One benefit of these incidents at Yahoo! is that they represent salient, clear examples of the cost of poor information security. CIOs and security directors will be able to point to this deal as evidence that poor security can have material impact on the business and destroy massive shareholder value, even years after the fact. A 6.5% intra-day dip sends a clear message. Even a CFO can now see that information security should be viewed as vital insurance that directly impacts shareholder value.
Yahoo controls 8% of search traffic and costs $4bn. Google controls 64% of search traffic and costs $558bn. That's a 17-fold difference in the price for 1% of the traffic. Even more if you take US search traffic only (to exclude Yahoo Japan).<p>Verizon can get rid of the costly parts of Yahoo (mostly its media business) and have its own small Google to make cash. That was $1.8bn per year in 2015, while Yahoo's overall revenue stands at $3.9bn (Asia excluded). So Verizon buys the company at 1x revenue.<p>Who would quit such a deal?
OK, what's it going to take to keep tumblr running? That's literally all I care about here. Everything else in Yahoo can be gotten or done elsewhere, but tumblr's a social network, so there's value in preserving those connections.
Fixing Yahoo seems impossible. It is bleeding cash and has at its scale no really credible strategic business model as a conglomerate of ideas. Selling it may fall flat now. Would it be possible to split it up? It may be easier to find a strategic direction for parts of it and maybe wind up others?
Yahoo has some good stuff, but their brand-name is just so, so toxic now.<p>I hope that if the deal goes through (and I'm sure it will), Verizon will still keep the better Yahoo services running.
Let's also not downplay the "Yahoo" brand name. It does not have much high impact negative publicity associated to it (yet). The name "Yahoo!" goes as far back as the Internet for modern day users i.e. 30+ yrs age group. If Verizon can put a nice spin to it and through micro-filtration of the brand whatever filtrate is left, as long as it is somewhat appealing it would sell, let it be a search engine or whatever new product Verizon offers free-of-cost to its subscribers over its data network. Verizon owns AOL and with that a few mobile advertising companies. As TV content is gradually getting further away form traditional set-top-box nightmarish cable providers and more towards individual content companies (Netflix, Amazon Video, HULU, HBO etc), this would be a good step for Verizon to head in that direction as well, maybe not produce original content (such as Netflix/Amazon) but perhaps air exclusive sports events. At the end of the day, it is all about maintaining your monopoly.
Verizon would be stupid <i>not</i> to walk away from the deal at this point.<p>Setting aside that $4 billion was clearly way too much, Verizon, as the parent company, would be liable for any lawsuits against Yahoo resulting from the last few leaks.
According to the email I received from Yahoo this morning, the data stolen was from 2013 and contains MD5 hashed passwords.<p>MD5 hashed passwords. In 2013. Apparently Yahoo never made it out of the 90s.
Looks like Mozilla still stands to make a lot of money from this <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>
The prospect of being part of the yahoo acquisition team at Verizon sounds dreadful. Yahoo has so many problems, so many things to figure out... it represents a close to impossible challenge to try to turn it around (in any way).
So considering there has been at least two breaches that are known and given the size and extent of them is there no concern by Verizon that any intellectual property held by Yahoo might have been taken as well?
Video of the merger team hard at work
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX4e81L-J7s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX4e81L-J7s</a>
Verizon wants to acquire Yahoo "without the liability". What do they want to do, dump the liability on a business unit designed to go into bankruptcy?
This is really just a news headline that really doesn't matter, or make any difference in the real world, who cares? the media just wants to make things seem bad so they can get some attention then on the back of that bad attention someone seeing an opportunity to save some money. Pathetic.