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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."
Yahoo mail (and occasionally AOL mail) users are the only people I talk to who regularly note the capitalization of their email addresses. I find that reason enough for Yahoo to die.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
That would mean investors are valuing Yahoo's core business at less than zero if the Asian assets were spun out tax-free.
There is a good chance it actually is worth less than zero. Yahoo hasn't been relevant for a while now. Yahoo used to matter in search but that hasn't been true for a long time and as a result there is no real reason for most people to go to Yahoo anymore. It's hard to concisely explain their business model anymore which is usually a bad sign for a company.
Yahoo should have sold to Microsoft when they were offered an obscene (and insane) amount of money for the company. The fact that they didn't was even dumber than Microsoft actually offering $53 billion for the company. Microsoft shareholders kind of dodged a bullet when that deal fell through.
I hear a lot about this company named "Yahoo", but can someone explain me what they do ?
Maybe it is become I am European, but I have never used/seen/visited it, and I have been using the web for 20 years now...
Who would be willing to buy an asset worth less than zero?
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.
As recently as 2007, they were still listed as the #2 search engine.
I still remember those stupid commercials. "Ya-Hooooooo!"
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I call dibs to be her replacement!!
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Only service I use is email, and I use it somewhat grudgingly since I'm so entrenched (having used it for years).
You can export the mail to Thunderbird using Yahoo's IMAP interface. With the same method you can import it into any other Email service.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Since yahoo bought the entire backlog of SNL footage and has held it hostage for the past few years, if they DO go under....who will be the next company to grab it all up and hold it hostage?
That doesn't readily correct the behavior of others that send to a given e-mail address though.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I've always said you could replace most CEOs with a magic 8 ball and notice little difference. No matter how badly a CEO fucks up a company they leave with a golden parachute.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
That doesn't readily correct the behavior of others that send to a given e-mail address though.
You are right, there is no fix for that! I monitor addresses that I've not sent mail from for years, my regular contacts _still_ email those addresses even though I've told them not to and those addresses send replies stating that the address is no longer active. I just pretend that I've never seen the mails sent there in most cases.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
That's news to me.
If it's too much of a problem, you could auto-forward mail sent to your Yahoo! address to your new one.
Yahoo should get out of Internet business long time ago
Yahoo was one of the many hundreds of Internet-related 'e-entity' jumping on the Net bandwagon, but unfortunately Yahoo did / does not seem to know what they want to do
When people offered webmail services (like hotmail, which was gobbled up by Microsoft) Yahoo started their own yahoo mail
Altavista offered search engine Yahoo also offer search engine
When Twocow offered file gathering / downloading service Yahoo followed suit ...
... et cetera
... et cetera
Even today Yahoo does not have a focus
It has a lab, and the lab people created a lot of neat and very useful stuffs ... and at the end, Yahoo kill almost all of those neat services
It wants to be like Google, except it doesn't know how to focus on selling ad spaces
The best Yahoo can do now is to sell all its assets, gather up all the money and then distribute it back to the shareholders, and then close shop
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Why don't you Google it and find out?
Yahoo is/was famous (infamous?) for their email, portal, and search. They also have a few well known properties that aren't branded as Yahoo, such as Flickr. But all of these are Internet businesses. What, if anything, do they own that's not Internet? Isn't Yahoo minus Internet = -1?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Yahoo turning down Microsoft is like Groupon turning down Google's offer of several billion.
Agreed. It was remarkably stupid on the part of Groupon to turn that offer down. Obviously it's easy to say that in hindsight but I remember thinking these companies were stupid to turn down that kind of money which was clearly well beyond their current valuations.
There's a lot of due diligence involved in multi-billion dollar transactions and neither deal would have gone through, even if the target company had accepted the offer.
I've worked in M&A in years gone by. If the offers had been accepted they almost certainly would have gone through. Much of the due diligence was already done by the time the offer was made. The only thing that would have derailed them would be anti-trust concerns but those probably wouldn't have been a problem for either the Yahoo or Groupon deals.
Yeah, 'cos politicians have a long history of keeping election promises once in power. You can detect that is sarcasm, right?
That wouldn't help me. I've had a Yahoo email address for nearly 20 years (ok, I think I signed up 1997 when they first started). First name and last name, and no numbers tacked on the end because somebody beat me to it. Everybody knows how to get hold of me. And before you ask, no, spam isn't bothering me. Furthermore, they've been reliable, which is pretty good considering both Hotmail/Microsoft and Gmail have had outages and data loss.
I've also been happy to pay them $19.99 since 2002 for a Plus account. Email's one of those critical things and I think this is a bargain price considering how much I value it and compared with how much I'm prepared to spend communicating over beer instead. Nice to be grandfathered at this price on their Yahoo Ad Free Mail service too, which is otherwise $49.99.
I have run and hosted my own domain at some points, but I just don't want to have to do this.
My first thought on reading the summary was that someone who had acquired Yahoo shares wanted their free money while there was still some to be had. No surprise to see it confirmed.
Me too.
Time to get a backup email address, any recommendations? Don't need a secure mail service, just something that provides POP and webmail, doesn't get on spam blacklists, and doesn't tack some advertising at the end of transmissions.
You could say the same sort of things about Microsoft. They weren't first to market with a graphical OS, a word processor, a spreadsheet, a TCP/IP stack, a browser, a game system, or a search engine. What measure of success they've had is due to bundling, network effects, marketing, and execution, not innovating.
-Dave
Someone has to hire the consultants. Do you think that just anyone can spend millions of dollars of their employer's money paying someone else to do their own job?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The best Yahoo can do now is to sell all its assets, gather up all the money and then distribute it back to the shareholders, and then close shop
Reminds me of something Michael Dell said in 1997 about Apple.
Of course, Yahoo doesn't have a Steve Jobs to bring back, so perhaps that really would be the best thing to do.
It's too bad, really. I rather like the Yahoo weather iPhone app.
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.
I'm trying to sort out Mayer could have done differently? She took over a company in long term terminal decline. If I were her, and I were offered the job, I'd want a big ass salary too, because I'd be blamed for all the mistakes the predecessor made. And remember that predecessor was Jerry Yang, who could have sold Yahoo off to Microsoft, but didn't, and ushered in this current decline.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
When is the last time I used Yahoo! for anything?! It was before I switched to using AltaVista because I thought it was that much better. That's the time frame involved. I don't know anyone that uses Yahoo!. I just looked at their page. They're still going after the "Internet Portal" thing, apparently; it's cluttered and claims to offer everything under the sun, but does it in a way that makes me click, click, click and seems entirely geared toward reading and content consumption.
It's like they're stuck before social media, mobile, and HTML 5. Feels very "Web 1.0" (though I hate that silly term).
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Marissa Meyer is not competent, in my opinion.
I've been typing 'yahoo.com' into my address bar for years. Many years ago, when my servers and my internet connection were less reliable, I always used Yahoo as a test to see if my connection was live. Yahoo servers rarely went down.
I still go to Yahoo about once a week, just as a reflex when my browser has an issue.
Have you seen their homepage lately? Evidently the Kardashians are REALLY popular with the Yahoo! demographic. The Yahoo! homepage is a mess of celebrity crap.
I've been wondering if this is what will happen when women control the Internet. More Kardashians...
No reason to lie.
Some people pay for public attention. Headlines 5 and 6 from today's Yahoo home page:
Khloé Kardashian Admits Sheâ(TM)s Had a One-Night Stand
Kylie Jenner Admits She Only Has TWO Friends
I haven't used Yahoo since I switched to AltaVista. That's a long, long time ago.
Just loaded up their homepage. It looks like they're still trying to do the "Internet Portal" thing, it's all very, very texty, tries to cover every last topic, requires multiple clicks, and seems social and mobile unfriendly. Like they're stuck in 2001 or something.
I don't know anyone that uses Yahoo. I can't think of a use case for using Yahoo. The "Internet Homepage" model just isn't something that people do any longer. Even "web search" is really outdated; I work for a SaaS platform these days and most of our users just enter keywords into their Google widget on their mobile device, and they only do that when they want to learn something about something.
For day-to-day workflows and tasks, well... there's an app for that (whatever it happens to be). Seems like Yahoo is an epoch behind.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
It's too bad, really. I rather like the Yahoo weather iPhone app.
Really? I think it's a piece of crap and the temperatures and predictions it gives are routinely wrong. I have several other weather apps because it is fairly useless and it's predictions are generally the worst of any weather app on my phone.
I had suggested this on a previous occasion, but will repeat: Yahoo should sell its internet business to Apple. That is the one missing thing that Apple doesn't have - unlike Google and Bing. And don't be too greedy on the price - just sell it to Apple at whatever they pay you
I'm trying to sort out Mayer could have done differently?
Hard to say. The company does make pretty substantial profits and they have quite a lot of cash. The problem the company doesn't really seem to have organic growth prospects and they don't dominate an important segment like Google does with search or Apple does with devices. Yahoo just doesn't seem to have a focus to the company and I'm not sure anyone would be able to easily fix that.
And remember that predecessor was Jerry Yang, who could have sold Yahoo off to Microsoft, but didn't, and ushered in this current decline.
That is among the dumbest business decisions of all time. The board should have pimp slapped him when he didn't want to sell the company for such a staggeringly large amount of money. I can't stand Microsoft either but if they want to buy my company for way more than it is really worth I'd take the money and run.
I have a bunch of emails - gmail, yahoo, netscape/aol, 2 hotmail accounts, icloud, ISP and a couple of more accounts. The first I ever had was netscape.net, right from the days Netscape had launched Communicator. Then I added yahoo, which was the catch all for everything - big mistake. So I created a gmail account that only family would use. When I was b/w jobs, I created a new hotmail account just for all my job applications and inquiries, and it became the primary LinkedIn account. When I got an iPhone, I got icloud, which I needed to work properly w/ FaceTime, and then again, when I got a Lumia, I got a live.com account. Oh, and I got 2 ISP accounts from 2 different ISPs that I had from different cities.
So I use Yahoo for all my financial transactions - it's the email account my bank has. I use my AOL account for my Amazon transactions - since it started early. Gmail is still for family, and my hotmail jobs is still just for jobs. Since I no longer have the Lumia, I use the live.com account for just the PC and anything I download from there. Finally, anytime I'm asked for email by any local shopping promotions or stores I'm unlikely to shop at once I move, I give them the ISP address. It's ideal for either junk mail which I won't miss, or for contacting any local business, like say the cleaners.
If Yahoo goes away, I'd migrate my banking info from there, but other mistakes where I gave that to people who subsequently spam me would give me the opportunity to lose them. It'll be fun once their emails to me start bouncing.
Add Meg Whitman to that - has she been doing any better? I'm trying to think of any good female CEO, but even Jill Barad of Mattel was a disaster.
But how has she been doing at HP?
Microsoft has a core business, Yahoo does not. It is just a series of websites they have acquired through purchases over the years. Its old curated directories no longer exist and the company is nowhere close to a market leader in what it does pretend to do. The largest value of Yahoo is ownership of stock in two public companies, Alibaba and Yahoo Japan (which is majority owned by SoftBank). Effectively, they are a holding company.
Obviously to build a playpen for her baby and cut their remote workers.
It's troubling to see people asking for the internet search business to have one less competitor. Less competition is always a bad thing for the consumer. Hell, google already gets away with pretty much any breach of privacy, data mining, remote software execution, etc. they like. Imagine them when there are no other options in terms of web search and related services?
Yahoo was one of the many hundreds of Internet-related 'e-entity' jumping on the Net bandwagon
Fucking hell, how young are you?
Pre-Google Yahoo had one of the top web directories available. It was manually curated and therefore doomed to failure, but they were for a while a market leader.
Didn't last long though, admittedly. Wouldn't let that malware infested shitfest anywhere near one of my browsers these days.
They already stopped being a competitor in the search engine business when they subbed the task out microsoft "bing!"
Only I can judge you.
Actually, CompuServe was bought by AOL a long time ago. So, in fact, AOL *is* CompuServe (or the other way around?).
It's a good example of the principle: "A-level people hire A-level people. B-level people hire C-level people".
First things first: discussed negative valuation of the core is result of other valuations and their subtraction. All these valuations are largely approximate to allow for any reasonable conclusion in quantitive terms. Therefore casuistical nature of this must be nailed down first off.
Then, company in quite substantial extent follows Google model of presence on net and its sophistication. Allright, in less extravagant fashion, but with lesser part of failing attempts at exotic activities as well. Presence on net is important by itself, it is itself chunk of the pie. I am user of Yahoo services and their client, like many others are. It is huge potential base for the future, it cannot be valued below zero just for the fact.
Yes, they are not that bold and trendy perhaps, but they are solid - which is important (even ambitious Microsoft does NOT have that decent reputation, sorry) - and they managed to own Alibaba, that is only one modest corner of the net and its future. More is definitely to come, no doubt in that. If Yahoo has presence, they as well may continue owning more of such.
Finally, it is greatly stretched to cite Yahoo as Altavista killer or what. Everybody knows what search method made it obsolete. Actually, I do use Yahoo search engine in the process of fishing some cached content, not present somewhere elsewhere - again, being present with unique resources is sufficient ground of serving your portion of clients in the future as well, likely expanding where becomes possible.
Servant of karma
Yahoo is the new Myspace
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I've always seen people use either google.com or in some cases, even microsoft.com for this purpose
Set an auto-reply message up (it might be called something like vacation settings, autoresponse, or similar) instructing people that the address is no longer valid and that the message will be unread unless they resend it to the correct address (include said address). Where you can change it yourself, do so. You might even want to include basic instructions for a few email clients on how to make the changes. It'd probably take an hour to do it exceptionally well. I bet you have a very high success rate if you try it out. (I've done this before.)
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Yahoo games used to be one of the most popular places to play a ton of board game clones, but Yahoo snubbed mobile devices for years. What makes this extra mystifying is that almost all of their games were written in Java, and most mobile devices support Java. Why weren't they ported?
History was recently repeated when several shows such as Community were purchased to promote Yahoo's video streaming service, "Yahoo Screen". But the apps and Chromecast support didn't exist until the season was almost over, and they were far from polished. Even the web interface is perplexing.
She's not entirely unattractive so, if we're selling off her body parts then she might be worth more whole than in parts.
Disclosure, I owned some stock until about a year ago. I'd held it for about five years. I bought it at under 20 and sold for about 50. Filthy lucre is filthy but, damn it, it was pretty lucrative. I harbor them no ill will and it was simply profit. I seem to recall that I'd had some 1800 shares. ;-) I believe I can login and check but I am lazy.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Those addresses do send autoresponses, though they lack the new email address because I don't want it going to spammers as well. However, the people still mailing that address most certainly have my new address as well, on an individual basis!
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
--Yahoo News is worth saving IMHO, but yahoo email got deprecated in my case pretty fast when they started doing Teh Stupid -- like getting rid of multi-tabbed email, datamining your private messages to serve ads, farting around with forced password changes, and now the latest - *blocking webmail entirely* for "a limited number of users" that use AD BLOCKERS. F'-d up Epic Stupidity there. It's like they're purposely trying to kill the experience.
--I'm unhappy cuz yahoo was a primary email account for me since ~1997. Gmail is just OK but there's no really good free alternatives out there that I've found except for maybe Inbox.
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== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??