Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
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.
I cannot imagine why anyone would actually work as a mid-level worker in Verizon unless you had absolutely no other options in life.
Totally agreed on BA/GTE. I used to contract on the GTE side of the house, and I saw how little it mattered whether you were good or bad at your job. All reports I hear from the new Frontier sound like it's even worse now.
Sigh.
If I say "they're doing cool work with clay and steel" that means the coolness is intrinsically linked to those things. That's how I'd read it anyway.
There's two ways to read it definitely, but I have a problem when someone decides to read it one way, and complains about that particular interpretation of what they're reading...
:)
Sounds like the perfect fit for yahoo :)
Verizon Labs is however, Verizon's play for Silicon Valley talent and they seem very aware that you need a certain kind of culture, perks, amount of autonomy etc. to compete in that market. I'm quite enjoying my time here.
http://www.verizonwireless.com/support/unique-identifier-hea...
so does Let's Encrypt prevents / subvert Verizon's HTTP modification?
EDIT: ah it's supercookie[1] and apparently a full protection is "Only a VPN or Tor"
In each of these cases the traffic is encrypted, Verizon can read only gibberish and cannot know where to insert its tracking code, while with HTTP it sees exactly where the HTTP headers end and can add another to them.
Vilifying carriers only attacks half the problem.
Highly doubtful. Someone running ads on their site doesn't make them suddenly complicit and knowledgeable about the creepiest corners of ad-tech. This is _exactly_ why knowledgeable regulators should make this illegal - this is a situation where the people on both ends are unaware of an explicit MITM attack happening between them.
Case in point: Google Fiber
Case in point, Comcast is capping their Internet in order to hinder competing video services, but their own video is not capped.
I think the suggestion that carriers shouldn't do this is wrong and naive and here is why:
User count should not ever be exponential of customer counts. It inescapably results in fundamentally unethical business practices where users are exploited.
That is google's business model and they stand uncontested today.
Carriers that end up doing any amount of content monetization will never disrupt Google, but they can create pressure that drives the cost of ads down, making google's life harder. I think this is so important that I am happily willing to endure the judgement of everyone here. I know this is downvote bait, but I keep thinking at some point everyone here will see the net positive on all possible angles.
I'm not seeing the connection between content monetisation and Google's ads business either.
W/r/t ads: the carriers who are aggregating anonymous useage data and reselling it are not revolutionizing their revenue. They are deflating the value of ads. This cuts into Google profit margins.
This makes no sense.
This is the backbone of the entire internet. Ethics and the value that users get from a company/service are all subjective, there's no hard rule that you can lay down like this.
Here is an article from 2012, enumerating the same point: http://www.forbes.com/sites/marketshare/2012/03/05/if-youre-...
Here is another from 2010: http://lifehacker.com/5697167/if-youre-not-paying-for-it-you...
If this is a new idea to you, you might want to consider broadening your debate network.
This is a tired argument that doesn't really make a point. People being "the product" isn't some inherently bad thing. These platforms have so many engaged users because they do actually deliver value to those users, whether you think so or not.
Maybe you want to pay for a social network but others want it free and are fine with the trade-off. Both perspectives are fine and what's important is that you have a choice, but saying that "user counts should never be exponential of customer counts" still makes no sense as it not up to you to decide everyone else's fate. Does that really seem logical to you?
>>it not up to you to decide everyone else's fate
I'm not asking anyone to live to my values. Many others share them.
I think the point that users should not exceed customers is easy to understand. Many people agree with me. Many others dont.
I have turned down an offer at Google because I couldn't reconcile the bad stuff. I wish more people agreed with me, but I don't say that those who don't are illogical. They simply have different values. That is OK if you value diversity.
This is what you wrote. Why make this proclamation? Why should free users be limited regardless of whether they derive value from the service and are ok with being "the product"? The ethics of a company and the value they provide to a user are all subjective and thus you cannot state that the company is unethical or the users are being exploited as a rule. This is why your statement does not make sense.
> Strawman ... I have turned down an offer at Google because I couldn't reconcile the bad stuff. I wish more people agreed with me, but I don't say that those who don't are illogical. They simply have different values. That is OK if you value diversity.
This is actually a good example of a strawman argument - and completely irrelevant to the discussion. I'm not calling you illogical and I don't see how diversity has anything to do with this. You've made a statement and I explained why it doesn't make sense (see above). You're still free to say it and I'm still glad you did as it led to this discussion.
Please focus on the arguments instead of being so defensive and using these passive accusations.
This seems to me to be the crux of our disagreement. You believe ethics are so subjective that ethical stances should not be expressed.
I reject that whole heartedly.
Businesses with user counts that dwarf customer counts generally are exploitative and bad for the consumer.
They are incented to harvest information that results in privacy violations.
Who is stopping you from saying anything? You expressed it and I said I'm glad you did. Again, please stop being so defensive for no reason, it's not conducive to any discussion.
> Businesses with user counts that dwarf customer counts generally are exploitative and bad for the consumer. They are incented to harvest information that results in privacy violations.
Not really, again you say "exploitative and bad" but this is according to you. It's up to the actual consumer to consider this for themselves, which is why there's no valid way to make a statement as how to how this generally works or that users should always be fewer than customers. You can look at open-source companies that produce software used by thousands but sponsored by a few customers as just 1 of many counter examples.
Seemed to result in some issues as I recall.
Mixing common-carrier status with provider-of-goods is quite inherently problematic.
I've got some pretty strong issues with Google's status as both search provider and other services, or with their dominant position in infrastructure, services, operating systems, applications marketplace, and on a growing basis, bandwidth provision.
Some of that is based on actual practices of the company. More is on the basis that when this has been tried before it's come to tears.
As to the price of oil, I can pretty much guarantee you it would have been far lower, though also quite probably much more volatile. I've posted a few times recently on the Texas Railroad Commission and general tendencies throughout the history of oil, and other extractive industries, for either monopolies, consortia, cabals, or government controls (or some mix of the above) to form to limit extractive activity and drive prices up.
I have concerns about private appropriation of the fruits of this activity. I'm also fairly convinced that oil prices are set low by the market. By something on the order of a millionfold.
Why and what to do about that is a longer comment.
As to the particulars of Standard Oil, the company arranged for rebates, intercepted (and occasionally changed) competitor's communications, engaged in what are now entirely illegal, and were seen then as highly immoral, business practices, and much more. The industry as a whole tended to be organised around such practices, and if it weren't John D. it would likely have been someone else who'd have emerged. He played the game best and/or had some early lucky streaks.
But I really cannot support the methods he used. If power is to accrue, let it be channeled through the democratic mechanisms for managing it: government. Not privately held corporations.
Fuller expansion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12140195
I'm really interested in this comment: "oil prices are set low by the market" Do you mean when externalities are included?
Re: consortia, and cabals - restricting output and raising prices will bring new entrants into the market. Eventually the cartel loses control.
It's as if you came into a windfall account, and could make withdrawals over time, but only counted cab fare to the bank as cost, not depletion of the principle amount.
I'm researching on why that was the case, though a developing understanding of many factors involved seems to be at play.
One book notes that at the present rates of consumption, a single cubic mile of U.S. coal reserves would last 1,000 years. And there were 1,100 such cubic miles, a one million years' supply.
(Henry Erni, 1865, https://archive.org/stream/coaloilpetroleum00erni#page/14/mo...)
At the time, estimates of the age of the Earth itself ranged from a few tens of thousands of years to perhaps a few tens of millions. So one million years was a substantial fraction of all eternity.
Oil was thought to flow underground in rivers, and the "rule of capture" from English common law held (and still does in some states of the U.S.).
Incentives were to massively over build extraction capacity, absolutely flooding markets, despite crashing prices.
Normal consideration of externalities still fails to properly account for this. It's a flaw in fundamental economic pricing theory. There was a time alternatives were considered. They've been wrongly abandoned.
> At the time, estimates of the age of the Earth itself ranged from a few tens of thousands of years to perhaps a few tens of millions. So one million years was a substantial fraction of all eternity.
James Hutton had been investigating the geology of Scotland and forming much of the basis for modern geologic timescales in the mid and late 18th C. By the mid 19th, most of the geological periods, we still use today, had been produced. Of course many geologists of the time had a tendency to believe in unlimited age!
Were it not for Lord Kelvin being so famously wrong we may have got decent estimates quicker. Even Kelvin was in the 30-400m years range.
http://www.es.ucsc.edu/~pkoch/EART_206/09-0108/Supplemental/... (pdf)
So they were mainly arguing about tens and hundreds of millions by mid 19th century I believe.
It took 50 more years until 1913 when Arthur Holmes took estimates from hundred millions to billions.
Hutton, Huxley, and Lyell famously argued for longer periods, but didn't have a solid basis for their argument other tthan general geological principles. Holmes applied radiologicaal methds and got to the right ballpark, 1-3 billion years. By the mid-1950s, currently accepted estimates of 4.5 billion years were given, with high accuracy, based on meteoric samples as well as very old Earth rock from Western Australia. Note too that plate tectonics, also crucial for understanding fossil fuel formation, weren't accepted until that time.
Age estimates were further validated through Lunar and Martian (meteors found on Earth) rock samples.
My point is that early theory, law, and practices of petroleum and other fossil fuel extraction were made with a significantly incorrect understanding of the actual facts of their origin. I'm rather in the middle of trying to figure out how inaccurate those beliefs were, but the time period was distinctly off.
At risk of distracting you there was a good documentary series, BBC's Men of Rock a few years ago. It's all on Youtube if you want to watch. It's maybe a bit light on details at times, but the stunning views of the highlands make up for it!
That's pretty good.
it is buying legal condoms to continue to abuse its subscribers.
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:)
So I guess queue Alibaba and SoftBank now to come in and divvy up the rest of the company?
From Matt Levine:
> "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.
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:)
http://marissamayr.tumblr.com/post/147941613134/verizon-to-a...
To make some more reasonable statement to try and add value to this non-comment, more than anything of yahoo's fall, every time it gets brought it it just makes me shake my head at the current state of compensation. For the same reason I can't comprehend what freedom and power $10m+ buys you, I can't comprehend how we change the system such that more of us get more of that.
The gist I was going for was more that even in a dev's greatest successes, they will likely never see most of the returns they generate for others without taking on some sort of "other" role (founder, CTO, etc), while to the other side of that coin, we do often get hit by the fallout of a failure (slipping a deadline, etc) and certainly don't get a payout that I would consider MASSIVE.
I've heard many arguments that this is aligned with the respective risk we take, but as my original statement, I'd take a hell of a lot more risk if it meant never working again a day in my life, but that's not even a choice us normal schmucks can really make :) (I'm also not convinced the risk argument is even sound, as that one MONTH's pay at a top exec salary essentially frees me from financial risk for the rest of my life, whereas I'll be working for decades even at a top eng salary to achieve the same)
Easy.
Also getting lucky is on another level than Mayer who simply got a job in the early Google years and surfed on that reputation ever since.
So: Live in the right place, have money, preferrably get out of a very well known school such as Stanford or MIT, get lucky.
Yeah, that's not an option for 99.99% of people.
It's facile of me to diagnose your life over the internet but I often think of the deathbed quote:
"I wish I had earned more money and spent less time with my family" -- no one ever
Universal healthcare in Germany likely helps offset the cost to some extent, but in the US those who even have healthcare usually get it through their employer. Really, it's more just a different expectation about what a reasonable life is.
I always think of how complex a television is, with thousands of little tiny components that had to be mined from the earth and forged and assembled and soldered (likely involving some child labor that we'd all prefer not to think about) and how many hundreds of people were involved. And then how it's just assumed in the US that it's reasonable to be able afford one of these in exchange for doing something simple like working a cash register at a bank for a few weeks, or how your quality of life somehow requires having multiple televisions etc.
The startup ran out of money, and I took the MacMini with me, so I could continue working.
The MacMini is also currently using a damaged HDD, that S.M.A.R.T. keeps telling me should be replaced and is already critical, because I can't afford actually replacing the HDD.
I was kicked out of the apartment I was living, and now I live with my parents, my parents own a store, and by law, all sales must have a tax form filled online, thus internet is a hard requeriment to have a store, I am using that internet connection.
The maintenance of my websites, cost for me in total, about half a month of food.
Currently my source of food is mostly debt (ie: me, my parents, and other extended family members are taking loans to pay basic stuff).
It is not like getting rid of my computer, would help me, my choosen profession, the unprofitable one, is to be a programmer, so I need it to work anyway.
So, it is not a question of valuing technology above eating, it is that I already have technology because of my work, and getting rid of it won't make food sprout on my plate.
Even if I managed to sell all my belongings, I would still be unable to buy food anyway (my net worth is negative, even if I sold every single object I own, somehow for their "new" non-depreciated value, even my glasses, I would still not pay all my debts).
Screenshot of my desktop, with MacMini about screen, and smartctl -a /dev/disk0/
You want my bank account screenshot too? I can tell you how much it has (positive 37.71 BRL, overdraft is disabled)
I honestly doesn't understand why people think I am coming up with lies, I didn't asked for anything, I just shared an anecdote, I am not begging, not trying to guilt-trip people, I was only sharing personal information, the fact that I made a mistake when I decided to follow my passion (programming), when people advised me to instead take a safer profession (construction worker for example) instead.
It is possible for people to listen to what is said and disagree with it, or refuse to believe it.
Do you think he literally can't afford food?
At the beginning of your career, I think the most important thing is to learn. Any company where you're learning a lot is a good place to be.
But I think you need to be able to learn to like what you're doing, even if it doesn't sound like your cup of tea. Get out of your confort zone. Go into a company that does something that's not just IT (that is, not a company that sells stuff for programmers). Human Resources, healthcare, geology, law, finance, advertising, any other domain other than IT. If I were re-doing my career, I'd try to get into any good situation with not only interesting tech, but interesting non-tech problems to solve.
Getting domain expertise outside of tech + strong tech fundamentals is huge, and a great way to build a really good company later on if that's your cup of tea, or be a great consultant or team member.
That way, you get both an interesting job, and very likely, very good financial rewards if you're good at what you're doing.
The worst mistake I've made was getting sucked into a dead-end path and staying because of the money. If I had gotten out early, I would have taken a financial hit early on, but would have continued an upward trajectory instead of plateauing (and working on stuff with non-marketable skills).
My advice is to make sure wherever you are, you're working on the thing that senior management care most about. That's where you'll have the opportunity to work towards ambitious goals with the best mentors and exposure to real-world consequences.
Your point of working on what senior management cares most about is also good (but easier said than done !!!).
Workers in secondary/support activities (as IT is in most non-tech companies) don't get that many opportunities.
> During her junior year, she taught a class in symbolic systems, with Eric S. Roberts as her supervisor. The class was so well received by students that Roberts asked Mayer to teach another class over the summer.
> Later at Stanford, Mayer found herself in a group setting that was less social, more comfortable, and more familiar for her. As an upperclassman in symbolic systems, she was tapped to teach a class.
> She took to it naturally.
> Computer science professor Eric Roberts, still Mayer’s mentor, supervised her teaching. He says she was “unusually good at it” and “extremely effective.”
> After Mayer taught a course in the spring, Roberts took a survey of her students. The results were astounding: They loved her — even if she did sometimes talk “a mile a minute.”
> Roberts asked Mayer to stick around Stanford to teach another class over the summer; she readily agreed.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20130826113249/http://www.busine...
Nobody said a word about the $200M that went Tim Armstrong's way in the Aol deal. [1]
Can't help but think that if Yahoo had a male ceo nobody would be making these comments.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2015/05/12/tim-armst...
And yeah, if you haven't noticed the widespread backlash against executive compensation in the past few years, you really haven't been paying attention.
Yahoo had several well loved properties that they bought and ran into the ground.
You're comparing someone selling a truckload of junk for decent profit to someone who keeps buying expensive stuff, actively breaking it or leaving it to fester then selling it for a loss and being paid off for doing so.
I suggest reading the various articles that were written about her in 2015. From what I've read of her tenure, this isn't a case of an MVP who didn't have enough support. Mayer being a bad hire / performing poorly AND Yahoo being at a point of no return can certainly co-exist with one another.
Sure they can, but if Yahoo really was at the point of no return, then it ultimately being sold for parts can't (in isolation) be used as an indicator of her performance. I remember when she took the helm thinking that it would take an unbelievable feat from anybody to turn that company around.
She's similar to John Chen (Blackberry) in the task they seemed to be given. Both brought on to captain a ship that was taking on water.
Instead she decided she wanted to be a newspaper/tv channel, instead of a tech company. Look at the trajectory Medium.com has taken, or wordpress, even atavist. Vox Chorus and Gawker Kinja. Instead yahoo chose to continue to compete with about.com as a crappy content mill / 2nd layer newswire.
Yahoo Fantasy and Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Messenger and Flickr were all basically left to die. There was really no reason NOT to clone FBMessenger/Line/WeChat/QQ/WhatsApp. They should have been adding features to Finance and Messenger every week.
Times -- and fortunes -- change.
Mark was smart and bought puts to protect his stake and then sold it so that he wasn't tied to Yahoo. In retrospect he was really smart.
Also questionably legal. There's this little thing called SEC Rule 144 [0], which forbids this kind of action (attempting to preempt pump-and-dump IPOs and mergers). I have no knowledge of the specific details involved, but I find it unlikely that Cuban was not subject to Rule 144 - especially since you say "bought puts to protect his stake", which indicates he couldn't sell Yahoo shares at the time, and thus was almost surely subject to said rule.
SEC enforcement was a joke (and possibly still is), but illegal actions are only ever smart in retrospect, post "statute of limitations".
http://investmentxyz.blogspot.fi/2006/05/cubans-collar-anato...
I'm not familiar enough with the SEC rules to add anything to your comment, other than it's the first time I hear this and it's.. interesting?
No action or inquiry from the SEC is a bet that a lot of people are willing to take, and it pays well for most of them. So does lying to the IRS. Personally, I prefer to pay more taxes, and lose some income (I wanted to protect a 5X exit from downside using puts, and my tax/legal guy warned me against it and introduced me to 144. I ended up with a 1.1X return - I've lost 98% of the profit because the buyer's shares dropped 5 months after the purchase for a reason unrelated to the 5X exit I was a part of. Sums weren't life changing either way, in case you wonder).
Some investments work out. Others don't.
"What does the #2 CPU maker need to become #1? The #2 GPU maker, obviously!"
Instead they entered both the integrated and discrete GPU markets, when they were already a market underdog that already struggled in the CPU market. They paid way too much for ATI, and then spread themselves way too thin.
I'm not just pointing out the error in hindsight, I was a critic of this deal back when it was first announced as well.
That's not true. The PC enthusiast market is a small segment of the overall PC market, and that's not even counting mobiles. Lots of people play non-graphically-intensive games.
More importantly, GPUs are hugely important for things that aren't games. Honestly, the fact that video needs hardware acceleration (which is part of the media/GPU block) means that there's a reasonable argument that games aren't even the most important practical function of a GPU.
Having an APU allows them to play in the low end market which was dominated by Intel with their IGP, the vast majority of laptops do not come with a discrete GPU which meant that AMD could not compete with Intel at all prior to their acquisition of ATI unless they would develop their own GPU or license it from some one (they had plans of licensing PowerVR at some point IIRC).
It's not a massive money maker for them, but I think that it positioned them well to push open standards like FreeSync, and Mantle/Vulcan. AMD is also fighting back by trying to develop open standards, knowing that proprietary ones wouldn't ever get any traction.
Not unless AMD had a dominant market position. CUDA dominating the ecosystem right now is a major PITA, and so is the insistence on GSync over FreeSync.
On the business technology side it'd be even harder due to thermal characteristics that have been demanded for over a decade now and Intel destroys AMD there without question.
MS and Intel both put EXTREME pressure and incentives on OEM (and both were accused of Anti-Trust Violations) to keep their defacto monopolies
Oddly enough NVIDIA back in the day made what arguable was the best chipset for AMD CPU's - NVIDIA nForce.
What happened was that Intel got its game back and then both, Intel and AMD, missed the mobile train. On the ATI side, they were outcompeted by Nvidia. Bad luck, and bad strategy.
In April 1999, Yahoo! acquired the company for $5.7 billion
(or over $10,000 per user) in stock. [...] The company had 570,000 users.
-- Wikipedia
Are there Yahoo! investors who have lost money? Sure. That is true for every stock that is traded. Are their investors that made money? Sure, same deal.
If one wanted to evaluate the performance of Yahoo! management in 1999 then one way to approach it would be to answer the question, "Given what Yahoo! knew at the time of the acquisition, what would have been a better use for that stock?" I personally can't imagine what that would have been.
If the company knew thought its stock was 10x overvalued (Yahoo's stock did drop 90% a year or so later) then they really only sold it for $570 million. That is, if Yahoo knew its stock would be worth 1/10 of its current value in a year, buying a company with $5.7B in stock will add value to Yahoo so long as The acquired company ends up being worth >$570M.
That being said, if they knew their stock was overvalued, it would be best to issue additonal shares, as $1 is worth $1 regardless. Similiar to how undervalued companies should buy back their stock.
These were the heady days before the dot-com bubble burst. In April of '99, Pets.com had just IPO'd (February) and Webvan was a going concern. The 'information highway' replacing traditional radio was believable enough. I don't think at the time anyone knew it was a waste. Hindsight is 20/20.
Offtopic: Only today did I put 2 and 2 together on the inspiration for Silicon Valley's Russ Hanneman "I put radio on the internet" joke...
http://shop.markcuban.com/three-commas-universal-symbol-for-...
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.
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.
And I imagine Mayer will be getting her full 9 figure severance package. So much for rewarding success and having interests aligned.
So not only does Yahoo! run the currently "hot" ad unit (they also do rewarded video), they own it.
But I just launched a yahoo/gemini campaign 2 weeks ago, for leadgen on web. They definitely have more than banners.
(Also, I've found banner ads can refer to either the format [728x90 graphic] or the model [pay per view/CPM/CPV]. They offer the gamut just like everyone else, even the small shady players.
To say that yahoo just has banners is very incorrect.
The yahoo.com homepage used to command some of the highest ad rates on the entire internet, but now you can buy their crappy inventory for a few cents/click, some of the lowest in the industry, even amongst other junk like taboola and outbrain.
The fact that simple Banner ads are no longer acceptable is the reason I use uBlock Orgin....
1. http://www.recode.net/2016/7/7/12116296/marissa-mayer-deal-m...
DDG is itself a privacy proxy for search. Yahoo's privacy policy doesn't much matter if DDG are proxying (and anonymising) search requests. The substance of search results would matter.
(Incidentally, since the switch, and I believe DDG were using Bing principally earlier, quality seems down somewhat.)
Seems like a no brainier to Mozilla.
I still have trouble wrapping my head around why Microsoft even made the offer, but I have even more trouble understanding why Yahoo rejected it.
Yahoo: MS offered us way more than we can figure out we're worth. They must know something we don't. Reject the offer and we'll monetize it ourselves!
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!"
Were they the right choices given all the information those people had back then? It seems that they were.
You could say the same thing ("Given all the information those people have back then, the best decision would have been to sell") about Apple right before Steve Jobs came back and turned it around. In fact here's what Michael Dell famously said: ("What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders")
So, in 2016 dollars we're talking $5bn for their core web business vs. 50bn+ (2016 dollars) for the 2008 MSFT offer.
That doesn't mean that that's the way it evolved, but it's a way to categorize it mentally so it makes sense. While there's no logic for it conflating with 'million' and 'mega', at least 'mm' is fairly unique, unless you measure your money by its length.
Later, of course, people assimilated the operation of the M to the other letters, esp. on the dates of printed books. However, if we are discussing manuscript practice in the 15th century, the medieval approach and not the modern approach to Roman numerals would likely be in play...
In any event, using mm. to represent mille mille (a thousand thousand, a million in modern parlance) would create no cognitive dissonance as it does today.
See how the currency sign for GBP looks like a capital L? and the currency sign for shillings and pence was "s" and "d"? (now the uk use "p" for pence since decimalisation). So "Lire", "Soldi" and "Denarii" were the denominations of Italian currency in the the late Renaissance, and this obscure terminology was because originally the bankers in London were from Lombardy.
So I always thought MM was the same. For something like "Mille Mille" (ie one thousand thousands). I don't have any reference for this, that was just my own theory, and it's slightly undermined by the fact that the Italians have a word for "Million" ("Milione").
http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2016/07/the-many-uses-of-randomnes...
That said, a social network centered on photo sharing and a slightly more handy version of email or event sharing is definitely not one of these high impact ventures in my opinion, so yes, I would have sold that long ago and went to work on something more meaningful.
If things seem to be going relatively well, and you've already taken $10-20-50m off the table, what's the point in selling? At that point it's only really cash in a bank account that you then need to manage and reinvest. Obviously, if you feel the wheels are going to come flying off, sell.
Same for a college degree. If you're a self motivated person and a learner, you don't need it. But if you need your hand held, you won't achieve much. Degree or no degree. More than anything this has to with the person and his/her work ethic and intellectual curiosity.
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"?
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.
In recent years Verizon has acquired technology companies EdgeCast Networks (CDN) and upLynk (Video Streaming) which form the core of Verizon's Digital Media Services [1].
Combining these assets with AOL (AdTech) and Yahoo (if the deal happens) gives Verizon an end-to-end platform for the creation, delivery and monetization of content (with focus on video) in the Internet.
Disclosure: I work at EdgeCast and we operate as a technology company, hate bureaucracy and try very hard to innovate and stay agile.
But there's evidence that Verizon made deals with cable companies to bundle wireless services, so Verizon could keep caring less about rotting infrastructure.
Also, they have internal conflict of interests. I.e. their execs are all about wireless, and simply don't care about landline business. Splitting it in two could actually help, since then they'll care about improving.
> It's not like anybody else is chomping at the bit to build fiber in those places.
Verizon stopped building out fiber everywhere. Only when they have a contract, they do it (very reluctantly). Some areas are indeed less profitable because of population density and other such factors. But others are not.
And Verizon is a public company. Investors are pushing it to ditch wireline entirely. If the wireline unit was spun off, would those same investors suddenly be eager to give the divested company billions to build a bunch of marginally profitable infrastructure?
Because they never cared about improving its efficiency. They actually noted, that when they upgrade to fiber, their expenses drop. A huge drain on their landline profits is their copper network which is falling apart. Their fiber is profitable.
Investors want them to focus on wireless. As I said, if it would have been split off, investors would have cared about how to improve their landline profits.
More generally, Verizon is legally required to keep serving the places it already served with copper. If it could save money by switching that with fiber, they'd do it. You're accusing a money-grubbing big corporation of leaving billions of dollars on the table each year.
Their execs indeed have no clue how to mange landline business or they simply don't care about it. Their whole background is wireless and they are trying to get rid of landline (selling it off).
Seidenberg was landline man through and through. He cared about improving it and moving it forward. McAdam has no clue about it and doesn't care.
Yes, or rather they aren't interested in getting that competence, because they are too focused on wireless.
> And Google isn't chomping at the bit to buy it because?
Google might at some point. They can have different reasons to wait. For instance Verizon are still obligated to build out in some areas. Or Google want to avoid dealing with unions and such.
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.
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.
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.
If only those in charge of Yahoo and other failing companies knew of such a cunning strategy...
/s
a) startups aren't better at building websites than big businesses
b) Yahoo! management came up with something better...
Who said they are? That's a huge "citation needed".
>b) Yahoo! management came up with something better...
They did come up with $5 billion dollars (plus other assets of huge value not included in the buy) -- as opposed to a hypothetical scenario which could have just as easily exhausted their resources, alienated their employees, and killed their current value for not much to show for.
She chose to try and become a content/adtech company without first rate tech, features or user interfaces.
One group thought that Y! had a shot at a viable business. The other group wanted out, but didn't want to sell until they got their cut from the Alibaba/Y!JP investments (which also propped up the stock price for the whole thing). Mayer was hired by the first group to try and turn the tide. The second group agreed in the hope that it would also bring the stock price up a bit and make the non-Alibaba part of the company more valuable.
The IRS finally ruled that Yahoo can't just divest Alibaba &co. without paying a huge bill, and Mayer hasn't been able to do anything about the rest of the company. Which means the second group of investors is basically winning out and spinning off all the assets so they can close out their price at the value of the Alibaba stake and make their profit.
It's difficult to say that Mayer is 100% responsible since a good chunk of the board/investors didn't care or were actively against her from day one. Also, she didn't have all the tools that a turnaround CEO has at other companies because she had to protect the share price around the value of the Alibaba investments or that second group would simply fire her. It was always a longshot IMO.
This reminds me of JC Penney, where investors also brought in an exec from abother successful company in the hope that they could replicate that success. In that case it was Ron Johnson from Apple, who tried to replicate Apple's retail strategy at JC Penney with devastating results, and certainly not for lack of being given the latitude to implement whatever changes he asked for.
The situation at Yahoo is pretty similar. I wouldn't blame the board and investors for finally trying to cut their losses.
She could have taken the $1 billion and invest in a few hundred up and coming startups. At least it will do some good for Silicone Valley
The Yahoo deal seems way more down to Earth, compared to an astronomical offer by a company with cash to burn and a desperate desire to keep growth going up.
I don't believe that encompasses Mail.
The Yahoo Mail interface is much cleaner than I remember, though I don't enjoy the purple theme, the loading times, and the persistent "Try Firefox" banner in the top right.
Plus my mailbox is full of spam from Yahoo itself, like weekly emails from Yahoo Movies.
We, non-Chrome users, hate persistent "try Google Chrome" banners on every Google property too.
When layoffs were announced Mail was spared and actually grew.
I don't know why it hasn't improved. It's not for lack of trying.
Ah, that's why Yahoo has gone to hell — emacs users don't stay with the company. You see, emacs has 8 different mail clients: rmail, gnus, mh-e, wanderlust, mew, vm, notmuch & mu4e — and no true emacs user (not to be confused with no true Scotsman …) would want to read email in anything but his favourite text editor.
... or, now it being Verizon, they will just drip one email per day into the inbox and say that they only advertised up to 100% of email, but that the contract only really guarantees 0.01% of the advertised speed.
I think the BBC somehow thinks they're being ultraprecise by putting quotation marks around certain words, but it's just obnoxious.
So if anything, the headline should have been written "'Syrian migrant' behind German blast". But the BBC didn't do that, because all indications are that BBC journalists pepper their headlines randomly with quotation marks.
Randomly peppering headlines with quotation marks absolutely is not standard practice. Most American newspapers don't do it.
With LinkedIn you had an obvious path to continue growing as well as a pretty obvious path to profitability whenever they decided to stop growing.
Snapchat actually has pretty big growth prospects and has shown that they can monetize very well, so they can command a much higher multiple of their current earnings.
Twitter's market cap is just over 2x what Yahoo! sold for, so it's not like people think they are THAT much more valuable, and their stock has taken quite a beating over the last year because they're showing that they don't have a path to growth.
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.
So final math looks like this: $36.38b-$21b-$5.4b-$6.38b-(-$1.4b)=$5b
this is like buying someone body shop, looking at the body shop revenue, and then subtracting the price of the current owner paid-for porsche.
To use your analogy, it's like buying a body shop, but subtracting the $10,000,000 in real estate they own because it's not included in the sale.
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.
It should be interesting to see what is actually in the announcement.
I once sold a $1 beer to a friend for $2. Let's back-of-the envelope that:
100% markup, $1 profit. If I buy and sell 1 billion beers per year, that's a profit of $1B/year. Ok, so given a 5 year return on investment, that means my beer business is valued at $5 billion.
Nice! Anybody interested in investing please get in touch I'm raising a series A.
Valuations of public companies aren't always rational in my opinion, however they are (again in my opinion) better assessments of value than any one person's estimate. If you disagree and think you are able to make a better prediction, then by all means don't leave a reply here, just short the stock (and with leverage - use options, etc).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkUiRGQHjdc
So probably 'there is more to it' than you are giving credit for.
Kenny: Don't tell me my whistlin' is good, whistlin's dead, and we both know that.
And if you've convinced enough people that this is the case, so you get at least a few million dollars in investment, that would mean your company indeed has some value.
But selling $1 of beer of $2 to a friend once never got anybody anywhere.
You seem to conflate what happens in micro-micro-scale with what should be shown to be able to happen in the macro-world, for a valuation like $5 billion to start involving people investing lots of real money.
In other words, sure, valuations are based on extrapolation, but it's BS to think they're the same as (or based on) any small-scale extrapolation of an statistically insignificant transation (selling $2 worth of beer).
When the volume/sales/eyeballs/etc get so many that people start actually investing big money according to a large-sh valuation, the company has already passed a lot of basic tests...
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketcapitalization.asp
Anyone recommend a Tumblr export tool? The best, as far as I can tell, is jekyll-import (http://import.jekyllrb.com/docs/tumblr/), but I'm running into errors and getting weird results.
Axis of... something.
As a Verizon (now, specifically Wireless) customer, I've watched things go from "worth the price" to "what am I paying for?".
And Yahoo. Once proud, pioneering Yahoo.
And the remains of AOL are in the mix, as well?
I mostly feel this is somehow primarily going to shovel more crap at me.
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.
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.
Firefox stopped supporting Google searches and switched me to Yahoo, will this Yahoo change no longer support Mozilla and be taken off the list?
They will then continue to hold their Yahoo shares which will represent their holdings in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan as well as Yahoo's patent portfolio.
1. $5B / 948.25M outstanding shares ~= $5.27 per share.
Their share price is about 39 USD right now, that means they sold off a huge chunk of the biz for 13% (5.27/39.38 = 0.1338) of the stock's current valuation, right?
Forgive my incredulity, I genuinely didn't know how this kind of thing worked.
When you sell part of a business, the owners of the business (the stockholders) receive their share of the proceeds. Management (the CEO and other senior leaders) is hired by the stockholders to negotiate these sorts of deals (among other things). The stockholders are always free to fire management for poor performance if they don't like what management is doing.
You are correct to note that Yahoo's actual business represents only a small portion of the value of the company at this point. The majority of the value of the company is Yahoo's holdings in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan (a similarly named but completely separate enterprise).
Frankly, I'm a bit surprised that they managed to get $5B for their core business. I think YHOO shareholders are getting a pretty good deal here.
If you do a sum-of-the-parts valuation of Yahoo, you can end up seeing that the core business has a negative value. So holders of YHOO will trade something worth -1$bn for $5bn in cash, that's a pretty good deal.
> Yahoo owns about 35 percent of Yahoo Japan and 15 percent of Alibaba, two overseas companies that have long dwarfed Yahoo in size.
Will it stay like the Rocketmail accounts did, or will they turn off service for legacy email to save money?
Wanda Group, majority owner of AMC Theatres, also owns Legendary Entertainment. And AMC Theatres and Regal Entertainment Group co-own Open Road Films.
Stepping back in time, infamous low-budget studio Cannon Films owned hundreds of theaters.
> Like car factory owning dealerships?
Plenty of folks think that would be a good thing, e.g., [1] [2]
[1] https://www.justice.gov/atr/economic-effects-state-bans-dire...
[2] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/competition-matters/20...
Does Verizon share the same values as duckduckgo?
Trailing-edge users are those people we might otherwise make fun of, but they don't run adblockers and they don't constantly question the services they use. These people have used Yahoo Mail for a decade and will continue to for the rest of their lives.