I thought the point was that Yahoo, a public company, was throwing away 30 million for no apparent gain.
It does not, however, mean shareholders can't/shouldn't complain about throwing money away, though.
$30 million could be spent on building daycare for all Yahoo mums and dads who can no longer work from home.
The one thing that I have learned about corruption is that at least small instances of it occur everywhere, even if its not "the norm." Wherever there is way to make money, people might very well be doing it.
And yes you are right although I tried to imply that shareholders were the ones being screwed - this is obviously unfair to shareholders, whether the transaction is corrupt or not.
I think the OP sentiment and many comments here are mostly classic HN resentment of success.
Or, when the bizdev team is told to spend a billion dollars this year, (1) is is easier for them to like in extra money into each deal than to find more smaller deal, and (2) they don't get bonuses for only spending 500million and saying there is nothing else worth buying.
It's also just kind of how people are. You can't reasonably expect a large corporation -- which is just a big group of people who are all trying to make decisions and getting in each other's way -- to be able to make logical choices when they're subject to every large stakeholder's whim and every bit of incompetence that happens everywhere along the line.
Is it happening in a capitalist setting here? Yes. But it happens in all settings all over the world, so to suggest it's unique to this system ignores the actual nature of the issue (which is the Human Condition).
The downsizing and outsourcing is driven by incentives to remove cost from the balance sheet. If there's no incentive to do so wisely, if there's no disincentive against doing so poorly, people will inevitably make bad 'outsourcing' deals, just to have made them. Quality might take a hit, direct billings might skyrocket, products might have to be scrapped, etc. But if you don't fix the incentives, it will happen over and over.
Similarly, if you incentivize a person to make deals, if they have a stronger incentive to make deals than to make good deals (e.g. if they have no effective disincentive against making bad deals) bad deals will get made.
But:
1- Is the traction convertible to any Yahoo properties?
2- Are the 1 million "downloads" legitimate interested users? Do any of them still use the app?
3- Did the "traction" come from paying firms to get them to the top of app store(s)?
I assume Yahoo knows more about this stuff than I do, and I'm not a Yahoo shareholder. Still, I didn't get the impression that the article was just complaining about rich teenagers.
Technical parity is a bad way to price a company, i.e. the value of Summly cannot be approximated by what it would take to replicate the technology in-house.
For $30 million, even an order of magnitude less, I think a lot of us could put together a team good enough to implement the Summly app. That's what's being questioned by the blog post.