Yahoo - Considering selling off core business

I heard a long time ago that Yahoo once had the option of buying Google for $1 billion and passed on it.

If true, that’s gotta be one of the worst mistakes in business history.

True, but unless they let Larry Page in as new CEO they would have probably failed anyway because they wouldn’t have known what to do with what they bought. The oughts were ten years worth of incompetence and failure for Yahoo. Yahoo would have said something like “nice search engine but these adwords and adsense things are never going to fly.”

Yep, Yahoo management pre-Marissa Mayer was hilariously inept, in a dead heat competing with HP for sheer idiocy. Marissa wasn’t successful turning Yahoo around, obviously, but at least she wasn’t clownshoes.

Ha, yeah, between Yahoo, HP, Nokia, RIM, and post-PS2 Sony we had a real race for the bottom during that decade. How so many companies could so mismanage market dominance just boggles the mind.

And now comes news of the Daily Mail also considering a purchase. What? What? What? Do they expect to make a profit on Tumblr or something? Anyway I can’t imagine a better use for their money than buying a dying company with few if any lines of business that intersect with their own. Hopefully Yahoo drags the DM down with them.

It’s like they saw telecom margins and thought, “Hey, being actively customer-hostile is the way to $$$!”

Too bad for them they were missing the key element of being a government-enforced monopoly (at least in the US).

Verizon is buying Yahoo! This has been rumored for some time, but I never thought they’d be that stupid. Oh well, it’s only $5 billion, I suppose they have the cash. But even so it’s just not right that the Yahoo shareholders and officers should be bailed out like that.

Mayer completely fails at turning around yahoo and gets a $218 million payout as a parting gift.

Is it really a wonder why economic populism is on the rise?

mind blowing:

Considering that at the peak of its success, Yahoo was valued at $125
billion, this is yet another benchmark moment in the company’s fall from
grace. In 2008, the company rejected Microsoft’s offer to buy it for $44 billion.

Since this is just the sale of Yahoo’s core assets, the company will
still have its Alibaba stake and Yahoo Japan Corp., which Bloomberg estimates is worth over $40 billion

Like Nelly’s hit single “Country Grammar” and trucker hats, Yahoo peaked in the early 2000s. It made some major mistakes at the beginning, like turning down the opportunity to buy Google for $1 million in 1997 and again in 2002.

Why does Verizon want the least valuable parts of Yahoo?

$5 Billion is the valuation of a stale email database?

This is the question. Verizon has conducted some very dubious acquisitions in the past, but none this silly so far as I can recall. I imagine that everyone in the communications corporation (as opposed to the holding company) is unhappy (and has been for 20 years) with landline and backbone revenue and with their inability to deploy FIOS with enough penetration to compete nationally. They also have a weak cloud business they haven’t done much with since acquiring. So they’ve no doubt been looking for new areas to exploit for some time now. But this bit of absurd M&A with a notoriously failing company’s shrinking ad business seems hardly likely to improve the bottom line now or ever.

ETA: Oh, the theory is this will synergize with their recent acquisition of the rump AOL ISP, but it really seems like doubling down on dumb.

Hopefully this acquisition won’t affect Flickr, the only part of Yahoo I still use (occasionally).

I expect Flickr to be one of their premiere properties, alongside the Yahoo! frontpage and mail.

Tumblr will be immediately sold off or murdered by aggressively trying to monetize it.

And… that’s about it for Yahoo! these days. Frontpage, Flickr, Tumblr, mail.

Verizon also bought what’s left of AOL. They’re trying to cobble some kind of content presence for advertising dollars, is my guess.

Sure, but it’s a dumb business for Verizon to be in. Also, I don’t think they bought the content part of AOL (possibly they did and I’m mistaken) but the lame ISP and email part.

And it’s done.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/after-sale-marissa-mayer-to-leave-yahoo-board-yahoo-to-change-name-to-altaba-1484002787

Pour one out for Marissa, yo.

Has she been named to the Trump cabinet yet?

Ahhh, she’s ineligible I guess as she’s staunchly Democratic…Who knew?

Downloaded all of my pics from Flickr just in case.

Probably a good idea 🙁