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Comment by frewsxcv | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I haven't been reading much, but what else has Yahoo done recently besides bring in Mayer and do a website redesign?

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They've done a lot of acquisitions. I think the biggest was Tumblr. Not much to show from the acquisitions yet, but based on the fact that there has been acquisitions, Googlers moving to Yahoo, etcetera, I think there's a pretty good chance they're working on some things that will eventually pay off.

Well right now that sounds a lot like the old Yahoo that blew massive amounts of shareholder value on terrible acquisitions that never panned out.

Tumblr will pay for itself? Not a chance they're going to earn a billion dollars off of that, much less turn a healthy profit. As such, at it seems like all Mayer is doing is burning value on a spend $3 get $1 back exchange. Works great in a stock market bubble of course.

You're right that Tumblr probably won't pay for itself as an individual unit, but perhaps the new Yahoo might be greater than the sum of its parts. It's not a sure thing, of course. We still need to see if they have a coherent direction. If they don't, then they probably can't be greater than the sum of their parts.

Yahoo was mismanaged to an utterly stunning degree before her time, so I don't doubt that a more sensible approach is going to do net-good things for them.

Yes-Yes-and Yes. Yahoo decline always bothered me. I think their stock will eventually be higher than Google, as long as they don't start acting like Google. Yahoo still has historical stock API's, while Google decided to hog the info, and is most likely charging. I wish I bought Yahoo stock a few years ago.

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