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Comment by gnok | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. We don't know what Yahoo wants to do with Tumblr. All we have are rumors, a WSJ report and tons of idle speculation. Without knowing what the intended end game is, I don't see how we can call the acquisition a "success" or "failure", much less the CEO's. I also don't agree that "a sign of progress" is "making it succeed in the long run".

Google is no genius with large acquisitions either. Motorola and Blogger come to mind immediately, but there are others too.

I think we can all agree that Yahoo has been mismanaged at least until recently. I just don't think a CEO's performance is a boolean value that depends on an undefined "any sign of failure" on a large acquisition with a 1 year time frame.

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Google is a genius at acquisitions IMO. To qualify as a genius you don't need a 100% of acquisitions to work out. You do need a few to work out tremendously. Google has those. Meanwhile, what's the last yahoo acquisition that didn't turn into disappointment soon after the acquisition? We can go back 15 years and be hard-pressed to find one. On the other hand there are plenty of disaster acquisitions including broadcast.com, geocities, bluelithium etc.

>Meanwhile, what's the last yahoo acquisition that didn't turn into disappointment soon after the acquisition?

One could argue that that the last acquisition that worked out was the acquisition of Stamped. Something tells me they were behind the new Yahoo! Weather iPhone app which is stellar.

I don't mean to imply that Yahoo is more successful than Google at acquisitions (We know that isn't the case). I just don't think Google is a good benchmark for acquisitions. I think they as good or as bad as Yahoo.

I think Yahoo's problem with acquisitions has been that they are moderately successful initially and then drift away over time. ViaWeb, GeoCities, Musicmatch Jukebox, Konfabulator, delicious and Ludicorp (of Flickr fame) come to mind. Other than Flickr, none of the others are still around, but they weren't disappointments soon after acquisition either.

Konfabulator is still (unfortunately) somewhat still around in the form of Yahoo Widgets for Connected TVs, a platform I have had the misfortune of working with in the past. But I suspect this too will soon be dead as any interest that still exists in this area has already shifted to Google TV.

ViaWeb was re-branded Yahoo Stores, and is still alive and, presumably, healthy.

Even GeoCities is actually still around in the form of Yahoo! Small Business. At least from a technology perspective.

Of a sort. It was rewritten in C++ and Perl (http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/m...), but is still an active product in its new form.

I sense a theme there: everything they acquired was underwhelming before they acquired it.

Tumblr, on the other hand, has a lot of users that are fully addicted. I can see things turning out differently.

This thread sounds like "he said, she said".

Anyone got a nice spreadsheet of who has acquired what, with the fate of the acquired unit and people? How long did they stick around? That seems like the minimum - maybe there are clever ways to add information to it.

Here you go, per your request, all 76 of them, but not including this latest one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...!

Overture?

Motorola stands out as a clunker. It is very expensive, even for Google. It is a distraction for management. It is a threat to Google's culture. It fails to be a stick to beat patent trolls. It has all the problems of an underperforming mobile OEM, while breeding doubt among Google's important partners. And all these criticisms were leveled by many people before Google bought Motorola. Some things really are plain to see.

So far, Meyer is doing what needs to be done to turn Yahoo into a first tier competitor. Who knows if she will succeed, but it's good to see them try.

> Motorola stands out as a clunker.

When Google bought Motorola, the reasoning I read was all about patents. They still have those patents, and it might have been a good acquisition no matter the state of Motorola the company...

And hey look, a coincidence: Google has been getting more and more into hardware since then.

Motorola X-Phone

To know that Motorola was a poor acquisition, you'd need to know what would have happened if Google hadn't done it. Defensive/preventative decisions are sometimes undervalued.

That's essentially saying that one needs to know alternate history, which is obviously impossible. So, any mention of 'undervalued' can be counterbalanced with 'overvalued' absent facts.

By that logic, no decision whatsoever can be analyzed at all.

Google is just getting started with Motorola so it's too soon to tell and I'm pretty sure that Blogger has been a huge success (through adsense) and many successful blogs uses it. It went down though since Facebook and Twitter for obvious reasons but the same thing happened to most blogging platforms.

I'm sorry, but in the 12 months since the acquisition was announced, MOT has lost pretty much every court case it's been in, had patents invalidated, has been passed over by google for 4 (might be even more?) flagship 'nexus' products, and hasn't built/shipped/teased a single thing newsworthy.

You can't seriously be arguing that this has gone well?

> MOT has lost pretty much every court case it's been in

I think for Google to be assuming an aggressive position in the courts is just posturing. Can you imagine the reaction if Google did really go all at it, and there was a result of an injunction against sale of all iPhones? No, of course Google/MOT would not go for something like that, that makes no sense. As it stands though, MOT's patent portfolio is pretty damn good. They're in a good position for it. It was something they needed and now they have it.

Google needs to be finished with Motorola.

"Just getting started" is what you hear from Nokia. That's not a good sound.

Motorola is a hardware company. it takes much longer to fix a hardware company. Do you think it took 12 months for Steve Jobs to fix Apple when he came back? Come on.

For a random $30mil acquisition (hypothetically), there's a lot of gray area where it's hard to judge whether the overall benefit to the parent company is net positive or net negative. For a $1 bil acquisition, it's a lot easier to judge and the stakes are a lot higher.

I also don't agree that "a sign of progress" is "making it succeed in the long run".

What? How can success ever not be a sign of progress? I know Silicon Valley likes to celebrate and learn from failure, but there ought to be a limit somewhere.

I meant the converse, sorry. I was responding to the idea that "a sign of progress" within a year is the same as "making it succeed in the long run".

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