[HN Gopher] Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)
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Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)
Author : tosh
Score : 198 points
Date : 2021-05-03 12:45 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| dave4420 wrote:
| (2008)
| arthur_sav wrote:
| Somehow people miss that. Smh
| spamalot159 wrote:
| How is this possible when other reporting suggests that Yahoo
| just sold to Apollo for $5B?
| mtmail wrote:
| By forgetting to add [2008] in the submission title.
| spamalot159 wrote:
| Ah yes, that makes more sense now.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| Many commenters seem to be under the impression that Yahoo was
| later sold for a mere $5B to Verizon, but this is not the case.
|
| MSFT's bid was for Yahoo _including its stake in Alibaba_ , which
| had a far greater value than the parent company itself. The
| Verizon deal did NOT include the stake in Alibaba. This was spun
| off as a separate company Altaba under the ticker AABA. (edit: I
| should be more precise. This is why _yahoo_ was spun off and
| sold. AABA is the remainder of the company, and retained the
| majority of the value. I heard previous plans to spin off the
| stake in Alibaba weren 't workable due to issues around
| triggering a taxable event.)
|
| AABA's spinoff accounts for the large value discrepancy. Poorly
| written news articles portrayed this as losing out on a great
| deal but this simply was not the case.
|
| https://www.marketcaphistory.com/aaba/
| plank_time wrote:
| I worked at Yahoo during this time. I said at the time it was so
| dumb for Microsoft to be wasting so much money on Yahoo and
| instead they should have bought massive holdings in almost every
| Silicon Valley company for that money, including Facebook (I
| think they did invest a little in Facebook). Had they done that
| instead they would have been worth multiple trillions now.
|
| They really avoided a huge disaster by walking away from Yahoo,
| so I applaud them.
| mimikatz wrote:
| now back in the BABA stake
| mrbonner wrote:
| Verizon sold Yahoo and AOL to Verizon for less than $5B today.
| The Hadoop ecosystem founded in Yahoo by Doug Cutting would
| probably cost a lot more than $5B in value today. I can't wait to
| see how FAANG turns out in 10 years from now.
| utopcell wrote:
| Let's not trivialize the value that was added to Hadoop from
| many other companies since its early Yahoo days.
| trinovantes wrote:
| It's amazing how much the internet has changed in just 13 years.
| Makes me wonder if the tech giants of today will become
| irrelevant by 2030s or we're past the point where the giants are
| rich enough to just buy up anything with potential while their
| original products fade into obscurity.
| fullshark wrote:
| If anything it's more amazing how much it hasn't changed
| lately. The early days were a wild west full of market share
| battles and failed startups/ideas. Now the market appears
| mature with a few companies with strangleholds on it until
| perhaps a technological sea change catches them off guard.
| scarface74 wrote:
| If you look back a decade, things haven't changed that much.
|
| Facebook was public, growing, had figured out mobile and had
| already acquired Instagram. It was by far the top social media
| company.
|
| Amazon had taken over online retail. It was already a behemoth.
| AWS was in its infancy, but it was growing.
|
| Apple was already the most valuable company in the US.
|
| Microsoft had been one of the top 10 most valuable companies
| for a decade.
|
| Google was already a behemoth when it came to search. YouTube
| was massive and Android had just started gaining traction.
|
| Out of the top five companies, Google is the only one that
| hasn't been able to pivot or diversify. The rest of the
| companies have been able to learn from the mistakes of the
| previous generation.
|
| In the case of Apple and Microsoft. They have both been around
| for 35+ years. Microsoft wrote the first version of the
| embedded AppleSoft Basic interpreter for Apple //e's in 1980.
| menzoic wrote:
| Google is well diversified. You even mentioned Youtube and
| Android. GCP isn't at the top but it's huge. Google
| docs/business suite is taking over, it's the goto for
| startups. They have a mobile carrier business. Self driving
| cars (although its dropping in valuation but they do have a
| large stake in Uber). Google is now Alphabet which it
| restructured into because of its diversification.
|
| Small nit: FB wasnt public 10yrs ago but your point is valid
| either way.
| ReggieCommaRose wrote:
| Google is well diversified in its business endeavors but
| hasn't been capitalize on that for a better diversified
| revenue stream.
| scarface74 wrote:
| How else do you measure whether it is successfully
| diversifying if not by revenue or more importantly
| profitability?
|
| Contrast Google with Apple. Even though the iPhone is 60%
| of Apple's business, last time I checked, the Mac
| business alone would put its revenue well within the top
| 100 companies.
| ReggieCommaRose wrote:
| That was my point - that Google isn't ACTUALLY well
| diversified compared to its contemporaries.
| LunaSea wrote:
| Youtube is a net loss and GCP has a 4.6% market share so I
| wouldn't really count this as diversified since very little
| of their overall revenue comes out of these two projects?
|
| Google docs / business is interesting but I'm not sure they
| make much money out of it and are scatting on the freemium
| tier success.
| utopcell wrote:
| YouTube is a net loss ? Where is that coming from ? It
| brought in $6BN revenue just in Q1 [1].
|
| [1] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2021Q1_alphabet_e
| arnings...
| scarface74 wrote:
| "Revenue" is not the same as "profit"
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/03/google-still-isnt-
| telling-us...
| utopcell wrote:
| The question stands: Where is the "net loss" statement
| coming from ?
| scarface74 wrote:
| Whether it's a net loss or barely profitable, it still
| doesn't move the needle as far as Google's income.
|
| Even if it did - it is still mostly search advertising.
| That's not diversification.
| utopcell wrote:
| Search revenue was $31,879 billion in Q1 and YT revenue
| was $6,005 billion. It doesn't seem like you're paying
| attention.
| scarface74 wrote:
| You're still conflating "profit" with "revenue". No one
| is doubting that YouTube's _revenue_ is substantial.
| There is doubt that it's _profit_ is substantial. If it
| isn't contributing any meaningful _profit_ to Google's
| bottom line, it isn't successful.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Google Docs is a very distant second.
|
| https://www.ciodive.com/news/Google-Microsoft-Office-
| collabo...
| scarface74 wrote:
| According to public records that came out during the Oracle
| lawsuit, Android had only made $22 billion in profit from
| its inception through the time of discovery (2016). Which
| is really nothing overall.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-
| generate...
|
| On the other hand, it's reported that Google pays Apple $12
| billion a year to be the default search engine on Apple
| devices.
|
| Apple makes a lot more from Google on mobile than Google
| makes from Android.
|
| Andy Jassy, the CEO of AWS, has said in plenty of public
| statements that only 4% of all enterprise IT spend is on
| _any_ cloud provider. GCP is in a distant third.
| eloisant wrote:
| Except for Amazon, that would still be extremely successful
| without AWS, the others had their original business model
| disrupted.
|
| So far Google still have a stronghold on search, they've been
| able to secure it with Android and Chrome by controlling the
| devices, they seem to be doing fine.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Android (profit of $23 billion from 2010-2016) hasn't
| really done that great for Google. They still have to pay
| Apple a reported $12 billion a year+ to be the default
| search engine for iOS devices.
|
| Apple's business model has always been to sell "computers"
| at high margins. They had record Mac revenues last quarter.
| All of their other devices are just computers with
| different form factors running a variant of the same OS,
| most with a variant of the same processor.
|
| Office and Windows have been the main driver for MS for
| over 25 years.
| Latour wrote:
| A primary benefit of Android is that Google is allowed to
| put their search engine on Android mobile devices for
| close to free instead of multiple billions of dollars.
| scarface74 wrote:
| If Apple customers are the most affluent and are worth at
| least $12 billion a year to Google, how much are the
| statistically less affluent Android users really worth?
|
| How much are customers buying $200 phones worth to
| advertisers compared to customers paying 3 times as much?
|
| Google also has to pay third party Android OEMs a share
| of search revenue.
| selectodude wrote:
| I would imagine a lot of it is mindshare. Apple is trendy
| and had already called their bluff once and made Bing the
| default search engine for a time.
|
| Google pays Apple to make Google the search engine on the
| iPhone for the same reason that Coca Cola and Anheiseur-
| Busch spend tens of millions per year on 30 second spots
| during the Super Bowl.
| smcl wrote:
| > Yahoo would give Microsoft dominance in Web banner ads used by
| corporate brand advertisers
|
| Wow for some reason I believed that by 2008 Google was already
| the dominant online ads player
| Kye wrote:
| This was around when Google bought DoubleClick.
|
| A good podcast episode on it:
| https://share.transistor.fm/s/66bcbec6
| kbutler wrote:
| I'd have to peg that purchase as the inflection point turning
| away from "don't be evil."
| rapsey wrote:
| Honestly it is pretty crazy how old Yahoo is and they are still
| hanging on.
| sushid wrote:
| I would saying getting acquired by a PE firm is the opposite of
| "still hanging on." Verizon just let them flop around as their
| pond dried up. Now they're about to be eviscerated by
| professionals.
| mrweasel wrote:
| But they aren't hanging on, Yahoo! is owned by Verizon.
|
| Why Verizon would buy a site like Yahoo is still a mystery to
| me, but they own a lot of other junk as well.
| 300bps wrote:
| I think Verizon would buy Yahoo so they could further
| monetize their subscriber base.
|
| Buy Yahoo.com, make Yahoo.com the default home page of every
| customer.
|
| They do this in other ways - I'm a FIOS customer and I don't
| use their DNS because you will see ads anytime you mis-type a
| domain name. You can turn this off with their not-so-simple
| instructions that any Baby Boomer will be completely unable
| to do:
|
| https://www.verizon.com/support/residential/internet/home-
| ne...
| jnwatson wrote:
| Yeah I still have yahoo.stanford.edu in an old bookmarks file.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| >Verizon will get $4.25 billion in cash from the sale along with
| its 10% stake in the company. Verizon and Apollo said they expect
| the transaction to close in the second half of 2021.
|
| Version paid $4.4 billion for AOL and $4.5 billion for Yahoo and
| now sell it for $4.25 billion w/10% stake. Am I missing
| something? why company (Version) just waste money like this?
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/verizon-sells-yahoo-and-aol-...
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| I worked for HuffPost (which was owned by Aol) at the time of
| the Verizon acquisition, and the story was that Verizon wanted
| to get deeper into the media and advertising game. It seemed
| dubious to many of us at the time. But I guess they probably
| felt they had to counter AT&T and Comcast.
| ahepp wrote:
| >The strategy reflected a mindset that was once widely shared
| among the world's biggest telecoms companies, which sought to
| benefit from an explosion in digital media consumption by
| becoming owners of content rather than mere network operators,
| or "dumb pipes".
|
| "Apollo buys Verizon media assets including Yahoo for $5bn"
|
| https://on.ft.com/3uk5DMk
|
| Paywalled, but link should be good for 3 visitors. I can post
| another if anyone is desperate to read.
| racl101 wrote:
| Yahoo negotiates in Bizarro land rules.
| Javimoya wrote:
| Back in 2000, Telefonica bought Lycos for 12,5B$... A few years
| later were sold again for a few millions
| Nition wrote:
| 2013: Yahoo buys Tumblr for $1.1B.
|
| 2017: Verizon buys Yahoo for $4.8B.
|
| 2019: Verizon sells Tumblr to Automattic for reportedly <$3M.
| mrweasel wrote:
| The owners of the Danish Yahoo clone Jubii got rich by selling
| to Lycos, who sold it back to a Danish media company. It's now
| owned by a Norweigen company. With each sale the site loses
| value.
| duxup wrote:
| Maybe I remember it wrong but even in 2008 I felt that there was
| at that point some question of what ... Yahoo was / would be.
|
| IIRC Yahoo at that point was a big name that wasn't irrelevant,
| but whatever they would be in the future seemed like it would
| have be be akin to creating new product(s) / company / sea change
| type move.
|
| It was hard to imagine them becoming worth 66% more anytime near
| that time (even without hindsight).
| after_care wrote:
| Microsoft was try to buy market share in the search engine.
| This is when they were making a play for Bing to be a market
| contender in Search. We don't know what would have happened if
| Bing had 20% market share out the gate, as well as access to
| Yahoo expertise/tech. A significant share of Search today would
| be worth significantly l more than $44B, and this deal would
| have been a fair gambit for Microsoft to make.
|
| It was a very good offer, but it wasn't enough for Yahoo to
| sell. Perhaps a larger offer would have helped, but I think
| Yahoo had an inflated opinion of their own worth.
| duxup wrote:
| I just don't know what Yahoo... ever thought it would be.
|
| It felt like a company that had success, and then never could
| find a way out of being old Yahoo while the world changed
| around them.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Is this the best money Microsoft did NOT spend?
| skinnymuch wrote:
| No. The Alibaba and Yahoo Japan stakes would have paid for the
| entire purchase while still having benefits and then some.
| Yahoo sold $8B of Alibaba in 2012 and $40B of the remaining in
| 2019. They sold Yahoo Japan shares for $4B. Microsoft would
| have had no need to sell the 2012 stake at the time. They could
| have possibly doubled their money.
| samgranieri wrote:
| That summer my girlfriend at the time and I were laughing at the
| different combinations of possible combined companies. Yahoogle
| was one. This one would have been Microhoo
| acheron wrote:
| Late 90's joke: Yahoo and Netscape are going to merge and move
| their headquarters to Israel: Net'n'Yahoo
| deshpand wrote:
| Mobil + Chevron => Moron
| wombatpm wrote:
| Microsoft to combine its handheld (Compact Edition), desktop
| (Millennium Edition), and server software (Windows NT) into
| one release:
|
| Microsoft CEMENT
| tommysydney wrote:
| one-man co outlasted the two big techs!
| kbutler wrote:
| WordPerfect bought a little company I worked for,
| "SoftSolutions". Then Novell bought WordPerfect.
|
| The combined company? NoPerfectSolutions
| ignoramous wrote:
| The years from 2006 to 2010 gave rise to today's BigTech.
|
| Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google were pioneers in the data-centers
| space. Amazon was only beginning to turn-up the heat. In
| retrospect, given the engineering talent and expertise at Y! at
| the time, it is a shame that in light of AWS' success they did
| not invest in Infrastructure-as-a-Service when their "web
| services" org was already churning out a range of tools and
| services on top of SOAP / REST. I mean, the Apache Hadoop
| ecosystem was mostly Yahoo!
|
| As an outside observer, I think, with any luck, cloud computing
| could have saved Y!'s bacon, even as a late entrant (MSFT re-
| launched Azure in 2010). Y!'s focus on being a Media house now
| seems like a bad bet, which could have worked had they snapped
| Facebook for $1B.
|
| Microsoft struggled with its initial "Red Dog" / "Windows Azure"
| release in 2008, too; so much so that parts of the company were
| EC2 customers back in the day.
|
| I think this goes to show how stars _had_ to align for AWS to
| stay a market leader as they started from a position of
| disadvantage (and needed a decade of exponential growth to
| consolidate only to contend with unrelenting competition from
| Azure), in face of companies that were are no slouches in terms
| of ability and product innovation, either. For Google though,
| around the same time Y! was floundering, their acquisitions and
| execution with Android, YouTube, and Chrome (I like to say Chrome
| was acquired because Google literally hired lead Firefox
| engineers to build it) ensured their relevance in the decade to
| come.
|
| No wonder the folks who ran AWS, Azure, and Android/Chrome ended
| up as the eventual CEOs of their respective trillion-dollar
| mother-ships; whilst Y! has bitten the dust.
| umeshunni wrote:
| > Cloud computing could have saved Y!'s bacon, even as a late
| entrant (MSFT re-launched Azure in 2010)
|
| MSFT could rely on a large enterprise-focused sales team with
| existing relationships with CIOs. Y! would not have had that
| luxury.
| spolsky wrote:
| at the time Yahoo owned something like 30% of Alibaba, which,
| today, would be worth maybe $200B.
| danielmeskin wrote:
| As far as I know its Alibaba stock got split off into its own
| company (Altaba)
| mimikatz wrote:
| Yes, but that happened after the MS bid.
| MisterPea wrote:
| That's funny, this fact completely changes the perception of
| this entire thread.
|
| 44.6B would've been a great investment then
| [deleted]
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I worked at Yahoo! when this was going on, I'm amazed the share
| holders didn't sue Jerry Yang and the board for avoiding this
| sale. Yahoo had very little of technological value and was
| actively trying to destroy its own search business amongst other
| properties at the time. They really were in a prime position and
| bungled it extremely badly, I think they had maybe 20% of the
| search market at the time.
|
| Carol Bartz later came and told everyone it was pointless to be
| in the search business because Google were too big and impossible
| to compete with on investment. She made it very clear the
| equation for success was money spent === great search engine
| results, ignoring how Google came into being in the first place.
| Pure Harvard Business School spreadsheet stuff.
|
| It still feels like a wasted opportunity to me, it seems so weak
| to just throw your hands up in the air and say it's too hard to
| make your extremely successful search engine better.
| lazyjeff wrote:
| I also worked at Yahoo at that time, and I remember the
| feelings internally were more mixed. It was known that nearly
| all (or even more than 100%) of Yahoo's market value was the
| investment in Alibaba. Microsoft's offer basically valued all
| of Yahoo minus Alibaba and minus Yahoo Japan basically at
| nothing. And I'm perplexed by your blame on Jerry Yang, as out
| of the entire history of Yahoo, his Alibaba investment was the
| most financially successful act, worth more than anything any
| CEO at Yahoo had ever done combined.
|
| Also remember at that time that Google, MSN, and Yahoo were the
| three major search engines at that time. It wasn't clear why
| Yahoo couldn't close on the #1 spot. It had the clear #1 search
| engine spot in Japan already. The Yahoo properties (combination
| of all their websites) was the most popular websites on the
| internet. They had a much stronger machine learning and data
| mining research lab, one year bragging that they swept all the
| best paper awards at the ML/DM computer science conferences.
| chalst wrote:
| The answer to the puzzle is that the rule about fiduciary duty
| really is only relevant to who the beneficiaries are of
| financial transactions; it pretty much does not have anything
| to say about regular business decisions. No doubt some
| shareholders contacted their lawyers and were gently dissuaded
| by a legal reality check.
| cbsmith wrote:
| Shareholders _did_ sue, and the threat of the lawsuit meant
| the board had to devote a lot of energy towards the Microsoft
| acquisition offer, which was unfortunately why the offer was
| a win-win for Microsoft.
| wpietri wrote:
| I'm with you on almost all of this, but can you explain why you
| think it's incorrect that Yahoo wouldn't have to spend a lot of
| money to keep up with Google?
|
| Google's origin story doesn't seem relevant to me, in that
| Google won because they made radical leaps forward in search
| quality, compute cost, and and compute scale. As well as
| company culture around innovation/continuous improvement, I
| suspect. All at a time when the web was exploding: only 19% of
| people used the web at Google's launch; by 2008 it was circa
| 70%. [1]
|
| It seems to me that by 2008, there were fewer easy innovations
| lying around to make. Or if there were, Google was well
| prepared to match them. That, plus the way the size of the web
| had exploded [2] in the decade since Google's launch suggests
| to me that competing with Google would have been extremely
| expensive. The way that other people have tried and failed
| since points that way too, as Google's market share is even
| larger now than it was in 2008.
|
| [1] See https://www.statista.com/statistics/185700/percentage-
| of-adu... and
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/214662/household-adoptio...
|
| [2] From 1997 to 2008, there were more than 100x more websites,
| and I expect those websites got larger both in number of pages
| and per-page size. https://www.internetlivestats.com/total-
| number-of-websites/
| chrisco255 wrote:
| > It seems to me that by 2008, there were fewer easy
| innovations lying around to make. Or if there were, Google
| was well prepared to match them.
|
| Except for privacy-centric search. This is what DuckDuckGo
| has capitalized on and it's worked out for them. Neither
| Microsoft with Bing nor Yahoo was able to see this as a niche
| to compete.
| cbsmith wrote:
| > Google's origin story doesn't seem relevant to me, in that
| Google won because they made radical leaps forward in search
| quality, compute cost, and and compute scale.
|
| That's the myth, but it's pretty far from the reality. Long
| before Google became such a dominant player, competing search
| engines had matched or exceeded its quality, compute cost,
| and ability to scale.
|
| > All at a time when the web was exploding: only 19% of
| people used the web at Google's launch; by 2008 it was circa
| 70%.
|
| Bingo. You nailed it. It turns out the search market was
| largely a distribution game. You wanted to be the search
| engine distributed to that massively growing audience, and
| Google did a great job of establishing itself as the first
| search engine presented to people.
|
| > It seems to me that by 2008, there were fewer easy
| innovations lying around to make.
|
| There's certainly been a lot of innovations in search since
| 2008, but nothing that was "disruptive". It's very hard to
| get more than a small percentage of people to change what
| search engine they use, and advertisers are not particularly
| interested in chasing that segment of the population.
|
| > The way that other people have tried and failed since
| points that way too, as Google's market share is even larger
| now than it was in 2008.
|
| Yeah, I really have to scratch my head at how people look at
| the empirical evidence and think that in 2008 it was a
| mistake to recognize the losing position competitors were in.
| chaostheory wrote:
| > That's the myth, but it's pretty far from the reality.
| Long before Google became such a dominant player, competing
| search engines had matched or exceeded its quality, compute
| cost, and ability to scale.
|
| I disagree. Inktomi, Altavista, and AllTheWeb weren't even
| close in terms of search result revelance and the number of
| pages they indexed. Every time they attempted to close the
| gap, Google would just widen it with stuff like real time
| search, their revolutionary maps UI, and gmail.
| cbsmith wrote:
| You're certainly welcome to disagree, but Google would be
| the first to tell you how relevant the number of pages
| indexed would be.
|
| When you actually measured the result relevance number,
| it turned out that all the major engines were pretty
| similar, and Google often was not the top one. More
| importantly though, the observed phenomenon was that no
| matter how _bad_ the results you presented were, most
| people didn 't switch to another search engine.
|
| I get that you're a Google fan, but GMail & Maps weren't
| part of the search engine. Ironically "real time search"
| was rolled out as a PR move to counteract the narrative
| that was being constructed at the time: that Google was
| falling behind UX innovations in the search engine space.
| All of the above were rolled out _after_ Google was the
| dominant player in the search space.
|
| Google has absolutely done some amazing things, and their
| search team is second to none, but the narrative that
| they became the dominant player because of their
| technical advantages is very misleading.
| chaostheory wrote:
| I am no longer a Google fan. Haven't been for years so
| there's no bias.
|
| > More importantly though, the observed phenomenon was
| that no matter how bad the results you presented were,
| most people didn't switch to another search engine.
|
| That may be the case today because the results are
| similar now, but it wasn't the same case years ago. The
| ancient search engines prior to Google weren't much
| better than human curated directories like Yahoo.
| Otherwise, why would anyone switch from them to Google?
| cbsmith wrote:
| > I am no longer a Google fan. Haven't been for years so
| there's no bias.
|
| I'm sorry, I guess I inferred the wrong conclusion from
| your statements. I would argue that your perception of
| Google _at the time_ would be a more significant factor
| influencing your perception of their performance, but
| that 's actually largely beside the point.
|
| > That may be the case today because the results are
| similar now, but it wasn't the same case years ago. The
| ancient search engines prior to Google weren't much
| better than human curated directories like Yahoo.
| Otherwise, why would anyone switch from them to Google?
|
| I think your question at the end there underlines the
| central point of confusion here. While some people do
| indeed switch search engines (depending on how you
| measure, somewhere between 10-30% of users), the vast
| majority do not. Even when presented with what one would
| expect to be the worst search engine in the world (one
| that presented only paid search results), most people
| would not switch to another engine.
|
| So the answer to your question is: most people don't
| switch from any particular search engine to any other
| search engine.
|
| I would be the first to agree that there was definitely a
| window of time where Google was observably producing
| better search results than their competitors, and I'm
| sure you were amongst many others (including myself) who
| switched to them at that time... but again, that was a
| small subset of the population.
|
| The search engine space was (and is) very competitive,
| and it did not take long for competitors to react and
| close the gap. When we measured performance in 2004,
| Google did not come out on top. Subsequent measurements
| produced similar outcomes, although occasionally Google
| would come out on top. Having more relevant results
| definitely lead to increased adoption, but only of a
| small segment of the much larger market.
|
| Unless you count AOL searches as part of Google, Google
| didn't lead in market share until ~2004 (and it really
| wasn't until 2005 that they were ahead by more than a
| paper-thin margin). At that point, they had slightly less
| than 30% market share as compared to present market share
| which is closer to 90%. Even by 2004, the predominant way
| that search engines acquired new users was not through
| "switchers" changing search engines because of better
| results, but rather because of distribution deals (like
| the deal Google had with AOL) where a distributor would
| make a particular engine the first one users were
| presented with.
|
| Think of it this way: how many times have you _checked_
| to see if other search engines were performing better
| than Google? After you switched to using Google, how
| regularly did you check to see if other alternatives were
| doing a better job? Most people I 've spoken with never
| even heard of Powerset, let alone tried it to see if it
| served their needs better than Google. If consumers never
| check, it's hard to believe product performance makes a
| difference, right?
|
| That's the reality of the search engine business. It
| certainly helps to be better than everyone else at
| search, but it is no where near the primary driver of
| market share.
| wpietri wrote:
| Thanks for the detailed reply.
|
| > Long before Google became such a dominant player,
| competing search engines had matched or exceeded its
| quality, compute cost, and ability to scale.
|
| Could you say more about this? I wasn't involved, but my
| recollection is that Google pioneered using a zillion low-
| cost nodes for search. E.g., I remember that AltaVista was
| using a big iron approach partly as a way of showing off
| DEC's wares. I can believe everybody had to try to keep up,
| but I am skeptical that Google slowed down enough for
| everybody else to catch up and/or surpass them.
| coryrc wrote:
| I was an AltaVista user. Then I started having to use a
| meta search. Then Google came along and it always worked.
| Who cares if the others caught up? I had no reason to look
| for over a decade. But now I feel the amount of money to be
| made means search will never be good again: you can pay
| people pennies to get a few more pennies for yourself, just
| to bury the better stuff given freely.
| cbsmith wrote:
| I think you accurately captured the reality of the
| context. For the most part, as long as people perceive
| they are getting a good search result, they aren't to
| look at other options, let alone switch.
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| > Long before Google became such a dominant player,
| competing search engines had matched or exceeded its
| quality, compute cost, and ability to scale.
|
| Just curious, which ones? I remember Google felt so far
| above any other search engine for a very long time.
| hogFeast wrote:
| Essentially all of their tech was taken from Robin Li and
| AltaVista/DEC. Brin did a lot of the implementation work,
| Page did nothing (a lot of the work he did do, didn't
| scale, and was highly inferior to existing work as he
| wasn't a strong programmer...I think he provided a server
| room or something, he was the snake oil salesman).
|
| The actual technological innovation in the search product
| was minimal (the stuff they did later to scale was pure
| innovation, but that came much later). They largely
| purchased their position (for a good price).
| [deleted]
| cbsmith wrote:
| The tech was "stolen" from HITS/IBM Research.
|
| Because of their success with their initial data center
| approach AltaVista was arguably one of the last to shift
| to a model that more closely resembled the one Google
| employed, but they certainly did a very fine job of it
| (late mover advantage and all that). I still liked
| AllTheWeb's data centers somewhat better, but at that
| point the differences were pretty small.
|
| I wouldn't agree with your characterization of Brin &
| Page's contributions, but their direct technical
| contributions to Google by that time were at best
| marginally greater than Yang's, so it's not really
| relevant anyway.
|
| Google definitely had some great tech, but the extent to
| which that won them the game is more myth than reality.
| Their aggressive strategic moves are really what made
| them successful.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Behind every great fortune there is a crime.
| cbsmith wrote:
| Inktomi, Altavista, AllTheWeb, all later under Yahoo.
|
| No question about the "feel", but it's amazing how
| perception fuels reality. We did a lot of studies of
| this, and one of the more interesting ones was that if
| you told people they were seeing Google search results
| (regardless if they were), they'd be more inclined to
| rewrite their queries and look farther down in the search
| results, rather than try using another search engine.
| Beyond the obvious revenue & marketshare benefits, this
| helped Google two-fold technically: it gave them better
| data on query rewrites and search results. The hoops you
| had to jump through to match our exceed their performance
| were substantial.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| We did a lot of studies of this, and one of the more
| interesting ones was that if you told people they were
| seeing Google search results
|
| This is super-interesting; where might one read more
| about these studies?
|
| Also, when were the studies done?
|
| I'm curious about the "when" because I think Google's
| reputation has slipped quite a bit.
| cbsmith wrote:
| These were done around 2004-2006 IIRC, I don't know if
| the brand impact today is the same as it was back then.
| I'll see if I can find publications, but I think most, if
| not all of it, was not published. Even when you told
| people that we were substituting in different search
| engines and the presentation and layout was not
| indicative of where the results came from, putting a
| Google logo on the page produced a measurable difference
| in behaviour -far more so than changes to the results
| themselves (admittedly, we never presented ridiculous
| results, like say results from an entirely different
| query or a just random landing pages, but we did present
| them with, for example, purely paid search results).
|
| In general though, consumer confirmation bias is not that
| surprising, right? Particularly with technology brands,
| it's pretty well established that confidence in the brand
| leads one to be more likely to attribute failure to one's
| own "mistakes" and therefore invest in further
| exploration of the product and/or modifying one's
| interactions with it. It also diminishes one's belief
| that another product would produce better results,
| therefore diminishing interest in exploring alternatives;
| it also leads one to perceive a product's performance as
| "better" when it is exactly the same.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| It makes 100% sense to me that perceived quality would be
| influenced by a person's feelings towards the brand. In
| fact I'd be shocked when that's not the case!
| skinnymuch wrote:
| I agree it was stupid for Yahoo to not go to Microsoft at the
| time. Maybe Microsoft and Yahoo search and ads would be
| stronger today. Pushing against Google and FB more. But it
| doesn't appear bad enough for a valid lawsuit considering Yahoo
| got more than $45B back since 2008.
|
| Yahoo sold half of the Alibaba stake for $8B and $40B in 2012
| and 2019. Yahoo Japan stake for $4B in 2019. And Yahoo itself
| for $4-5B around that time.
|
| Of course the people who would have taken Microsoft stock
| would've made a lot if they held on through 2013, 2014.
| Microsoft stock was 10x less in 2008 and rose 50% before the
| end of 2014. The shareholders who would've taken cash wouldn't
| have been better off without knowing how that cash would be
| used.
| duxup wrote:
| Was there an understanding in 2008 that Yahoo... couldn't just
| "be Yahoo" going forward without falling behind / fading away
| and would have to really change dramaticly?
|
| I ask because it seemed like there were attempts but they were
| sort of fits and starts and meanwhile most of Yahoo still
| seemed like just old Yahoo...
|
| It does seem like a continuous failure in leadership at Yahoo
| to really change much at all. There were sort of psudo attempts
| to do other things (be a media company I guess) but they never
| came to much.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| pg wrote the famous "What happened to Yahoo?" article in
| 2010: http://paulgraham.com/yahoo.html
| eloisant wrote:
| No, in 2008 Yahoo was already seen as a failed company.
|
| The biggest mistake they did in the late 90's is to stop
| being a tech company and be a "media company" instead.
|
| So in 2008 they were still big but mostly running on momentum
| they built during the 90's and a couple acquisitions. They
| had Yahoo!Mail that was popular, their homepage was still
| popular because some people forgot to try something
| different, Flickr that they bought and was the most
| successful photo sharing website until the got overtaken by
| general purpose social networks, and Yahoo!Japan that was
| hugely popular but was a joint venture with Softbank. Maybe
| some other stuff I'm forgetting... But they didn't have
| anything that made people dream.
|
| Right before 2008 they tried to join the social bandwagon
| with a horizontal social network across their properties, but
| it failed just like when Google tried to do the same a couple
| of years later with Google+.
|
| However, as much as Yahoo was seen as a failed company,
| Microsoft didn't get their Nadella rebirth yet. It was still
| an old evil outdated company, run by Balmer, mocking the
| iPhone and claiming their Windows CE phones with their tiny
| start button and stylus were better.
|
| So Microsoft didn't look super sexy either. It really looked
| like 2 losers trying to band together to fight the cool
| winner that Google was.
| duxup wrote:
| Yeah that's a valid point about MS, they were healthier as
| far as having products and income but ... weren't at that
| point yet reborn / looking for their own way forward.
| [deleted]
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I agree with this analysis, pretty spot on. Working there
| at the time there was still potential with the right
| leadership to turn it around. Unfortunately that never
| happened, instead we got Carol Bartz to destroy any
| remaining morale at the company.
| hkmurakami wrote:
| Shareholders did great holding onto Yahoo! stock, as it's
| Alibaba holdings would perform magnificently.
| jsight wrote:
| I could be wrong, but I don't think that was enough to push
| it back above the 44.6B valuation.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| The Alibaba and Yahoo Japan stakes Yahoo got were selling
| half of Alibaba stake for $8B in 2012 and $40B remaining in
| 2019. They sold Yahoo Japan shares for $4B in 2019.
| Microsoft would have had no need to sell the 2012 stake at
| the time. They could have possibly doubled their money.
| jsight wrote:
| Oh, certainly if YHOO or MSFT had retained the Alibaba
| stake it would have been worth it.
|
| It looks like YHOO shares never went back above $45B,
| though: https://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-market-cap-
| over-time-2...
| oefrha wrote:
| Yahoo used to have a 15% stake in Alibaba. Alibaba's market
| cap today is ~643B according to (ironically) Yahoo Finance.
|
| Edit: Apparently they used to hold 30%, but sold half of
| that for peanuts in 2012.
| mbesto wrote:
| Also, IIRC, Yahoo Japan is basically another entity and
| way bigger than all of Yahoo global, in which Yahoo had a
| stake in as well.
| 1024core wrote:
| Jack Ma refused to take Alibaba public until Yahoo sold
| half of its stake back to him (for peanuts).
|
| Carol Bartz really screwed Yahoo over in its dealing with
| Alibaba. Yahoo had 2 seats on the 5-seat board of
| directors and Bartz couldn't be bothered to appoint
| directors to those. When she became CEO, Jack came to
| meet her and she dressed him down in front of his
| underlings: a big slap in the face to Jack. These two
| incidents made sure that he was as uncooperative as could
| be. He took Alipay out from under Yahoo and never
| informed Bartz.
|
| Whatever you may say about Marissa Mayer, when she became
| CEO her first priority was to fix the broken relationship
| between Alibaba and Yahoo. She smoothed things over, and
| Jack let Yahoo keep the 15% stake, instead of asking for
| all of it back. She made Yahoo many billions with her
| moves.
| kreeben wrote:
| If you are flabbergasted by the fact Yahoo, and everyone else
| for that matter, thought it absolutely impossible to disrupt
| Google (except for perhaps a handful of hubris-riddled people
| at MS), please remember the general sentiment HN used to have
| towards Google who according to us, at that time, could do no
| wrong. They were infallible. They were the brightest people in
| the world. They were The Good Guy (TM). They were so good that
| when they launched a browser later that year, no one blinked
| before installing it. You didn't blink. I didn't blink. We just
| drank the cool aid and clicked "install".
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Sure, but if you had 20+% of the search engine market it
| seems terrible to not even try. Maybe it would have failed
| and bankrupted the company but I still think it would have
| been an exciting sell for the employees to try to compete.
| There were so many extremely talented people working there.
| [deleted]
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| Chrome was an excellent browser when it launched... It might
| not be able to compete with such a wide gap against all the
| Chromium based clones out there now, but it was rightfully an
| amazing experience. Initially its only competition felt like
| Firefox
| Rapzid wrote:
| Well I'm not going to apologize for installing Chrome then or
| now lol. It was a fantastic piece of tech with the tab
| process isolation and V8 helped to revolutionize what
| "webapps" were capable of.
| kreeben wrote:
| I wish for us all that some day the internet as it is today
| would fracture and split into one webapps realm and one
| hypertext realm so that those who can't stand it when you
| want to click on something and you do, once the page
| finishes loading you end up clicking the top page ad
| instead of the button you aimed at, could go on doing the
| things we thought we could do, back in the day.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| The Gemini protocol is actively doing this.
| raspasov wrote:
| Nothing is perfect, all of the time.
| cbsmith wrote:
| > We just drank the cool aid and clicked "install".
|
| That's misrepresenting the search market's reality though.
| For most people, they never clicked install.
| kreeben wrote:
| In 2008 there wasn't a need to click "install"? What OS
| were you on that provided Google Chrome seamlessly?
| mhermher wrote:
| No, it was snuck in with Java updates (or maybe Flash?).
| Unless you spotted the correct checked-by-default option.
| cbsmith wrote:
| Chrome wasn't released until September of 2008. Initial
| adoption was around 1% in 2008.
|
| I was referring to search engines, though the same was
| true for browsers. Deals were cut with distribution
| channels to have browsers pre-installed and to have
| certain browsers and search engines as the default. The
| overwhelming majority of people would use the default. In
| fact, a lot of the benefit of releasing Chrome was that
| it became another distribution channel that would default
| to Google as the search engine.
| tolbish wrote:
| Tabbed browsing and incognito mode were incredibly
| innovative.
|
| edit - Looks like Firefox introduced both. But Chrome was
| incredible in comparison at the time. I recall thinking
| Firefox was no longer worth it. I made the move back to
| Firefox a few years ago.
| alexjplant wrote:
| Revisionist history... Firefox and loads of niche browsers
| (MyIE2/Maxthon which I used in the era where IE was
| sometimes mandatory for site compatibility) had tabbed
| browsing.
| xtracto wrote:
| Somehow it feels like Opera invented most of the features
| contemporary browsers have. I remember using Opera on an
| off from the late 90s to late 2000s.
| cxr wrote:
| Indeed, it would be nice if the tendency of people to
| jump into a conversation and start spewing absolute
| nonsense were subject to harsher social consequences.
|
| But it was not just niche browsers. By the time of
| Chrome's debut (2008), just about every browser had tabs
| --including Internet Explorer:
|
| "With the release of Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, all
| major web browsers featured a tabbed interface."
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#History>
| tolbish wrote:
| What punishment would be harsh enough in your eyes for
| the grave mistake of correcting a wrong memory?
| ericbarrett wrote:
| It had tabbed browsing, but at the time Chrome came out
| there was no or limited tab process isolation for FF.
|
| I used to work with a guy who always invoked Firefox in
| gdb so that when it crashed, he could fix the bug (null
| ptr deref etc.) and continue. As a "tab hoarder" he would
| lose a day or two of context and productivity otherwise.
| gogopuppygogo wrote:
| Mozilla (the at the time self titled browser they had
| before Firefox) even had tabs.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Application_Suite
| jrib wrote:
| chrome's big win was that it was fast. When it came out
| firefox felt super sluggish and it was a refreshing change.
|
| That and better isolation of tabs so that one tab wouldn't
| ruin your entire browser experience with some javascript
| that was thrashing.
| ginko wrote:
| There were tabbed browsers before that but the first
| mainstream browser to introduce tabbed browsing was Opera
| in 2000.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| I have no idea why you're completely annihilated in
| downvotes. You're right, at least about the incognito mode.
| I clearly remember chrome introducing this with a blog post
| or something; my boss at the time even joked that they used
| an example of "secretly buying a gift for someone" instead
| of all the dirty, dirty porn you want to watch.
|
| Tabbed browsing, no idea though.
|
| No one is claiming chrome invented the concept of incognito
| mode. It was just executed incredibly well.
| xxpor wrote:
| FF had tabbed browsing for years before Chrome ever showed
| up.
| Aa9C4xPz43Gg7k6 wrote:
| And also had single process model which failed completely
| when you had 50 tabs and Youtube etc. implemented in
| Flash. Main tab use case being unusable around the time
| Chrome came out was what motivated me to switch. Also,
| extensions getting broken at each update.
| meestaahjoshee wrote:
| firefox definitely had tabbed browsing and private mode
| before chrome was released.
|
| pretty sure opera had tabbed browsing as well.
|
| i just recall chrome being very minimal, clean and fast
| when it was first released. plus as kreeben said, Google
| was pretty revered at the time.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Chrome made a big thing at launch about their process
| isolation of tabs. Was that their innovation?
| rishav_sharan wrote:
| I remember switching to Chrome just because of the
| minimalist UI. I don't know if Chrome was faster at that
| time, but it felt faster and leaner than anything else. I
| switched back to Firefox when I realized that there were
| everal extensions I didn't want to part with. And then
| back to Chrome again after a few years when Firefox
| upgraded their UI to make everything bigger and bulbous.
| figassis wrote:
| What chrome sold was speed. Most of their ads were all
| about how fast websites would open. And tabs was cherry
| on top. I know that's what made me jump from IE. I
| remember I have a Sony vaio desktop then and IE would
| weigh it down to a crawl, then I install chrome and that
| just made me swear to never use IE again.
| tapoxi wrote:
| Process isolation of tabs, speed (V8), incognito mode,
| silent updates. Most of this they covered in the
| announcement comic.
| Huffers2 wrote:
| You're right. Opera had tabbed browsing before Firefox
| existed, and Firefox had tabbed browsing before Chrome
| existed.
| wavefunction wrote:
| I could be wrong but it looks like Opera introduced tabs
| in 2009 with v10.5 while Firefox's first release was in
| 2002. Unless we're referring to different things.
| meekaaku wrote:
| No. Opera from early 2000s atleast had tabbed browsing.
| It also had gestures, paste-and-go, open non-hyper
| plaintext links in tab etc.
| xorcist wrote:
| That's not right. Opera had tabs in version 4, released
| in early 2000.
|
| Some people apparently think tabs has to be drag-and-
| droppable, which Opera had in 2003, in order to be called
| tabs:
| https://allthatiswrong.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/opera-
| did-no...
| cbsmith wrote:
| > I worked at Yahoo! when this was going on
|
| As did I
|
| > I'm amazed share holders didn't sure Jerry Yang and the board
| for avoiding the sale.
|
| There was a lawsuit:
| https://www.seattletimes.com/business/yahoo-settles-lawsuits...
|
| > Yahoo had very little of technological value and was actively
| trying to destroy its own search business amongst other
| properties at the time.
|
| I'm not sure what you are referring to there. There was a lot
| of investment going on in search at the time. Certainly,
| critics (including me) felt it was maybe not the right
| investment, but "actively trying to destroy its own search
| business" doesn't ring true.
|
| > They really were in a prime position and bungled it extremely
| badly, I think they had maybe 20% of the search market at the
| time.
|
| 20% market share was unfortunately, a very weak position that
| was deteriorating pretty rapidly. The network effect ensured
| that the search business would continue to reward the dominant
| player dramatically more so than the smaller players, even if
| the smaller players had a technically superior product, which
| was what Bartz was getting at.
|
| "She made it very clear the equation for success was money
| spent === great search engine results, ignoring how Google came
| into being in the first place."
|
| That's not ignoring how Google came into being, and the "money
| spent === great search engine results" isn't exactly what she
| said either. There's a reality that the business had evolved
| (not accidentally) to the point where barriers to entry were
| increasingly higher and more costly and the rewards
| disproportionately went to the dominant players. It is typical
| Harvard Business School stuff, because it's not at all an
| unusual circumstance in business.
|
| > It still feels like a wasted opportunity to me, it seems so
| weak to just throw your hands up in the air and say it's too
| hard to make your extremely successful search engine better.
|
| If you'll recall, they made the engine better; it didn't
| matter. Less than a quarter of the market would switch to
| another engine even if you gave them absolutely the worst
| results, and smaller differences in search quality impacted the
| behaviour of less than 10% of the market. Hell, there was still
| a ton of traffic going to _Alta Vista_ despite that engine no
| longer being different from Yahoo 's. Meanwhile the advertisers
| hugely favoured larger market share, and the consequently more
| efficient market yielded huge marginal rewards in terms of
| quality and profit. The search engine battle had largely
| already been lost by then; it was largely lost several years
| prior (arguably as far back as Google's AOL deal). The
| opportunity wasn't "wasted": they'd thrown pretty much
| everything at it, and come up short.
|
| To this day, Google still has a dominant market share, despite
| a plethora of would be competitors. Sure, there is a
| possibility for a market disruption to change the game, but in
| a decade and a half, that has yet to emerge, so if you'd bet on
| game changing disruption in 2008 (and many investors did), from
| an investor's perspective, you'd have lost that bet.
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| I'm a bit confused at what Bartz' strategy was? If she
| deinvested in search, where did she expect Yahoo to succeed
| over Google?
| cbsmith wrote:
| It's almost like there are more ways to make money than
| search. ;-)
|
| Bartz really wasn't there long enough to execute on a
| strategy, but her point was that the opportunity cost of
| continuing to try to win the search engine wars was far
| greater than the likely value of the investment.
|
| At least from a historical perspective she was right.
| Alibaba, social media, mobile, games, content, etc. All of
| those spaces had lots of opportunity for the right moves.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Is 21 months not enough time to execute on a strategy?
| cbsmith wrote:
| At such a large company? Not really. You can certainly
| _start_ execution of a strategy, and she did, but it
| takes a long time to turn such a big boat and fully
| realize a strategic vision.
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| > Bartz really wasn't there long enough to execute on a
| strategy, but her point was that the opportunity cost of
| continuing to try to win the search engine wars was far
| greater than the likely value of the investment.
|
| True, but don't you kind of have to win at _something_ to
| retain users?
|
| It's just unclear to me where they wanted to invest the
| freed money.
| subpixel wrote:
| I think it was in no small part about selling ads on Yahoo-
| owned media or through a Yahoo ad network.
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| Isn't that what Google was doing?
| subpixel wrote:
| It's been a long time but I seem to recall Yahoo's
| approach being decidedly old school. They were trying to
| create or buy must-read and must-watch content to sell
| ads against. The marketing message was that at Yahoo.com
| you will find all the news and entertainment you could
| ever need!
| cbsmith wrote:
| Google is doing that (particularly with YouTube), as is
| everyone else. I don't think they break down the search
| vs. other ad business any more, but at last check it was
| still the biggest single source of revenue for the
| company (admittedly, I believe YouTube and adsense
| collectively generate more revenue for them now, but both
| of these are primarily showing ads on _other_ people 's
| content).
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| Ah ok, so her strategy was to pull out on search, but
| focus on higher quality/yield ads?
|
| It still seems like a bit of a losing strategy as I don't
| see any reason for people to stay with Yahoo.
| [deleted]
| cbsmith wrote:
| Yahoo at the time was #1 in a number of categories,
| including fantasy sports, finance, etc. In other areas
| they were #2 and the marginal value of being #1 vs. #2
| wasn't nearly as great as in search. The focus wasn't so
| much higher quality/yield ads (I mean, that was there,
| but everyone was always looking for that), but investing
| in other kinds of online services that would get a better
| ROI.
| bazooka_penguin wrote:
| Pure Harvard Business School spreadsheet stuff.
|
| Business degrees might be destroying the nation.
| wyre wrote:
| All we need is a peer reviewed study proving it.
| ihsw wrote:
| > The road to hell is paved with Ivy League degrees.
|
| Source: Thomas Sowell on "Intellectuals and Society"
| trenchgun wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/l7n33v/my_dad_has_ta.
| ..
| riemannzeta wrote:
| Even if you worked there, you may not have been aware of the
| fact that Yahoo already had an investment in a still small, but
| exponentially growing ecommerce startup in China, or that part
| of the reason the deal fell apart was because of a difference
| in opinion over how to value that asset.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I seem to remember the stake in Alibaba was worth a huge
| proportion of the valuation at the time. I didn't know the
| deal fell apart because of that, I was just under the
| impression Yahoo's board and Jerry didn't want to sell to
| 2008 Microsoft.
| trimbo wrote:
| IIRC, Yahoo didn't have search tech until they bought Inktomi.
| They outsourced their search to Inktomi in the 90s, then to
| Google in 2000. It was only after Yahoo bought Inktomi that
| they brought it in house (can't remember timeline of switching
| off Google).
|
| https://www.cnet.com/news/yahoo-to-acquire-inktomi/
|
| Yahoo was also a major shareholder in Google because of those
| agreements/investments and cross-licensing Overture patents.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/10/business/technology-googl...
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| I never understood why Yahoo got so wrapped around the axle
| with the search engine business. I used to use Yahoo a lot to
| start my web browsing and I liked the fact that it wasn't a
| search engine. They provided broad categories that you could
| click on and you could keep drilling down to more specific
| categories until you found relevant websites. Not always the
| best way to search the web but it was great when you didn't
| know exactly what you are looking for. They could have easily
| continued to categorize and curate the web that way and
| provided a nice alternative to search engines, especially for
| non-power users. In addition to that Yahoo had so many
| successful components back in the day that had they spent even
| a modicum of money and development effort they would have
| continued to be a significant force on the web. Things like
| Yahoo Travel and Yahoo Groups still don't have a decent
| alternative these days. I still mourn the loss of some Yahoo
| Groups I used to participate in. Yahoo Finance was once one of
| the best places on the internet to research stocks and
| investments. Yahoo Mail was ahead of Gmail for many years and
| only through years of neglect finally let everyone else catch
| up, their lack of spam filtering was what finally killed my
| Yahoo mail account for me. Yahoo Briefcase could've been
| Dropbox or Google Drive 10 years before Dropbox existed. Heck
| Yahoo even had news aggregation years before Google did. Yahoo
| dominated fantasy football for many years. The fact that they
| couldn't grow and monetize any or all of these successful
| components was simply due to a complete lack of vision and
| leadership.
| duped wrote:
| One sad niche they missed was fantasy sports. Yahoo fantasy
| leagues were great, with configurable rules and such.
|
| Now fantasy is a big business and deeply tied to legalized
| sports gambling. That could have been worth hundreds of
| millions in revenue for Yahoo.
| r00fus wrote:
| It's even in their original acronym "Yahoo = yet another
| hierarchical officious oracle".
|
| Hierarchical is exactly what you're describing and I remember
| using that a lot in the early days.
| mabbo wrote:
| > "They have to do it because they've tried everything they can
| do to fix MSN. Yahoo is the most visited site in the world, so it
| goes without saying that, given the current valuation, this is
| the perfect time for them to buy it," said Piper Jaffray analyst
| Gene Munster.
|
| 13 years changes a lot.
| dang wrote:
| This story was a saga in 2008. (The related news today, of
| course, is _Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5B_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27024118).
|
| _Microsoft eyeing Yahoo (buyout) deal!_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19336 - May 2007 (25
| comments)
|
| _Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo in $44.6 billion deal_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=107770 - Feb 2008 (3
| comments)
|
| _Microsoft bids $44.6 billion for Yahoo_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=107771 - Feb 2008 (80
| comments)
|
| _WOW. Microsoft Offers $44.6 Billion To Acquire Yahoo_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=107772 - Feb 2008 (2
| comments)
|
| _Open-source silver lining in Microsoft 's wedding vow to
| Yahoo?_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=107874 - Feb 2008
| (4 comments)
|
| _Yahoo-Microsoft merger bad news for startups?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=108099 - Feb 2008 (4
| comments)
|
| _Source: Yahoo employees say "there is no way in hell that we
| are going to work for Microsoft."_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=108391 - Feb 2008 (6
| comments)
|
| _Non-obvious winners and losers in Microsoft Yahoo Deal_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=108531 - Feb 2008 (1
| comment)
|
| _Why Microsoft Acquiring Yahoo Could Suck For Everybody_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=108769 - Feb 2008 (7
| comments)
|
| _Google 's Chief Legal Officer on Microsoft's acquisition of
| Yahoo_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=108824 - Feb 2008
| (5 comments)
|
| _Why Yahoo Should Say Yes To Microsoft_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=108873 - Feb 2008 (8
| comments)
|
| _Google Offers to Help Yahoo Fight Off Microsoft_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=108949 - Feb 2008 (2
| comments)
|
| _Google works to torpedo Microsoft bid for Yahoo_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=109346 - Feb 2008 (4
| comments)
|
| _Silicon Valley after a Microsoft /Yahoo merger: a contrarian
| view_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=109612 - Feb 2008
| (12 comments)
|
| _Redeye VC: Microsoft /Yahoo - let the exodus begin_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110366 - Feb 2008 (8
| comments)
|
| _Microsoft Adversary Rises Instinctively at Yahoo Bid_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110392 - Feb 2008 (1
| comment)
|
| _Microsoft Bid for Yahoo Drops To $29.50 a Share_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110584 - Feb 2008 (1
| comment)
|
| _My Opinion: Google wants Microsoft to buy Yahoo_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=112444 - Feb 2008 (3
| comments)
|
| _Yahoo Board To Reject Microsoft Offer_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=112749 - Feb 2008 (44
| comments)
|
| _Microsoft is 2000 times less effective than Google; Yahoo Board
| seems to be insane_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=112841
| - Feb 2008 (17 comments)
|
| _Yahoo protects employees in case of Microsoft takeover_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=120372 - Feb 2008 (6
| comments)
|
| _Yahoo sued for spurning Microsoft_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122047 - Feb 2008 (19
| comments)
|
| _Microsoft: Yahoo! has 3 weeks to decide_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=155833 - April 2008 (7
| comments)
|
| _Yahoo tells Microsoft to increase $41B bid_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=156836 - April 2008 (10
| comments)
|
| _The Yahoo! /Microsoft chess match continues: Yahoo! enters
| trial partnership with Google_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=159294 - April 2008 (6
| comments)
|
| _Microsoft Said to Be Talking With News Corporation About Joint
| Yahoo Bid_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=159493 - April
| 2008 (3 comments)
|
| _Pmarca: If Microsoft goes fully hostile on Yahoo_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=175477 - April 2008 (27
| comments)
|
| _Microsoft Says They'll Pay More, increasing Yahoo! bid to as
| much as $33 /share (from $31/share)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=177816 - April 2008 (3
| comments)
|
| _Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo Bid; Walks Away From Deal_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=180517 - May 2008 (58
| comments)
|
| _Yahoo shares fall 19.7 pct as Microsoft withdraws $44B bid_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=181422 - May 2008 (5
| comments)
|
| _How Yahoo Blew the Microsoft Deal: Part 1_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=181885 - May 2008 (1
| comment)
|
| _Battered Yahoo Admits It Overplayed Hand; Open To New Microsoft
| Talks_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182085 - May 2008
| (36 comments)
|
| _Why isn 't anyone writing about Yahoo's amazing stock gains and
| Microsoft's plunge?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182259 - May 2008 (5
| comments)
|
| _Yahoo, Microsoft Back At The Table_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=193615 - May 2008 (10
| comments)
|
| _Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook: War of the Worlds II_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=194101 - May 2008 (2
| comments)
|
| _What Yahoo doesn't want you to know about the Microsoft deal_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=208276 - June 2008 (2
| comments)
|
| _Why Yahoo Passed On Microsoft 's Search Deal (New Details!)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=217178 - June 2008 (1
| comment)
|
| _Microsoft Signals It Would Rather Talk To An Icahn-Controlled
| Yahoo_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=238583 - July 2008
| (3 comments)
|
| _Yahoo spurns Microsoft again as blood boils_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=245059 - July 2008 (4
| comments)
|
| _Yahoo tells Microsoft: 'Buy us'_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=355531 - Nov 2008 (19
| comments)
|
| _Microsoft rules out Yahoo acquisition (again)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=356526 - Nov 2008 (4
| comments)
|
| _Why Microsoft Should Bid Again -- and Yahoo Should Accept_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=369671 - Nov 2008 (1
| comment)
|
| _Microsoft Poaches Yahoo 's Top Search Engineer; "the end of
| Yahoo search." _ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=369908 -
| Nov 2008 (21 comments)
|
| _Why Microsoft should forget about Yahoo and buy Palm_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=442003 - Jan 2009 (18
| comments)
|
| _Microsoft-Yahoo Deal Struck, Will Be Announced Within Next 24
| Hours_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=729152 - July 2009
| (22 comments)
|
| _Microsoft and Yahoo Reach Agreement on Search_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=729823 - July 2009 (24
| comments)
|
| _Microsoft looking to buy Yahoo again_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3270790 - Nov 2011 (38
| comments)
|
| _Yahoo Shares Top $31, The Price Microsoft Offered In 2008_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6414838 - Sept 2013 (49
| comments)
| steinskeeper wrote:
| Got a heart attack when I just saw the headline,thinking it was a
| latest news. That aside, it's crazy how things changed for Yahoo.
| If you really look at what transpired through their struggle to
| find a comfortable spot during all those period of acquisitions.
| They really failed to find a way to manage building existing
| products and integrating new ones.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| Mourn Geocities
| 9front wrote:
| "Apollo to Buy Yahoo, AOL From Verizon for $5 Billion" from
| today's edition of WJS.
| mrweasel wrote:
| How could Yahoo possibly be worth that much money? It certainly
| not worthless, Yahoo still have great brand, nostalgic even. $5
| Billion is a bit of a strech though.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| The sale also includes AOL, and brands like TechCrunch and
| Engadget.
|
| Still not sure it adds up to $5 billion, though.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Perhaps the sites are only valuable as a bundle?
|
| The brand value of both AOL and Yahoo has to add up to
| something, but TechCrunch and Engadget is most likely just
| thrown in for free to get rid of both sites.
|
| On its own I believe that Yahoo Finans could be a
| profitable little site.
| Macha wrote:
| Techcrunch/Engadget came in to Verizon with AOL, and the
| media sites (well those that Verizon hasn't sold off
| seperately over the years) are a big part of the value
| bundle for Verizon Media. Having just the sites without
| the adtech business means you're losing money running the
| sites, having the adtech without the sites mean you don't
| have a guaranteed anchor inventory.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| Yahoo still ranks very high on Alexa. At 11, it's above
| Wikipedia(12) and just one position below Amazon (10). Reddit
| is at 19. Microsoft is at 21
|
| https://www.alexa.com/topsites
| ghaff wrote:
| There are certainly sites that many assume must have
| totally faded away years ago that are still floating
| around.
|
| The one that gets me is Second Life which was such a hot
| thing for an instant in time and is still, amazingly,
| around even though I haven't heard anyone mention it for
| years.
| 0xy wrote:
| Anecdotally, I use Yahoo Finance daily and Yahoo News (they
| have decent business stuff sometimes) a couple of times a
| week.
|
| Yahoo Finance is a great product.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Yahoo Finance I could see be a successful stand-alone
| product/company. It's not a billion dollar company, but
| perhaps a $50+ million. Sadly I don't think many in Silicon
| Valley is interested in being an company of that size.
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