How Yahoo came up with its new name: Altaba | Hacker News Reader

How Yahoo came up with its new name: Altaba

washingtonpost.com

102 pointstaylorbuley78 comments

Still the third most visited Web property in the United States

According to Alexa it's the 5th [1] but I'm sure it's not a huge difference between third and fifth.

Yahoo still makes almost $5BN a year. It's a 24 year old internet behemoth.

I mean by any reasonable measure of a company, those are ungodly numbers. Given how people talk about Yahoo though you'd think it was populated with lepers.

I guess it's all about managing expectations.

[1]http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US

Part of it is that this is HN, and Yahoo as an internet company has been boring for a long, long time[1].

Another part of it is that it shows the incredible value of inertia. Sports scores and email is with $5B.

And I think a third is just a bit of schadenfreude from the internet insider set. Selling half of yourself to a Baby Bell-revenant and turning the rest into a tracking stock is a sad way for the first internet directory to die.

[1] The last vaguely interesting thing I can remember was Yahoo Pipes.

> Part of it is that this is HN, and Yahoo as an internet company has been boring for a long, long time

It's like the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M). They make $30 billion in annual sales with 55k products. How often do you hear about them? They're big, profitable, and news is mostly boring to HN interests.

I did not know that's what 3M stands for, learn a new thing every day here at HN :)

They are used in many MBA courses as the reference story for a conglomerate and also for the idea of core competencies, namely "applying coatings to backings".

I heard loads about 3M when I was in college. It was probably one of the most frequently mentioned companies in the context of strategic management.

Same with the semiconductor industry. There are many profitable industries that don't release a webapp or use a JS framework.

Part of why you probably don't hear about "Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing" is that the company is no longer named that. :-) Wikipedia says "formerly known as". But, fascinating, I didn't know that.

> no longer named that

And now Yahoo will be Altaba :)

I mentioned the same thing to a former Yahoo employee recently (about Pipes), he looked at me for a second and responded "Well, there was Hadoop."

The Alexa rankings follow what is superficially akin to a Zipf distribution [0], so one would actually expect something like a 40% difference between the 3rd and 5th sites.

[0] http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/zipf-s-dist...

As an aside, isn't Alexa sampled from a self-selecting set of people who install a browser toolbar of dubious value? Should its figures really be relied on at all?

I'm not sure there is a great way to really measure this type of data. Granted I don't think Alexa is a good point to argue if something is top 3 or top 5. It at leasts provides some sort of indication of overall measurement error. We can probably say it is at least in the top 10 which is probably meaningful enough for the discussion at hand.

This article could be a tweet:

The new name is meant to be a combination of the words “alternative and Alibaba,” according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the individual was not authorized to speak on the record about the name change.

Most articles could be condensed into headlines

> Most articles could be condensed into headlines

There really needs to be an app for that

This reddit bot does a fantastic job of this. Summarizing articles in a readable manner.

https://www.reddit.com/user/autotldr/

https://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotld...

There was, it was bought by Yahoo... http://summly.com

I remember this. Created by a 16 year old[1].

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_D'Aloisio

Now we know what kind of mentality took Yahoo down. Marisa Mayer should have read less HN?

There is an Indian startup that does that: InShorts.com

Matt Drudge makes millions doing just that. He's the greatest wire editor of his generation.

If you're going to claim that it could be a tweet at least bring it down to 140 ;)

The new name is meant to be a combination of the words "alternative and Alibaba” according to a person familiar w/ the company’s thinking.

We can't be too hard on them. At least it's real news this time.

I thought it was a nod to the windows command for pivoting to another application. Alt + Tab => Altaba

Alt + Tabber

Someone particularly proficient in changing between windows

A window everybody Alt-Tabbed out of long ago yet still isn't closed.

I guess that name choice is just more evidence the CEO wasn't the only moron who brought about Yahoo brand's ruin.

In Danish it sounds like "alle taber" which means "everybody loses".

spectacular

Altavista + Alibaba was my first thought.

I was about to comment on the same thing.

Altaba is the abbreviation of alibaba's father in China. 阿(A)里(Li)它(Ta)爸(Ba) XD

On Chinese Interwebs, it's been called Ali's Dad. You can google for 阿里他爸.

As an English speaker this comes across as such a horrible name (for me at least).

A typo: alt-abc?

I really do not get it.

Verizon spends a lot of money for what essentially is a widely recognizable brand, popular destination, and an email service, and they change it?

"I saw it on Altaba"???

All these people with emails @yahoo.com is free advertising for yahoo.com, but guess what, no more yahoo.com? Will they try to force a change of email domain over 20 years and kill the email service for good?

I have no clue now why they bought Yahoo in the first place...

Edit: got it all wrong. Thanks all for clarifying which piece is what.

You realize that Verizon is buying the Yahoo brand? Altaba is just the shell company that holds onto their pieces of Alibaba and Y! Japan.

There is a lot of misunderstanding about what is going on. The current Yahoo basically exists of 3 main parts:

1. The Yahoo website and properties that most folks think of when they think "Yahoo". 2. The 15% share of Alibaba 3. The share in Yahoo Japan.

Verizon bought part #1. That is not changing its name and will continue to be accessible on yahoo.com. Parts 2 and 3 are being left behind in a company that is being renamed Altaba.

Not quite- the part of Yahoo owned by Verizon will still be called Yahoo, but the part not acquired by Verizon (essentially the Alibaba shares) will be called Altaba.

Well, one wonders how AOL still strike to survive after all these years. MSN gone. Yahoo gone.

We just had this discussion at work.. one of the recent reports stated over 2 million subscribers still pulling in ~600 million a year just from that (pales in comparison to ad revenue and past performance, but still... 2 million!). The average per-account income was something like $21/month.

That's more an indicator of how large parts of America don't have affordable or any broadband access. I'd trust AOL to be around longer than NetZero or any other bottom feeder ISP.

Well, the AARP has 38 million members, so that's not too surprising, I guess. (I'm saying that a lot of old folks don't realize there is an Internet, or email, or online news, etc. without AOL.)

My grandparents still use AOL, because they live in the absolute middle of nowhere (aka they drive roughly an hour to be able to do groceries). Their options have been basically dial up, or extremely expensive satellite internet.

Verizon has been promising the little place they live for around 5 years that they will eventually get some sort of service, however last time i was there i could barely get any cell coverage.

My previous company built web caching servers for independent ISPs. We served a bunch of providers in rural areas who offered WiMAX to customers that were too far out to get DSL or cable internet, and with lower latency than satellite. It was usually somewhat expensive, compared to DSL/cable, but the ISP could profitably serve individual customers the "last mile" (or last dozen miles, with a repeater or two). A lot of those ISPs died as antitrust regulation in the broadband industry failed and their nearby customers got poached by the telcos and cable operators, making it harder to operate at large enough scale to make it work. So, there was a moment where it looked like a lot of those difficult to reach customers would be reached by ISPs willing to roll out WiMAX with tall antennas and repeaters. But, it didn't work out, and most of them died.

Anyway, I agree with you that there are still stretches of the US that have people but no broadband. And, my primary internet is mobile broadband (from two different carriers, since I travel and often find only one of them works reliably), so I know the pain of it first-hand. But, still, I'd wager that most AOL customers are older folks (even if the reason is also that people living in rural areas tend to be older).

Wi-Max or alternatives like DIY long range Wi-Fi, cannot have both 10 miles (~15 km) range and high throughput. At the very minimum because earth curvature, and also because the radio signal has to go right through the moisture in between the sender and receiver. I came up a few years ago with the idea that it would be possible to use the mesospheric layer as a passive relay for communications at 40 miles range in desert areas. This even during daylight. It is inspired by the "laser guide star" in astronomy with coding à la 802.11 (Golay/LDPC).

More about it here: https://padiracinnovation.org/2017/01/10/mesosphere-light-sc...

Sure you can, you just need a bigger tower; you can get gigabit speeds with microwaves, no sweat, very directional too. Signal loss due to moisture? Up the power. It doesn't work? Use more power, or add 5 feet to the tower and try again. Remember, if brute force isn't working, you aren't using enough of it.

BTW: I like how you kinda gloss over the advanced math for atmospheric corrections. The idea is interesting, though.

Thanks for having read the stuff.

* About the horizon problem: You need a tower which is 90 meters (270 feet) high to reach a 40 km receiver. It exists but it is pretty costly ... and hugly.

* About the power problem, this is regulated. For Wi-Fi I think it is around 80mW. It is not much.

* About glossing on math. You are right about it, but after all this is well known: The idea is used heavily in astronomy exactly for this purpose since 10 years. No need to reinvent what more gifted people have already invented.

"if brute force isn't working, you aren't using enough of it"

You just made my day with that phrase.

It's also almost pure profit, compared to the ads business. Something like 90% of AOL's actual profit is from dialup.

Rural areas rely on dial up internet

How many rural areas still use dialup but don't have access to cellular yet?

My grand parents do not get celluar where they live in very remote Montana. Apparently ether Verizon/AT&T (i can't remember which) has been promising them Celluar/Cable service for over 5 years now, and has never come through with it.

Honestly i think the only reason they even pay for AOL is because they use it to keep in touch with relatives via email.

Sadly every cellular map I've seen has a big black hole with is Wyoming/Montana. I feel for your grandparents, beautiful country but no connectivity.

Sounds like an opportunity for someone to come along and create a new network based on open source mobile stuff.

http://osmocom.org/

"Open source mobile stuff." - Good plan, sounds well thought out, sign me up.

If the CCC can do it every year, Burning Man can do it, Niue can do it, an island off Nicaragua can do it, then the middle of the USA can too.

http://wiki.rhizomatica.org/index.php/Rhizomatica_GSM http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Building-a-GSM-network... http://itp.junglebrains.com/setting-up-your-own-cellular-net...

And it would, except that Charter communications owns rights to the cellular spectrum there. So once such a system were in place Charter would no doubt come in and take it away from you and then operate it at a profit if they could.

A lot. Most of the upper midwest lacks cellular coverage. You need to drive to the top of a hill to even hit a gsm signal at one bar. The old analog signals were better but they're gone now.

> Most of the upper midwest lacks cellular coverage.

What now? This simply isn't true.

Its spotty at best, when you live in an area with hills all over, LTE/gsm is not your friend.

Verizon and AT&T have LTE coverage over most of the Midwest.

Yahoo is going to join AOL as part of Verizon. So Yahoo managed to outlive them by a few years at least.

https://www.aabacosmallbusiness.com/

With Aabaco being taken by the original spin-off plan, this is simply an alternative company name so that they still get the stock symbol they want for the investment company that will remain behind after all the web assets have been sold to Verizon.

That's it.

How do you even pronounce that?

Ahl-tah-bah

Altabadabadoo!

Alt + Tab + A?

Did no one ever have the conversation about how Alibaba is a racist stereotype or do we just give Asia a pass on this kinda thing?

No Westerner wants to be the one to call Chinese people racist

How is Alibaba a racist stereotype? The character is from a timeless classic... its like claiming a hypothetical company called Lancelot is a racist stereotype.

What "stereotype" does "Ali Baba" invoke? As I recall the story, Ali Baba was a clever man who started out poor but made his fortune by outwitting dangerous thieves with the help of his brother's super-capable slave girl. Is there something bad there? Even if there is, is there something that anyone would have a stereotype about?

There are other characters from literature that could be problematic, but this just isn't one of those.

alt+tab it

Alibabers will kill the company, they have no talent running western style dotcoms

Neither altaba or Alibaba is a western style dot-com. That part of yahoo is being sold to Verizon. Altaba is just a holding company for Alibaba stock.

Well I had an impression that Alibaba was a party to the deal. It appears, they aren't

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