Hacker News Reader

They've lost the battle for web supremacy. They should recognize their strengths and capitalize on them.

I've already raised this in the previous Yahoo thread, but I don't understand where this perception is coming from. Yahoo is absolutely massive, and their sites now have more unique desktop users than any other web company is the US — Google and Facebook included. If anything, they have won the battle for web supremacy.

They're not that popular in the tech bubble – but there are hundreds of millions of other people in the US who are clearly using Yahoo. Seriously, they've something like 800m monthly active users globally, which isn't that far off of Facebook.

I do think that Yahoo should indeed cut out non-profitable parts of the company, but they I hardly think that's a minority opinion. But they're still consistently profitable as it is, and they have oodles of cash.

They've languished somewhat over the years, and grown a bit fat and lazy. But that's nothing that some refocusing, trimming, restructuring and good management can't fix.

downandout doesn't use Yahoo so it only makes sense that nobody uses Yahoo.

I find this attitude everywhere with young technology people. The belief in a One True Brand.

> Yahoo is absolutely massive, and their sites now have more unique desktop users than any other web company is the US

Yeah, but having more unique desktop users shows dominance in the modern online world in way similar to how having the most equine-propelled vehicle sales does in the modern world of personal transport.

> Seriously, they've something like 800m monthly active users globally, which isn't that far off of Facebook.

Facebook has over 1 billion active monthly on mobile, 1.3 billion total. So, yeah, I'd say that's pretty far off

Many people use desktop at work, and this will likely continue for a while. Desktop is also often preferred for more complex tasks. Though mobile use is growing, no evidence that desktop will go way of horse-and-buggy.

Yeah, but having more unique desktop users shows dominance in the modern online world in way similar to how having the most equine-propelled vehicle sales does in the modern world of personal transport.

No it's not. Lots of users are on mobile, no doubt, but Yahoo's presence is also there.

Facebook has over 1 billion active monthly on mobile, 1.3 billion total. So, yeah, I'd say that's pretty far off

That's not far off at all. At best, that puts Yahoo at like 0.6x the MAU of Facebook. That's huge.

There is an explanation for why their market cap does not reflect the numbers you cite:

In the current environment, value = mobile devices + ecosystem

Yahoo is missing two things:

1) An alliance to provide a mobile ecosystem

2) All the parts needed for a mobile ecosystem

Apple, Google, and Amazon are winning at this kind of value creation. Facebook is doing well enough, especially in developing markets. Microsoft owns both factors but can't make them add up.

If I was running Yahoo, I'd be looking to more-quickly mature Aliyun in Asian markets and then expand out of that region, maybe to a developing market first, but eventually to the US and Europe. I would use the ecosystem requirements to drive emphasis on online properties.

You sound like Michael Dell in the 90s saying Apple should be liquidated. I'm not saying Yahoo has a second act coming or anything like that, but rather that your armchair analysis ignores the reality of Yahoo's DNA as a company.

Which of Yahoo's DNA do you have in mind?

Apple got turned around because Jobs came back and took it over using people from NeXT. Apple's success is built on different people, different products, and a different OS than were present before the Jobs/NeXT merger.

The valley is a very competitive hiring environment, so anybody good who wanted to leave Yahoo has presumably left. And Yahoo has been in sad shape for a very long time. I'm not saying there isn't some valuable DNA left, but I wonder where you think it might be.

DNA defines an organism, it doesn't leave. My point is that Yahoo! has a lot of operations and revenues that are based on a history. You can't just liquidate most of it and use the rest to create a hedge fund, that kind of thinking only makes sense long enough to write a pithy comment. The reality is that large corporations don't "pivot", they turn very slowly and they can only make a big turn with a long and concerted effort.

The metaphor doesn't seem to be helping.

History doesn't build software. That takes people using a process and embedded in a culture. If there's some sort of long-lasting Yahoo-ness, it's embodied in that.

I think the other guy's plan is crazy. But Yahoo has spent a lot of years being a has-been coasting on the strengths of former glory. I think reasonable people can say that the enormous inertia you describe is too much to overcome, and that you might as well not bother trying to turn it. That would involve just letting it coast slowly to wherever it's going, squeezing out profits as long as you can.

Yahoo probably won't do that on its own, but that's exactly what a sufficiently large corporate raider might do with it.

"They could reassign some of their brightest engineers to write trading algorithms."

Unfortunately for that strategy, their last CEO effectively got rid of all their good machine learning guys.

As a former Yahoo, I can confirm. There's certainly still some great engineers at Y!, but you could start a Fortune 500 company with former Yahoos.

Any more background to that story? Did he specifically go after them or was it just a culture change that scared off all the talent?

The market misprices things all of the time.

A few years ago, EMC was in a similar situation, where it's stake in VMWare was (and may still be) nominally worth more that the EMC enterprise as a whole. From an investment POV, it means that Yahoo is probably undervalued, and good management can increase the value of the enterprise substantially.

I feel like I might weather a good amount of negative perception for a same-day ROI of over 33% on 37 billion dollars. What am I missing here?