Ballmer Speaks, Yahoo’s Market Cap Jumps More Than $3 Billion | Hacker News Reader

Ballmer Speaks, Yahoo’s Market Cap Jumps More Than $3 Billion

techcrunch.com

11 pointsqhoxie15 comments

Am I the only who thinks Yahoo is going to be in excellent shape after they trim down and start focusing on what they're good at?

My Mother uses Yahoo for mail and news, I use Geocities for a few small webpages. I think they're a great company with the best PhD-to-riches story ever from the 2 founders Jerry and David. I think their founding story is even better than Google, even if their market cap is a fraction of that.

What's so interesting about Jerry and David's story? I remember to have found what I read about it quite uninteresting, so maybe I lost something.

I think it's because they turned a website list into a 60 billion dollar company in about 5 years. And one investor in the early days was Masayoshi Son, and he was once the second richest person in the world in 1999.

And that advert in the film Inspector Gadget.

It's not worth a corporate biography book, I admit.

[Edit] And after the dotcom crash, their market cap (in 2006/2007) was just half of its peak, quite impressive. And they never chickened out and bought, say, Disney. They stuck to their guns.

What's the PhD part? What I like about Google's story is the PhD-technology-research that went into it (tho Woz wasn't a PhD student, I'd put the Apple story in a similar category).

Creating a $60B co from nothing is an astonishing achievement - but this one sounds like a business victory, not a technology victory. Although cool++, it's not a PhD-to-riches story - they just happened to be PhD students.

http://docs.yahoo.com/info/misc/history.html "Before long they were spending more time on their home-brewed lists of favorite links than on their doctoral dissertations."

Exactly; that's why I didn't find Yahoo's story very interesting.

May I also ask a language-related question. Why are you saying "story" in all these posts, when you are talking about a true story? I thought the word "history" was to be used in those cases, but I think there is a subtler difference between story/history than I previously thought (I thought: story=fiction, history=non-fiction). Could anybody please give me a pointer on this?

Sorry, story is used in British English (from my experience) to mean a description of an event or a sequence of events, fictional or not.

Thank you very much! I'm glad to know this now.

Every time MS nods at Yahoo the stock rises X%, and when the deal is obviously not going to happen it drops > X%. This is a really interesting way of battering your competition.

I'd look in my own backyard if I were Balllmer. dump everything that is average (msn, vista, live, etc.) and come up with brand new products, from scratch

And what exactly would be said "brand new products"?

The same, but appended 'Beta'...

This is why you're not in charge of MS. They make tons of money on their existing, if problematic, products.

Not for long they won't.

Just in the consumer space right now they're fighting Google and Yahoo in web, Sony and Nintendo in gaming, Apple in mp3, Android/IPhone in smartphones.

Plus most of their money comes from lucrative deals with computer manufacturers. Sooner or later Dell, etc will realize that Apple is eating at their market share and Vista isn't helping and they'll start reconsidering their agreements with MS (and perhaps consider investing in customized versions of Linux)

All while Google Apps is starting to compete with their Office/Exchange offering on the low end and IBM and Sun are getting ready to step in at the high end with cross platform solutions. I'm curious at how MS is going to turn the situation around.

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