Verizon Reduces Yahoo Deal Price by $250 Million in Revised Deal | Hacker News Reader

Verizon Reduces Yahoo Deal Price by $250 Million in Revised Deal

bloomberg.com

130 pointsrichardboegli90 comments

$1B would have been better, but this is a dream come true for the people who take infrastructure and security seriously.

We've got Amy Pascal's head on a spike, now we have the same for the Yahoo deal.

Please, may this be the year that Wall Street is finally bitten in a serious way by a tech company flaming out due to the technical incompetence of its leadership.

Did you forget about 2001 already?

That wasn't technical incompetence, per se, but an unsustainable financial bubble.

Unless executive golden parachutes get trimmed does it really make a difference? The execs that doused the company in gasoline, struck the match and then walked away won't be around to try and operate on $3.75B instead of the original $4 billion after the acquisition is complete.

This is just Verizon exploiting some leverage to get a better price, it's not actual punishment of incompetent leadership.

Pecunia non olet.

If buyers were to talk the price down due to security sloppiness routinely, then it doesn't really matter why they do it: Shareholders looking for an eventual exit would have to factor their company's security practice into the their sale prospects whatever the reason.

Yep, this is what I expect. The pressure will be on prospective buyers to insist in a rigorous security audit and preparation for that audit will get worked into standard business plans.

I work for a huge telecom, and we take sucurity pretty seriously. Sometimes it seems like we've been doing nothing but security upgrades in the last seven or eight years.

what the hell does amy pascal have to do with this? She was a movie producer? Is it just because she's also a woman?

The Sony hack had a significant negative impact on her career. The parent post asserts that this "is a dream come true for the people who take infrastructure and security seriously." because people in powerful positions won't care / listen to their security teams unless they fear the consequences of ignoring them.

I'm not sure if you could get any more hysterical about something so mundane.

Let's see here:

"She served as the Chairperson of the Motion Pictures Group of Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) and Co-Chairperson of SPE, including Sony Pictures Television, from 2006 until 2015"

A movie producer eh. Hardly her most important role at Sony.

Oh please, the executives are walking away with millions. As usual the only people actually losing are the trench workers, I especially feel for any Visa workers right now (regardless of your feelings about that sort of thing, they're just people trying to earn a living, and with the current political climate getting canned might well mean getting deported.)

By all accounts the leadership put Yahoo into a nosedive and will be paid millions if not billions for their services and the little guy gets screwed.

Yahoo was already in a nosedive. The most you can say about Mayer is she didn't find a way to pull the company out of it.

Didn't mention Meyer, I think she tried some good things, I also don't think she tried hard enough on a few other things. But I digress, it's all armchair analysis at this point.

I'm referring to the leadership as a whole, before and including Meyer.

Yahoo most likely has contingencies in place that would make a pullout from the deal very painful for VZ.

Otherwise VZ would have much more leverage, since they don't need Yahoo like Yahoo needs them.

Laws are being relaxed on subsidizing data plans with ads so Verizon wants ad-tech. Is it really that hard to understand?

yahoo has adtech?

I was as surprised as you are, https://advertising.yahoo.com/

Yahoo needs Verizon ? Yahoo just posted $300M Q4 net profits.

They made $66.2M in Q4 from their actual business activity. 3 quarters prior to that have been losses.

Operating Income -110.5M -107.1M -39.4M 66.2M

Q4 earnings was $160mil, most of it came from Equity in earning.

What is the argument here ? $66.2M 'actual' net profit is still net profit. Indeed there were losses in previous quarters, but it seems that they managed to turn it around. Yahoo is by no means a healthy, growing company at this point but I fail to see how they "need" Verizon.

The argument makes sense if you understand the context behind the Y! deal.

1. A large number of their shareholders want to be able to separate the web business from their outside investments in Y! Japan and Alibaba, but they aren't allowed to without taking a huge tax hit.

2. The only way left to facilitate this deal is to sell off the web business and then do other stuff with the remaining equity that basically turns the Y! shares into Alibaba and Y! Japan shares.

3. But no one wants to buy the web business since it's not very profitable (for a tech company it's very low price/earnings and profit margin) and looking worse thanks the the security issues.

4. That's why Y! needs Verizon much more than the other way around.

Point 1 is clear and on the company's todo list for a long time, but 2 and 3 are not: Yahoo could create a new entity into which the web business is transferred.

they tried that, and all the tax experts they could hire said they'd still get a huge IRS bill.

Not true: they tried to create an entity and move the Yahoo! Japan and Alibaba holdings in there, which had the perceived danger of a huge tax bill. They could create an entity to move the main business in, which would be taxed as much as the current deal.

I think it's safe to assume that they investigated every other angle as far as reducing the tax burden goes and this is the best they came up with (source: fiduciary responsibility if nothing else). Unless you have some inside info or reporting that says otherwise.

Meanwhile:

http://www.zdnet.com/article/yahoo-warning-users-that-hacker...

You've got to give it to Yahoo. It must be the only company that broke its own world record for a data breach. That's kind of impressive in its own way.

That's it? Seems like Verizon's negotiation experts weren't very good. Yahoo board is desperate to sell the company. I think they would've easily given up on a billion dollars to do it.

Also, if this was some other company, it may have actually cared about Yahoo's disastrous data breaches and its cooperation with the NSA. But because is Verizon, the cooperation with the NSA and the spying infrastructure being already in place is probably why Verizon didn't want to cut too much from the price.

Yahoo's board may be desperate, but that doesn't mean they necessarily believed they were contractually in the wrong here. Verizon only had an out if it could show that this event was a "material adverse effect" on the business, which is a very high standard to meet. Verizon likely also preferred to close the deal, and neither company wanted to take the risk of litigating this and losing.

> it may have actually cared about Yahoo's disastrous data breaches and its cooperation with the NSA. But because is Verizon, the cooperation with the NSA and the spying infrastructure being already in place is probably why Verizon didn't want to cut too much from the price.

Exactly what I was thinking. Verizon seems more desperate than Yahoo. Been trying to figure out what a phone company wants to do with these online user accounts. The only thing I can come up with is data-mining, surveillance and data-sharing. This seems to be what motivates those in power these days. It's about control.

I just don't see a telephone company getting excited about email, news feeds, Yahoo Answers and some of the other properties available for it's own sake.

The next question is: how deep is Verizon into surveillance already and, aside from marketing and ads in a business they know little about, what their ultimate goals are?

There were already contracts signed.

Not that I understand how the deal structure is priced, but that seems like a win for Yahoo at this point?

I'd say so, I always assumed $~1 billion would get shaved off the asking price after the PR nightmare caused by the hacking.

If anyone from Yahoo is listening, I'm still trying to get into my Flickr account after about a year and 10+ contact attempts now. You guys literally have thousands of users in a holding pattern complaining and you're not doing anything about it [1].

I'm not trying to cause trouble or shake anything up. I'm an honest person who just wants in my account with all my photos. Meanwhile while all this happens you're just leaking and leaking account info every year.

What am I to do? Yahoo Help is just a FAQ that has no route for me to submit my identification information. Flickr's legacy login is gone. My original gmail was deleted. I do not have a route for escalating my issue. I'll show you my driver's license, birth certificate, maybe even the last 4 numbers of the CC I used for flickr pro in 2008.

What do I do? Get a lawyer? This is my stuff! Get it together Yahoo!

https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157668446997150/

Yahoo has a "concierge customer support" team for exceptions. (No, I can't/won't refer you.)

If you won't, then don't mention it. It comes across extremely rude and arrogant ("oh yeah I think I know a way to help you, but no I won't.")

The information might be useful nevertheless.

He is signalling that he has connections. One day we could be as cool as this guy.

No, it's because I used them once for a former employer issue (after a Yahoo! employee referred me ~2 years ago for that specific thing).

Knowing that the program exists should be sufficient for anyone who needs this to find access, though. Hint: google the fucking string I quoted. But I'm not putting in any effort beyond communicating that fact for some random, hostile person on a website, no.

Try https://twitter.com/YahooCare, just maybe.

Hahaha. Yahoo employees don't read hacker news :-)

Yep, I have exactly the same problem.

Thanks for posting, I thought I was the only one with this problem.

same exact problem thought i was the only one

Me too. For me it is because I moved country, and now my 2FA SMS won't work because my number changed. And there is no way around it, no 2FA no account.

I mean, yes, I understand security blah blah. But if I can send you a scan of my passport, which shows the same me as in most of the photos, surely that is an exception? And if I can reply to the same username@gmail.com too? But no, there is no way I can get to a human.

I am a bit torn on this one. On one hand it makes sense that you shouldn't lose the account, on the other it opens 2FA up to social engineering.

Recently I have been a lot more careful storing provided one time codes or the original QR code to prevent running into this.

Best practice is to never use 2FA SMS

Agreed, but it was the best option available at the time.

Can this be a lesson to all to never keep an only copy of your photos on a photo site, even if you are paying for it.

Unless there's another free hosting site with unlimited pictures up to 14mpx and unlimited vids up to fullhd I'm giving all my trust to Google <3

Again, don't put all your eggs in one basket. Store them somewhere else - there is plenty of providers: Dropbox, Amazon, Microsoft, Backblaze, ect.

WD, seagate.

(I.e. your own hardware)

And make sure at least two of them have egress policies so you can get your data back. Regardless, keep you own backup somewhere unless you don't care about losing the data.

But Google gives UNLIMITED storage for FREE. Do these guys give? Dont think soo..

Well yeah, if your pictures are only worth "FREE", then that's the right call.

How does this relate to the fact that the photos are stored for free? You store them the same on apple drive and it's not free..

I read it as you only use one service because there is only one good free one (= not willing to pay for a second copy = can't be that valuable)

I've just emailed you for details; I'll try to get the right person to help.

Email support is available from Yahoo, if you're locked out of your Flickr account:

http://bit.ly/2l14F4Q

Hi Tony- My name is Darius, PM on the Flurry team. Spoke with the Flickr team and they will follow up.

The fact that people have to do this to get that team's attention is ridiculous.

Do you guys remember when a few years ago Yahoo decided to make old, stale accounts up for grabs again? I lost my old Yahoo account which was forwarding mail to my main Google account. I haven't logged into it in ages. I could never re-register it or reset access to it after Yahoo killed it. And luckily i was able to move everything away from it, BUT it still forwards me mail. At some point I remember getting something that indicated that somebody's using it. I still can't believe this bonehead move on Yahoo's part.

I am from a place where information security awareness is in general very low. So while people fill bank forms and all they don't usually give much care and often fill wrong mobile numbers and many times fill wrong emails or just <their first name>@some-email.com just because there's a field called "email" on the form. The agents (who are almost never bank employees and usually third party hires) also add it to "sir, don't worry, you sign here and here and I will do the rest".

So yeah, my my-first-name@hotmail.com/yahoo.com regularly gets: 3 bank statements, 2 credit card bills, 1 postpaid Internet and mobile connection bill, and password recovery mails from other Internet accounts, my mobile number gets OTPs for heaven's sake. I received a Facebook password reset mails.

Initially I would try to contact the bank/company and they couldn't care less. In fact people themselves didn't give two hoots - none of them (I was able to contact one guy on Facebook using the mobile number in mail). So I've created filters to delete them upon receipt.

What surprises me is even newsgroups verify email and some online services verify mobile too but banks never do. It's so crucial but banks never verify mobile numbers and emails, at least not here in India.

This is not even a mild slap on the wrist. It seems like Verizon has been very desperate to get Yahoo and blinked during the negotiations (after the revelations about the security violations/intrusions).

Also have a look at the latest yahoo mail breach https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13654696

Don't forget to reduce final price by 1 billion USD - http://www.recode.net/2016/7/7/12116296/marissa-mayer-deal-m...

Huh, I think Yahoo negotiated well.

Looks like the market agrees. Yahoo is up 2 points, Verizon is down 0.7.

“I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”

So I have 4 shares of Yahoo I bought a few years ago on a whim...what the heck should I do with them? I paid something like $40 per share.

If you like Alibaba then just keep holding. After the sale it is basically a tracking stock for BABA.

If you don't like BABA then you should probably sell?

Frankly, if you are asking strangers what to do with some stocks you bought, you might consider simply buying a broad market ETF like the SPY, VTI, or VT with the proceeds.

Asking "strangers", i.e. experts in internet forums related to a stock, is a key step in learning enough about a market to trade intelligently in it. Your comment reads a little like "investors asking baby questions should trade baby securities". But just asking people's opinions on a stock doesn't mean you are a low skill investor. Quite the opposite really. People who si questions tend to get smart.

this is a tech forum. any response you get should not be assumed to be from an expert.

I've come across more doctors and bankers on HN than on any other social bookmarking site I've ever read. It's not limited to a "tech forum".

He flippantly asked what to do with his 4 shares. Doubt he'd get a dcf analysis.

I'm actually being completely serious with my question -- it was the first investment I ever made, and I figure someone here might have some insight on whether I should just sell them or not. $200 is still $200, right? Plus maybe someone else is in a similar boat, albeit with more shares.

Only basic thing that comes to mind is: Don't buy $200 worth of stock. If you pay a broker $10 commission, you're already down 10% as soon as you decide to do it ($10 to buy and $10 to sell). Hell, even if you're buying $2000 worth of stock, you've lost 1% right off the bat.

The stock market is a casino for rich people, not us.

Anyone making an engineering level salary in the US should be saving a portion of their money and investing in the stock market. There are a wide variety of options that involve no commissions and allow you to own a broad cross section of the market. The Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF is a good place to start. As are Vanguard's age based funds and automatically reallocate to more conservative positions as you get older.

Writing off the stock market as a "casino for rich people" is a good way to make yourself poorer.

I wish there was a crash course on this when I was in college. I've been meaning to understand stock market, how to get involved. The most I got was 401k but I don't even look at my Fidelity. I know certain industries are projecting or doing well currently... but ugh.

Most of the information you need to know can fit on an index card:

http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2016/01/07/index-67f786d0f1f...

I think the parent meant don't waste trivial amounts of money buying individual stocks rather than don't invest at all.

I'm picking stocks with a small fund (started with $1500), and I'm up 300% in the past 12 months. I'm just doing it for fun, though.

The best answer you got was to not invest in individual stocks at all, and instead to globally diversify using index funds. For example, you can own basically every significant publicly traded company in the world by holding just VTI and VXUS (Vanguard ETFs). Or equivalent mutual funds. Much simpler and lower risk.

I never bought any more individual shares like that, it was really just for the emotional aspect of making my first investment after finally having the money to do it. Right now I have my company 401k and Schwab ETFs.

There's no way for people to answer this honestly without understanding your personal tax situation and financial goals. And it's not enough money to concern a financial adviser by itself.

Keep in mind, you're gonna pay brokerage fees and capital gains if you try to handle this by yourself. None of that amounts to alot of money, but enough to cut into your profits if you screw something up and the IRS gets to you. Best advice is, if you're far from retirement, just figure out how to get it rolled into a Roth IRA or something unless you actually need the cash.

Sell them (along with any other random stocks you bought on a whim) and invest in broad low cost index funds.

4? Your trade fee will be so large that you might as well hold onto it indefinitely.

Robinhood?

Not going to help unless you're already in Robinhood. I guess you could ACATS transfer to robinhood but most retail brokers will charge an outgoing ACATS fee.

Yahoo! seems to keep screwing up. Even this last thing is a screwup, last thing they did as Yahoo!, inc.

At least now we have a price point for what a breach costs. Very pricey it seems.

Yahoo has something you cant buy. Yahoo has what makes facebook unique and google plus suk. A user base, an fing large one. This discussion is not really for hacker news. We are techies, this is a talk for business men. If anyone has ad sales experience please step up and speak to the value of yahoo. Aol would love to have the inventory of yahoo in its graps and looks like they will finally get it.

Security is for techies, I dont think yahoo's user base cares as much as lets say githubs. So while bad, its context that will help here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com