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Yahoo Discussing Sale of Internet Business (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader writes: According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal (paywalled), Yahoo!'s board of directors is considering the sale of their internet business in a series of meetings starting today. "Growing concerns around Chief Executive Marissa Mayer's lack of progress turning around Yahoo and an exodus of top executives have increased pressure on the company's board to consider her future and alternatives to her turnaround attempt, now in its fourth year. ... Much of the value of Yahoo's $31 billion market capitalization is tied up in two large Asian assets, Alibaba and Yahoo Japan. Its 15% stake in Alibaba is now worth about $32 billion, and its 35% stake in Yahoo Japan is now worth about $8.5 billion. Yahoo's cash and short-term investments totaled $5.9 billion at the end of the third quarter. That would mean investors are valuing Yahoo's core business at less than zero if the Asian assets were spun out tax-free."
I have been following Yahoo since their IPO, and I have never really been sure what they actually wanted to do (except to spend their pile of cash acquiring stuff). While Google has always seemed very focused in increasing their share of the search / information processing market, Yahoo (which started, remember, as What Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle!, i.e., a web directory) was going to own search, then started using Google, then build their own (pretty bad) search engine after letting Google get big. That was pretty much par for the course. I can remember sitting through numerous presentations on this or that (Yahoo! Music!) where it seemed like the basic business model was "we will buy a promising startup, rebrand it as Yahoo and then let it die on the vine."
In other words, like a lot of Silicon Valley, they have made a lot of money, but it has been investor money, not actual revenue.
I used Yahoo when they were top dog as my primary search engine back in the day. They were the big guys then. Unfortunately, they were the first to jump whole hog onto the pop-up/pop-under bandwagon. That was before browser plugin and built-in pop-up blockers had been created. Every click regenerated a new pop-up. Their site instantly became unusable. (Remember X-10, anyone?)
It took me less than 24 hours and I found this new relatively unknown search engine called Google, people had been talking about which had a nice clean interface and NO POP-UPS. I changed my homepage and never looked back. Yahoo shot themselves in the foot and gave Google a serious foothold in the market they owned. When they became a "portal", I knew they were done. They damaged their brand, fell behind in technology and eventually became an also-ran.
I think you're missing the problem here: if Yahoo closes up shop soon, that auto-forwarding won't work any more because Yahoo Mail won't exist.
This is one of the big problems with email: it's not really permanent, and only lasts as long as the provider lasts, or as long as the provider allows you to have an account there. That's why so many people have webmail accounts at one of the Big 3 (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft/Live/MSN/outlook.com/whatever they're calling it these days). Lots of idiots use email from their ISP, but then one day they have to move (or they get tired of their ISP's high prices and switch to a competitor) and suddenly that account is gone, along with all their email, and all their contacts are still sending emails to the old address which bounces. You don't have that problem with, for instance, Google's Gmail. But of course that assumes Gmail is going to be around indefinitely. The way things are going now, that's probably a safe assumption, however 15 years ago we could probably have said the same thing about Yahoo Mail, and it's looking now like it might not actually stick around that long. It's hard to say; it might just get sold off and turn into a paid service, it might get swallowed up by a competitor like Gmail, but there's also a chance it'll disappear entirely, which would affect a LOT of people.