This is Vinod and Marc Andreessen, we put a lot of money in this company, hoping Facebook would buy it for a $billion . At this point we want to get our money back. What do you say you do us a favor and buy this company? We owe you on this one.
If this were the first in this long line of crap-quisitions, I'd disagree with you, but I see Yahoo as the Island of Lost Startups.
Tying multiple disparate teams into a cohesive product will be really hard. I don't see what good will come of this, except getting Yahoo positioned to have early access to a16z and Khosla startups.
I'm not saying that is what happened here, but I have been involved in a startup acquisition which was an investor shell game, and even guys who lost in the acquisition had to come up with a warped internal history about what happened in order to not feel bad about it, or something...
(I don't necessarily disagree with you I just like to understand high stakes trickery).
In my case, what happened is the failed startup I worked for was "acquired" by another company that was funded by the same investors. The acquiring company wasn't acquiring anything: the software was open source, none of the founders worked there anymore, no key engineers were left, etc. The deal was done to avoid a loss on the VC balance sheet so that the fund wouldn't lose face with its institutional investors. The people who benefit: investors, and also mediocre late hire employees who stuck around through the transition. They ended up with a higher salary and better title than they would have if they had been hired directly by the acquiring company.
When I read about an acquisition where it doesn't seem like anyone is going to make money, nobody uses the product, the founding team isn't there anymore and key engineers have left, it just reminds me of this situation I already lived through.
http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=rockmelt#q=rockmelt&c...
They couldn't have paid too much for such a downward trend.