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Yahoo Preps Auction For 3,000 Patents Worth $1 Billion (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Wall Street Journal reports that bids are being accepted for nearly 3,000 Yahoo patents and pending applications. In April, Yahoo moved 2,659 patents into a patent-holding company called Excalibur IP LLC, which was seen as a first step toward a patent sale. "This represents a unique opportunity for companies operating in the Internet industry to acquire some of the most pioneering and foundational patents related to Web search and advertising," Yahoo said in a statement. Those invited to join the auction include "strategic buyers, private-equity firms, and investment firms focused on intellectual property," according to the Journal. Preliminary bids are due by the middle of this month, and the patents are expected to fetch more than $1 billion, according to "people familiar with the matter" who spoke to the Journal. Bloomberg, which also reported on the patent sale, said there was no official reserve price or bidding guidelines. Yesterday, Verizon submitted a $3 billion bid for Yahoo's core internet business. The sale will include 500 U.S. patents and more than 600 pending applications, but will not include the larger collection of patents going in the patent sale.
at Yahoo!
I'm definitely telling all of my friends/family who remain on Y!mail to get out of dodge.
Verizon and privacy (much like Verizon and security) are more like oil and water.
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How much of these billions will go to Marissa Mayer's golden parachute?
yea we'll see after the auction is over...
Mysogynist!! How dare you criticize the leadership of a strong womyn!!
Marissa Mayer is widely expected to stand down as CEO with any takeover deal and will leave with a severance package of around $110m.
Run a business into the ground and make $100 million? What a great scam.
enough said.. ðYðYðYðYðY
Patent trolls are working 24/7 to figure out which patents they want to bid on.
Better known as 318230.
or does Yahoo seem to be dismantling their company piece by piece until nothing of value is left? It all strikes me as shenanigans to avoid paying out money they owe or maybe a Bain style investor gambit.
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Just remember Eastman-Kodak. Their patent portfolio was supposedly worth somewhere around $2B. They tried to sell it as a last ditch to save the company but their competitors joined up and kept the price down. They ended up getting only a tiny fraction of what they thought it was valued at and now there is effectively no more Eastman-Kodak. Granted, Yahoo isn't in nearly the predicament that Eastman-Kodak was, but it still may not be as lucrative as they think.
I don’t think management has committed to selling the core business; they just said they’d entertain bids. I could see them selling the patents for show and then Mayer declaring the core business sale is off because the bids were too low. She’ll have gotten the press off her back for six months while thinking of new ways to run Yahoo into the ground. Her golden parachute will still be waiting.
3,2,1
Did you by chance mean the top executives when you said "the board of directors"? The board doesn't typically have generous golden parachutes like the key executives do. Board members, who serve at the pleasure of the stockholders, get paid around $150,000/year or so to attend several meetings each year. If I were on the board, I would want to keep getting that money for many years.
If Google and Facebook throw in they can own what little they don't already and exclude all comers. $1B is trivial for them.
> does Yahoo seem to be dismantling their company piece by piece until nothing of value is left?
There's already not much of value left. 90% of Yahoo's value (market cap) is the Alibaba stock they own. Investing in Yahoo is just an indirect way of investing in Alibaba, with a small serving of "maybe Yahoo has some potential" on the side. Yahoo hasn't been doing well in their business, so the best course of action may well be to sell off assets to other companies who can manage them better. The other option may well be having the assets slowly rot under Yahoo's control.
I'd be frothing at the mouth. To think they turned down Microsoft's $44 Billion dollar offer 7 years ago... And that was before Alibaba got big.
1. Register company
2. Raise money from investors
3. Buy as many patents possible. It doesn't matter what they are. Just buy, buy, buy
4. Sue! Sue! Sue!
5. PROFIT!!!
Run a business into the ground and make $100 million? What a great scam.
Marissa Mayer did not run Yahoo into the ground. That had been accomplished before she ever arrived at the company. Frankly if anything she's done a fairly good job of mitigating the damage. Yahoo lost it's way a long time ago and has largely been coasting on previous accomplishments for the better part of a decade. I doubt anyone could have really fixed the problems Yahoo had. The best solution was always likely to be to sell the company. Anyone with a brain coming into a train wreck like Yahoo would have negotiated a severance package because why else would you bother taking on the job? The long term prospects of the company were poor and anyone with the chops to run the company would know it.
does Yahoo seem to be dismantling their company piece by piece until nothing of value is left?
Yahoo hasn't been in good shape for quite a while now. The only real assets the company had that were really worth much were the stake in Alibaba and some residual business from 10+ years ago when the company was still relevant. A sale of the company and it's assets, together or separately, was clearly the most likely outcome even before Marissa Mayer became CEO. That's the way things go sometimes. Most companies don't last forever and Yahoo is no exception. It will continue to exist as a portion of some other company or companies and nothing of value will be lost. Yahoo hasn't been well managed for a while. The dumbest thing their management ever did was declining the buyout offer from Microsoft for an absurd amount of money. (Conversely that might be the biggest bullet Microsoft ever dodged...)
I remember a time when the idea of AOL and Yahoo! being brought together into one company would have been the biggest of biggest news. Now it barely even garners a mention in the article.
I mean, imagine if Google bought Netflix, merged it with Youtube... and nobody gave a shit. It really makes you wonder what the tech landscape will look like in another twenty years.
Can we exclude those?
--- Mercutio was right.
Patents have no inherent value. You buy a patent because you intend to "monetize" the patent by developing a product or service that generates cash.
OR
You buy a patent for use as a legal weapon. The value of that patent is only relative to the potential legal costs of not holding the patent.
If these patents were worth $1 billion in either case - why wouldn't Yahoo hold on to them and develop them for the benefit of their shareholders?
The truth is they aren't worth this much - and Yahoo has FA ideas of how to monetize them.
Yahoo is an old car heading to the junkyard to be chopped up for parts.
Selling what others built, and you were given custody of, takes vision & leadership.
I hope the executives get a big bonus, and find time to layoff the people who authored these patents to reduce costs.
Since Yahoo is failing how good are those patents. Yahoo doesn't seem to be making bank with them.
Their CEO should try find the Yahoo BILLING page
I have to use GOOGLE to search for Yahoo BILLING page
it constantly changes from wallet.yahoo.com to billing.yahoo.com to billing.mail.yahoo.com and it is NEVER linked from YOUR ACCOUNT INFO page on their services.
WTF? and they wonder why they cannot get money?
It really takes a thick shit CEO to have a billing page TUCKED HIDDEN AWAY from your CUSTOMERS.
Yeah, that billion dollars worth of patents has done a lot for them -- they've managed to grow their market share to OVER ONE TENTH of Google's, with only a four-year head start.
https://www.netmarketshare.com...
But hey, if you want to buy the secret recipe to a glistening 1998-style "portal", be my guest. A billion dollars is a small price to pay to get into a competitive position against Netscape/AOL!
Unless one of those patents is for a working time machine, the only value you'll get out of them will the the warm fuzzy feeling of helping Marissa buy her eight and ninth yachts when she quits/gets fired/closes the company later this year.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Every time I see a bunch of patents up for sale, it's like seeing a car load of thugs in the neighborhood that you know don't belong there. Sooner or later they'll be trying to extract cash for those patents. Patent troll's dream. Bunch of patents to misuse. Almost as bad as giving a kid a revolver to play with, only with the kid it's probably safer.
I've been on a couple of boards.
Typically, a board member is required to spend about $50,000 of their $150K compensation buying company stock, and hold that stock. That aligns their interests with those of investors, because typically most board members are NOT major stock holders. They are HIRED (nominated) by major stock holders, or more often by representatives of the stockholders, the fund managers. They are professional accountants, strategic managers, etc. People who are very successful are often so succesful because they put qualified professionals in charge, not because they try to make all of the decisions themselves.