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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."
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 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.
Once AltaVista came about Yahoo was kinda useless, I actually had a preference for web crawler anyway. It was a web directory, so it catagorized sites, in therory making finding stuff that was of interest easier.
When web indexed became a thing, it was pretty useless for search, they then tried to become a homepage (which turns out nobody wants), and email after hotmail offered (their email client actually has a lot to offer, not better, but not worse than Gmail, just different).
I think they try to produce some content, aggregate some, etc. But they were always behind the trend. Late to email, late to web index (I don't think they ever had their own even), went the super ad route as Google was crushing he with text ads (they had a dominos ad with sound and full page animation of pizzas flipping over your page).
From what I can tell now they're an investment company, with Alibaba being the bulk of their value.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Altavista
Search and portals, they also own Flickr.
Honestly, if you need to know about Yahoo, just Google it. ;-)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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'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
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 !
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.
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.
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
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.
Brilliant, sell Marissa to Apple too. That'll fix 'em.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.