Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

I'm seriously flabbergasted that they continue to let this happen. The last time you would've thought head would roll, they would batten down the hatches, notify users and be completely proactive in defending against another attack.

To me, it looks like they just said, "Well, fuck it, it won't happen again, why invest the time and money to protect our users?" I'd also point out the breech they're referencing was from 2013 so any data that was pilfered has already been running wild on the underground and been passed around a few thousand times. Another reason it just shows they don't care at all.

After this, no investor should touch this company with a ten foot pole.

Having been in the role of advocating investing in security the typical questions are;

   * "Will the product run faster?",
   * "Will the customers get better service?",
   * "Will someone choose us over a competitor 
      because of this?" 

But if you can say, "When you try to sell this company to another company, the strong security policies and technology this funding will provide insurance against having a security breach like Yahoo! and tanking the sales price."

Now that resonates because they probably have a lot to win or lose over the sales price of the company in a merger/acquisition strategy.

"Its a few million now, but without it, it could cost you billions of personal wealth down the road. Now who's in?"

The problem is that it's hard to evaluate security. Unless you know the area very well, it's hard to hire someone that knows the area well, which is a catch-22.

Do we know that Yahoo skimped on security, or did they just not get what they paid for because they didn't know better?

Yahoo! (like Twitter, in my opinion) may only find a buyer in that sort of financial purchaser who doesn't mind looking bad resurrecting corpses. Unfortunately, those bidders are notorious low ballers.

[1] http://marketingland.com/yahoo-microsoft-rps-guarantee-42680

And mail would be just fine if they'd remove all the crap so it would run faster.

Lots of non techy still uses yahoo mail, and that won't change as long as the service exists.

Do you see how that argument is flawed? Leaders in a market tend to be worth much more and have much higher profits than even the 2nd player in the market, let alone the third or fifth. When you have a small percentage of the market, it's also much more difficult to make something out of it, than it would say for a market leader to go from 30% market share to 50% market share (and billions of dollars more in revenue).

We could repeat the argument for a small social network that has a much lower market value than Facebook per user, and so on.

However, they are hemorrhaging money. You don't generally buy for revenue unless you're buying a small startup, where the growth rate is exponential and you'll become profitable once you hit economies of scale.

Yahoo has already ostensibly hit economies of scale, is stagnant in terms of growth, and is losing both money and eyeballs. What part of that is attractive to the balance sheet? You might not even be able to milk it to its demise, as it's currently unprofitable.

Isn't Microsoft the one providing search results? If it is, then Microsoft ultimately controls the traffic, not Yahoo.

Whatever yahoo has in comparison is negligible.

If the Verizon deal falls through, I'd say "someone with the skill and resources to keep Tumblr running buying Tumblr, either together with other parts of Yahoo! or separately."

Maybe Google would buy given that it's pretty much bombed out on photo sharing itself.

Tumblr has insanely high operating costs and practically no revenue stream. Yahoo has spent a lot of time and money (while fighting with Tumblr people) to get these costs down, but much of that work would be undone to separate Tumblr from Yahoo.

So much of Tumblr's traffic is comprised "non-monetizable" porn sites that Yahoo foots the CDN bill for, which does nothing to build the brand or the social aspect of the service. They can't truly crack down on it though, because that would reveal the truth: there isn't that much real use to justify the spending.

Why is there value? Honest question, just curious. Do myspace friends, for instance, still have value in today's day and age?

Between AOL and Yahoo (and their own Verizon email addresses where they're an ISP), they'd have a huge portion of the world's email accounts, and I could see a push to pull an Outlook.com: Move everyone to a new service, but keep all the old legacy email addresses from older services.

A billion compromised accounts seems like it could fill that role. Many people may not understand their online information's privacy/security, but that's an ear-grabbing number.

Imagine if I had two friends, Google and Yahoo. Both are asking me if they can borrow a dollar.

Over the last few years when Google borrows a dollar it gives back an extra 3.5 cents the next year as a thank you. On the opposite side, when Yahoo has borrowed a dollar they've lost 13 cents within the next year.

Left to their own devices, Yahoo will implode and be out of money in under 7 years, likely much sooner. The $4 billion price tag was a way of salvaging what may still be valuable properties within Yahoo, but the company on paper is rapidly losing money at any valuation.

It's like asking someone to buy a car that's broken when it's unclear if they can fix it.

and this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13182120

Also, at this point, under-investing in security never pays.

"Verizon Communications Inc. is exploring a price cut or possible exit from its $4.83 billion pending acquisition of Yahoo! Inc., after the company reported a second major e-mail hack affecting as many as 1 billion users"

http://www.wsj.com/articles/material-adverse-change-clause-i...