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Mozilla Could Walk Away and Still Get More Than $1 Billion If It Doesn't Like Yahoo's Buyer (recode.net)
Kara Swisher, reporting for Recode: Under terms of a contract that has been seen by Recode, whoever acquires Yahoo might have to pay Mozilla annual payments of $375 million through 2019 if it does not think the buyer is one it wants to work with and walks away. That's according to a clause in the Silicon Valley giant's official agreement with the browser maker that CEO Marissa Mayer struck in late 2014 to become the default search engine on the well-known Firefox browser in the U.S. Mozilla switched to Yahoo from Google after Mayer offered a much more lucrative deal that included what potential buyers of Yahoo say is an unprecedented term to protect Mozilla in a change-of-control scenario. It was a scenario that Mayer never thought would happen, which is why she apparently pushed through the possibly problematic deal point. According to the change-of-control term, 9.1 in the agreement, Mozilla has the right to leave the partnership if -- under its sole discretion and in a certain time period -- it did not deem the new partner acceptable. And if it did that, even if it struck another search deal, Yahoo is still obligated to pay out annual revenue guarantees of $375 million.
with a deal like this, well mozilla, you guys have to build a new, better/secure and faster browser. oh and by the way keep working on thunderbird also...
and i am a user who never left for chromium/chrome family...in fact i really don't like google's browser for several reasons....privacy being one of them.
They really ought to just exercise the option unless the buyer is someone they really really want to work with. Its a lot of money and it would be very good for the foundation to get that money.
Yahoo investors were fools.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Buy Opera and fully move to the blink engine?
That's a billion FUs.
You think designing a new UI every 6 weeks is cheap ?
At worst it drops yahoo's value by a billion dollars.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
You think ignoring what your users want is cheap?
$997 million of it will go into a program to get more lesbian Eskimo Little Person left-handed albinos into programming, and $5 million will go into studying ways to make Firefox more like Chrome, then they'll have emergency fundraising to keep from defaulting on the $2 million they're in debt.
So Recode saw this contract? Why didn't it post the exact language used? Because it sounds plenty fishy for me ... what court would enforce a contract that says that if I walk away from a mutually agreed-upon deal, you have to still hold up your end of the deal? You still have to pay even though you get nothing in return? A concept called "consideration" comes to mind...
Breakfast served all day!
Specifically for Marissa Mayer, the Peter Principle.
People are stupid, and also lazy.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Mozilla sponsored a surfing contest in Hawaii. That isn't cheap.
Marrissa Mayer knew what she was doing. If this agreement actually exists, it was intentionally engineered to help resist a hostile takeover or shareholders forcing a liquidation of assets. Mayer took this job knowing that if either of those scenarios played out, she would be dumped without the track record to get another job of similar scale. Setting up this contract with Mozilla is one way she has been able to retain her control thus far.
Poison Pill
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
If it gets any money.
Yahoo! will sell of the company piece by piece until "Yahoo!" is worth less than $0.
Yahoo is already worth less than zero. Their market cap is less than the value of their shares of Alibaba and Yahoo Japan.
No one should be stupid enough to buy Yahoo under conditions like that.
No one should be stupid enough to buy Yahoo under any circumstances 9unless Yahoo has assets that can be liquidated for more than the purchase price).
Yahoo is company that no longer has any reason to exist. They are the Radio Shack of the Internet.
$375 million a year??
For that much per year maybe they could create a browser that have memory leaks that render it unusable after a day or two.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Deals like that is the reason Yahoo is in trouble. Mozilla doesn't care, it found another sugar daddy after Google dumped them. Yahoo can't afford to be a sugar daddy.
Marissa Mayer has to be post-menopausal and likely has short mannish hair. Bonus points if she's fat like all the other americans too!
Seriously? Live under a rock much? Not only does she have three very young kids, she is seriously attractive (in my opinion.... Actually, no, she is objectively, factually attractive). She might run tech companies equally as poorly as Meg Whitman, but she is way, way better looking than 99.8% of CEOs.
Stop that. Radio Shack sells batteries and cheap Chinese trinkets. That's more than Yahoo does.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
What does Yahoo actually have left? The most frequent web real-estate must be Yahoo answers which comes up often in search query results. There are still people who never migrated away from Yahoo mail but to my knowledge most people who used it switched to Gmail years ago.
I think one major thing that should have been done long ago was to change the name. Face it, Yahoo is a stupid name and has like zero marketing appeal, especially to the groups you would want to be reaching.
Once when Firefox forced my address-bar query to be answered by Yahoo the result took me to a download of a popular free app that had been re-packaged with what basically amounted to malware - super-aggressive crapware which even though I selected all options to not install and to decline, still installed shit on my system. That was my impression of Yahoo and totally pissed me off about Mozilla's having baked it into Firefox.
Never understood why anyone would pay that kind of money to be the default.
This should give you an insight as to the mind-set of the upper management at Yahoo.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
"baked it into Firefox" ... except that you can change it with literally two clicks.
You think "never change anything because some user somewhere will complain" is a path to success?
Maybe that was actually the point. It's a "poison pill" clause. It's well known that Mayer has been against selling off the company all along but her hand is being forced by the board.
Breakfast served all day!
What does Yahoo actually have left
Their real estate holdings are pretty valuable. I think they own 8 or 9 large buildings in and around Sunnyvale. The Sunnyvale campus alone has got to be at least 10 acres. 10 acres in the Silicon Valley in the hottest real estate market since the dot com. Real estate developers are probably drooling at the thought of all that land coming up for sale.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
It's more likely that he thinks "if 99% of your users loudly declaim that your latest change is an utter bucket of septic arsedribble" then it may be worth at least considering that it might be, to a degree, a bit suboptimal round the edges.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
RadioShack (no space) had enough value for Sprint to buy them up
They do it because it nets them more money than it costs (or at least in theory it would). Search engine traffic is tens if not hundreds of times more monetizable than any other type of traffic (after all, this is one of the only times ads are truly relevant in shaping customer buying habits), so people jockey for it intensely, including by spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get large chunks of it.
This contract, her golden parachute if bought out, retention bonuses for key staff if bought out, and some other contracts that make a buyout look less appealing. My guess is that they were trying to swallow a poison pill -- make it too financially dangerous to get bought. But then they realized the next week that the best option was to get bought :)
If their marketshare went down so much it's not because of "some user somewhere", it has to be the majority of them and it means Firefox is just making one extremely bad decision after another, non-stop, for years.
You think copying Chrome's latest changes every 6 weeks is cheap ?
FTFY
Of course, 99% of users never say anything at all no matter how they feel about changes.
Either you do a proper survey or you have to guess whether those users raging on the Internet are a representative sample.
There are many possible causes of marketshare decline, some of which are not under Mozilla's control ... Google properties saying "works best with Chrome!", for example. So it's difficult to know how much of the decline is due to, say, browser UI changes.
It's also difficult to know how what would have happened had no changes been made. It's pretty clear that *some* users would only be satisfied if Mozilla had made no UI changes since 2001, which would clearly not be winning.
If you keep losing users every day, you should be able to understand that what you're doing is not right.
That doesn't follow. Sometimes you lose market share for reasons entirely outside your control.
Even when you lose market share due to factors under your control, it doesn't necessarily follow that you made bad decisions. You have to make decisions under uncertainty and sometimes the best decisions given the data available don't turn out to be the best in hindsight.
And even when you lose market share because of decisions you should have known are bad, it doesn't necessarily follow that those are the same decisions that some subset of people ranted about on the Internet.
The traffic there is *appalling* every day starting at 3 p.m. and doesn't get better until almost 8 p.m. That entire area has become a logistical catastrophe and the fact that greedy developers want to keep putting shit there - like a huge sports stadium - keeps making it exponentially worse.
Yeah and then it magically gets changed back on its own.
...after all of the users and developers it shed when Yahoo became the default search engine for their browser.
Of course you do.
The C-suite's actions are only responsible when it improves.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
if you choose chorme to search this web. you can see the speed and display visual is quite good. it better than the others.
That is all.
"The Mozilla Reps program aims to empower and support volunteer Mozillians who want to become official representatives of Mozilla in their region/locale." Apparently, the commode.
I think that's an optimistic estimate.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
These people have so much money yet they cannot get multi-proc and sandbox to work. Tottally and utterly negligent. Really security features like this need to come first to protect the users. You would think they could also keep XUL for backward compatability, with more security and user control for security purposes
Where did Yahoo get that kind of money to flash around anyway?
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Google does the same thing.
Yeah, you have to admit, that's a pretty sweet deal. Whoever managed to negotiate that at Mozilla really earned their pay.
We should be singing her praises now, for negotiating this deal. Sure, it might look bad for Yahoo, but maybe she did it for the greater good, knowing that Yahoo was doomed anyway.
they have a lot of active email users, I don't see why a competent company couldn't make money there.
allegedly they have 12% of search too.
if that's true, it's worth a ton (based on payments made to various companies to be default search).
Google has the advantage of not needing to buy them (they'll get practically the same benefit from their collapse), but there's money to be made with the Yahoo customer base, and e-mail customers are pretty loyal, as it's a PITA to change emails.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Good question: How does Mozilla Foundation spend $300,000,000 each year?
I understand that Mozilla Foundation now gets most of its money from Microsoft: Microsoft pays Yahoo. Yahoo pays Mozilla Foundation to make "Yahoo search" (actually mostly Microsoft Bing search) the default search engine in Firefox. That means Microsoft gets more money from advertisers when Firefox users do a search.
Firefox is now, apparently, mostly controlled by Microsoft, who is apparently trying to destroy it. In the past, Google paid Mozilla Foundation $300 million each year to make Google search the default search engine in Firefox. Google apparently didn't cause problems in the design of Firefox, even though it paid a shocking amount.
The Thunderbird and SeaMonkey Composer GUIs have been damaged, apparently deliberately. File saves in the newer versions of both ask for a new file name, and don't suggest the last one chosen. The damage was reported several months ago, but has not been fixed. Is that another example of Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Extinguish? People who feel forced away from Thunderbird may choose Microsoft software to replace it. Is that something Microsoft is trying to accomplish?
In my opinion, dishonest people should not be employed in management. In my opinion, the managers and members of the board of directors of both Microsoft and Mozilla Foundation who approved the dishonesty of sneakily re-configuring Mozilla Foundation products should be immediately fired, and not allowed to have management positions in the future.
The browser situation is very, very ugly.
Google is becoming more and more abusive, and more and more incompetent. Want to download the Google Chrome Browser? The download file name does not give the version number. Even the badly managed Mozilla Foundation puts the Firefox version number into the file name. (But the file names for the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Firefox are the same.)
An earlier version of the Google Chrome browser installs 3 system services. Google has more control over computers than limited rights users. Is Google paid by the U.S. government to include software to control computers?
I would like Slashdot stories about:
1) The fact that most people aren't technically involved enough to know that their Firefox browser search was hijacked by Microsoft, or how to change back to Google search.
2) Bad and sneaky management. One of the many examples: Microsoft will make more money if it arranges that people are discouraged from using the Firefox browser. Another example: Why was this pastebin script removed?
3) Counteracting abuse. We need stories about web sites like this:
Remove spyware in Windows 10.
Disabling Windows 10 Tracking.
Destroy Windows Spying - Windows spying removal tool.
4) How do download a Windows 10 ISO file: Windows 10 Tech Bench Upgrade Program.