return all the cash, minus Operating Costs to the share holders. If anyone has any guess as to how much "operating costs" will be, please email:)<p>So I guess queue Alibaba and SoftBank now to come in and divvy up the rest of the company?<p>From Matt Levine:<p>> "Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s chief executive, is not expected to join Verizon, but she is due to receive a severance payout worth about $57 million," bringing her total compensation for about four years of work at Yahoo to $218 million.<p>Wow! So I guess the now decade old valley trick off spending a "few" years at google to start your career and leveraging the google name to get another job really is the way to go:)
Less than the $5.7 billion Yahoo! paid in 1999 for Mark Cuban's Broadcast.com: <a href="http://money.cnn.com/1999/04/01/deals/yahoo/" rel="nofollow">http://money.cnn.com/1999/04/01/deals/yahoo/</a><p>Times -- and fortunes -- change.
<i>>Shortly afterwards, Verizon announced it would start combining data about its mobile network subscribers - which is tied to their handsets - with the tracking information already gathered by AOL's sites.</i><p>I was talking to a friend who is in the Telecom industry in Japan, and apparently this sort of arrangement is not legal there. EU is generally wary of such arrangements as well. So this is a merger whose product synergies would not have been possible in other jurisdictions.<p>In recent years I recall advertisers being skeptical about the quality of eyeballs on Yahoo!'s platform. The pitch to the same advertisers already seems more compelling, though the premise does make me feel uneasy.<p>And I imagine Mayer will be getting her full 9 figure severance package. So much for rewarding success and having interests aligned.
So this means Mozilla's insanely bad clause (for Yahoo) [1] kicks in?<p>1. <a href="http://www.recode.net/2016/7/7/12116296/marissa-mayer-deal-mozilla-yahoo-payment" rel="nofollow">http://www.recode.net/2016/7/7/12116296/marissa-mayer-deal-m...</a>
Why isn't this mentioned/discussed anywhere. In 2008 Microsoft offered $45 Billion to acquire Yahoo. Then Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang rejected the offer, saying that the bid "substantially undervalues Yahoo." Microsoft raised the bid to 50 Billion, and it was yet again rejected. After that MS withdrew its bid. 8 years later, at 10% the original offer!
To the guys on this thread who talk like they're some mini-pundits who know it all saying this is what Yahoo gets for walking away from larger valuation offers from a decade ago: No one thinks you're intelligent for pointing out something years after the fact. Tech companies come and go, and I would bet that a lot of the hottest tech companies right now will meet the end just like Yahoo did in a decade (or less).<p>Imagine if Google becomes irrelevant in 10 years, and end up selling itself to whichever hottest tech company that will be around then. Will you say "Told ya! Google should have sold to Yahoo when Yahoo was going to acquire them for $3 billion!"
I remember being shocked when Yahoo spurned MSFT's $44+ billion offer in 2008. Goes to show, when someone offers you 11 figures for a failing company, sell because the offers aren't going to get better.
Keep your eye on <a href="http://tracker.archiveteam.org/" rel="nofollow">http://tracker.archiveteam.org/</a> to contribute to archiving certain Yahoo assets for future generations in the Internet Archive.
"The US telecoms giant is expected to merge Yahoo with AOL, to create a digital group capable of taking on the likes of Google and Facebook."<p>Can someone explain how combining two "past their prime" entities like Yahoo and AOL, with the Verizon telecom bureaucracy is going to produce anything "capable of taking on the likes of Google and Facebook"?<p>Telecom companies have a pretty horrible culture. It is not one of innovation or agility. They are bloated bureaucracies based on tenure and not merit. I speak from experience. To give one small example I have have been on conference bridges where Verizon project managers fell asleep and began snoring. I have many more of such anecdotes with these folks. All similarly illustrative of the culture.
Yeah, they have billions to spend on buying companies like Yahoo, but they can't upgrade all their rotting copper to fiber optics. That's Verizon for you.
What the hell has Marissa Mayer been paid for?<p>Everything about this smells like Yahoo! is being run by idiot MBAs with some spreadsheets somewhere totally misunderstanding that technology can empower people to do fantastic things including those working within Yahoo! - instead it's been hamstrung by each property not being held accountable to it's competitors effectively.<p>I would have started competitors (startups) internally for all of Yahoo!'s key products (buy Y.com and test them under that) and told the current product owners if their products were not better faster than these startups could build them they'd be replaced.<p>The decision to sell search because they were not able to match the investment Google and Microsoft were putting in is another example; if you can't beat someone financially you need to be better than them. To have just given up based on "only" having a few billion to invest is absurd.
2 guys who spent 20 years at Yahoo, started WhatsApp and sold itself to Facebook for $19B. and this huge company sold for 1/4th of that price. Management vs. Product Visionaries.
I hope yahoo mail sticks around. I've been using it since forever, and would hate to change to gmail. Yahoo mail is kind of slow, but gets the job done, gmail is too chaotic for me. Maybe I'm old school about that, but I'm all in on yahoo mail.
I'm curious how this will play out for AT&T internet customers, given that their email is currently hosted by Yahoo. Is Verizon going to host their competitor's customers' email?
Can someone change the title to include the fact that this purchase is for the search and advertising operations part of Yahoo? Everyone here thinks it's for the entirety of Yahoo. It's like they didn't bother to read the article.
I wonder if Verizon worked out a deal with the mozilla foundation over the search bar exit clause? That's basically a billion dollar pay out over 3 years if Mozilla decides to trigger it.
Here is math for people wondering about price of Yahoo:<p>Y! market cap is $36.38b. Have in mind that Y! is selling only its core biz so we would have to subtract values of Y! shares in Alibaba and Y!Japan, which are worth $33.74b and $8.56b respectively. However thats pre-tax and Y! could not get that money for them. There for adjusted values (-38% tax)are $21b and $5.4b again respectively. There are also cash & marketable securities worth $6.8b and convertible debt of $1.4b.<p>So final math looks like this:
$36.38b-$21b-$5.4b-$6.38b-(-$1.4b)=$5b
"US telecoms giant Verizon Communications is to buy Yahoo's search and advertising operations"<p>First, I was surprised to see search operations mentioned, since they farmer that out to Microsoft. Second, if this is only search and advertising, I wonder what will happen to things like Flickr and Tumblr.<p>It should be interesting to see what is actually in the announcement.
While Flickr has decent export tools (you just get your photos without tags, descriptions - literally anything else), Tumblr's have always been non-existent aside from an unofficial, macOS-only tool by Marco whose download link (<a href="https://marco.org/2009/12/10/the-tumblr-backup-app-is-ready-for-its-first-beta" rel="nofollow">https://marco.org/2009/12/10/the-tumblr-backup-app-is-ready-...</a>) no longer works.<p>Anyone recommend a Tumblr export tool? The best, as far as I can tell, is jekyll-import (<a href="http://import.jekyllrb.com/docs/tumblr/" rel="nofollow">http://import.jekyllrb.com/docs/tumblr/</a>), but I'm running into errors and getting weird results.
Off-the-cuff sentiment:<p>Axis of... something.<p>As a Verizon (now, specifically Wireless) customer, I've watched things go from "worth the price" to "what am I paying for?".<p>And Yahoo. Once proud, pioneering Yahoo.<p>And the remains of AOL are in the mix, as well?<p>I mostly feel this is somehow primarily going to shovel more crap at me.
A fair amount of FreeBSD's infrastructure in hosted in Yahoo!'s datacenter in Santa Clara.<p>I'm curious how this will affect that relationship, if at all. It's not like Yahoo! is going to stop using FreeBSD overnight or anything but Verizon may decide they don't want third-party infrastructure in "their" datacenter.
Every time I hear about Yahoo these days, I am reminded of the movie Frequency. At the end of the movie, the protagonist is driving a fancy mercedes with "YAHOO" as the license plate, implying investments in Yahoo made him rich. How ironic that since the movie came out, Yahoo started its decline.<p><a href="http://www.rexblog.com/2012/05/13/47671" rel="nofollow">http://www.rexblog.com/2012/05/13/47671</a>
Basically everything Yahoo tried to do basically failed to earn income, and Google came along and did those things better.<p>Verizon can get more users from Yahoo and merge them with their AOL users. No doubt this bigger user base can be sold advertising to earn more money.<p>Firefox stopped supporting Google searches and switched me to Yahoo, will this Yahoo change no longer support Mozilla and be taken off the list?
Yahoo retains a market cap of $36 billion. The reason Verizon paid only $5 billion is that Yahoo Japan and Alibaba are not part of the deal.<p>> Yahoo owns about 35 percent of Yahoo Japan and 15 percent of Alibaba, two overseas companies that have long dwarfed Yahoo in size.
The oil trader folks are going to be miffed, did Yahoo! Chat get axed in the deal?<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11826186" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11826186</a>
Note: this acquisition does not include their $30+ Billion USD worth of shares in Alibaba and their stake in Yahoo Japan which is about $12 Billion USD.
I misread that on my phone's tiny screen as a "$4,88" deal. Even then I thought it was a lot to pay for... er... whatever it is that Yahoo does these days.