Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo to buy Geocities
Michael
sent in the big news that
Yahoo is Buying GeoCities.
The deal was for 4.52 Billion Bucks- with that kind of cash
maybe they can make the server not lagged to last thursday
and figure out a less intrusive advertising system? Maybe
not, but we can wish.
Their sites are fast. Have a simple interface. Their ads are not intrusive. And it all runs on FreeBSD :)
I could care less about those popup banners, I minimize/close them by pure reflex. But Geocities' "site branding" is downright intrusive, not to mention offensive. Putting your company's watermark on the work of every person on your site? Lame.
Great. Now that Yahoo is buying another worthless company watch the stock skyrocket.
worthless+worthless=400/share.
Actually Yahoo did make a $25 million profit last quarter. And what's $4 billion in STOCK when the stock has gone up by $10+ billion in the past month or so?
If you think Yahoo is an overvalued stock, get yourself an account with Ameritrade, sell YHOO short, and collect a fortune when it crashes. Or continue the near constant diatribe about the standard /. bogeymen - corporations, capitalism, Microsoft - that has made this site almost like a caricature and sadly, a shadow of it's former self.
1:I dont want it to happen,
2:I doubt rob would so it wouldnt be worth it
3:some doofus would try something like it
Congratuations, you gratuitously slammed the poster while avoiding everything of substance he stated in his post. You must be a level 4 /.er.
Not to worry...once everything resets itself to it's true worth (and it will), those who have fully embraced the consumer society will fall.
Or, use the trailer park to attract tornados and use that as your video feed.
I use Google! (www.google.com). And it runs Linux too. It's been covered on /. before, but it has several novel concepts that make it interesting.
I wish I could. On Datek...
"YHOO: Security is marginable but cannot be sold short."
I think that a few too many people think the stock is overvalued.
Of course, you stole that from any one of many comics that have done extensive strips on that joke... (Doonsebury and Fox Trot come to immediate mind...Dilbert as well)..
But it is funny.
News.com and wired are both reporting that the deal was for 3.56 billion. Still overpriced, but not as bad:)
Geocities does provide freewebpages, but that doesn't make it valiable. Geocities is worthless, I know I've been with it since the beginning.
I goto specfic sites within Geocities not the frontpage. Netscape is different. when I go to Netscape I go to either download something, like a browser or plugin, or to "My Netscape" & Webmail. Netscape provides a better portal than Geocities, people just use it for its free stuff we don't care about it.
Then they would have gotten something worthwhile for their billions
The Open Directory Project, formerly known as NewHoo is a better and more complete directory in a number of areas. With hundreds of volunteer editors working on the directory in their areas of interest, it's bound to get even better. Check it out:
http://directory.mozilla.org
Five years from now places like GeoShitties and Excite will either be gone, or essentially in serious decline. A lot of executives are going to fall on their sword for dropping billions of dollars on enterprises that maybe could make $100 million revenue tops. And a bunch of middle class financial wizards who bought Yahoo at $300 hoping it would go up to $600 will be crying to the US Government for help.
Meanwhile Sun will be making real dollar reselling Netscape's enterprise software to the Fortune 500, and Mozillia will have been reinvented into hundreds of profitable products.
(Special spite to GeoCities - their service is a good idea but the execution is horrific. They already are being ripped off by a hundred other sites. $4Billion - yea right.)
Today Ford bought Volvo's car division for about 6 billion. I can't understand that Volvo isn't worth more than stinking Geocities....
I just don't get it. How can a company be
worth 4.5 Billion dollars when it has
no tangible assests. It rents all of its
servers and buildings, and has no real
identity in itself. Most of the pages
on the site suck. Most of all, the
company has been in business for close
to 4 years and still has not made
1 cent in profits. I just don't get it.
it should be called geosh*ties.
it's just a virtual server with some crummy web space. geez. i guess good marketing/advertising fodder for the masses.
werd.
-mrRGB
once the company starts doing well, open a new company in the Caymann islands to buy out the old company at an inflated price. Split the stock. Buy out a legitimate corporation. Swap the stocks. Watch your net worth shhot through the roof. Hobnob with the Fed. Then forget selling everything--take the companies liquid assets and run to Tahiti :) ...start a swiss bank account with your ill-gotten gains...invest in a Russian start-up with some of your new nest egg...once that company is going well, buy out some profitable US and UK companies...you get the idea :)
/dev/brain /dev/brain: No such file or directory
# find
find: cannot open
What is your Slash Rating?
I think Geocities and Yahoo have the same demographic. First time and intermediate Internet users who don't know any better.
4+ billion is a lot of bank though, must be nice to not clear a profit yet but be able to purchase something like that.
Either way, I don't usually go to either so it won't make a difference to me.
If you can read this message, your threshold is too low.
When I'm looking for something Yahoo is almost always the first place I go. Most of the Time when I look on Yahoo I find what I want. What more could you ask for.
--Zachary Kessin
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Having the fast simple interface is really important. They do have a great deal of broken links, but they've also got a crack team of paid monkeys sitting and checking those links all day long. The database is just to big to hold on to. Yahoo is also pretty fast, and they don't do those crappy poppup windows. I still like Google better, but that's just because pb told me to.
You can't stop being a cow, but you can pick your grass.
--
(sourceCode == freeSpeech)
Like another poster said, Foxtrot has already done a wonderful job of this. Look back a couple days for the beginning of the story.
<tim><
I figure if GeoCities can get $4.6 billion, slashdot, which is a far more useful site (I mean, how many times do you need to see "Mary-Jo's Home of All Her Beanie Baby Friends!!!!!" on a webpage?), should get $10 bil, easily.
-mike kania
Anyone got some swampland they wanna develop as a joint venture?
Get off my lawn.
Remember, most of your favorite internet stocks are majorly overvalued. Notice that most of the big deals lately are stock-swaps? $4.6Bil in funny-money....
Program Intellivision!
Cisco became the giant it is through the same "pooling of resources" acquisition method.
As for the author of the book that is so _often_ quoted here - I accuse him and his fans of cowardice.
Yes, there is volatility in the market folks. If you can't handle the risk, invest in bonds. If you have some brains, a little capital, and a pair of balls, you can make yourself moderately wealthy.
This really does prove that the American internet industry represents the very worst of a consumer society on speed.
I'm not even going to bother explaining why I feel that stocks like Yahoo! and Amazon.com are ridiculously over-valued. Hell, right here on my desk, I have today's Financial Times' FT 500 supplement, which now lists Microsoft as the worlds biggest company.
I'm so tempted to turn anachist, become some form of apocalyptic darkside hacker, dedicate my life to the downfall of Microsoft and other over-valued Internet stocks, and basically become a real-life Bond villain.
The Dodger
aka Alec Trevelyan, 006.
Well, I was tempted to hook up with an unscrupulous stockbroker in a scheme to do just that - sell short. Then do something nasty, like put a press release on Amazon's home page headlined "Amazon.com appoint administrators, goes into Chapter 11" and watch the stock fall through the floor...
... Prices going though roof, but vast majority of companies likely to fail, warns Fed chairman ... Alan Greenspan: Investors' high hopes for some internet-related stocks are "pie-in-the-sky"'.
Today's (29/JAN/99) Financial Times:
'Greenspan says internet stocks have the appeal of a lottery
Goto www.ft.com or something...
Dodge
I don't know about that - I still like and use Yahoo's directory, be it ever so outdated ... it's still very useful when you need certain types of information (like official company web sites).
D
I've had my home page on GeoCities for years (I kept changing ISPs after college and wanted a consistent URL), but the popups and now the "branding" are enough to make me leave. The Javascript code that gets appended for the popups prevents me from getting a "Valid HTML 4.0" from W3's validator.
I was working on a couple of sites for one of my hobbies (a live-action roleplaying group) and I was planning to produce them on GeoCities until they started the branding. And now it's a damn logo! *sigh*
I was fine with voluntarily putting a link to GeoCities on my front page in exchange for the space, but that brand is just obnoxious...
Jay (=
Yahoo! stock is through the roof. It's not worth what it's at right now, and no one can afford it.
...Thus, it only makes sense to trade it out in exchange for real assets.
AOL did a 4.2b stock swap for Netscape, whereas Yahoo! did a 4.52b swap for Geocities.
Is Geocities more of an asset than Netscape?
good lord...
Don't kid yourself into believing there is a bank account out there with $4.? billion dollars, these companies just convert Geocity stock to Yahoo stock, effectively printing their own money and a deal is made. I've considered turning myself public just so I can pull the same kind of stuff.
Great, I guess when I get dragged to a Geocities site now it'll open up two commercial banners, one to Yahoo and one to it's other advertisers.
On the other hand, I guess it's good to see a bit of support/interest for one of the largest free web hosting services. I did have a web page on Geocities once, a long time ago...
or, how to get ahead in the year 2000:
Open up a web site, make sure it has no product and negative earnings. Go public. Throw around buzzwords like "portal" and "e-commerce". Once your stock price inflates to 400, sell everything and move to Tahiti.
And at least half of their links are broken. Yahoo is the poorest example of webmastering that I've ever seen. Just because it runs a cool OS does not make it a cool site.
So, CmdrTaco would you sell if you where offered say a billion dollars for slashdot?
And this comes after the recent deal with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp (Fox TV, etc). Is Yahoo intent on becoming another evil empire? Source: BBC
Neither GeoCities nor Yahoo has had a new idea in ages.
The big idea GeoCities came up with was the popup ad banner. I hate those things. If I go to a GeoCities site by mistake, first I close the banner window, then I look at the site for 5 seconds and realize there is little content there (typically, though not always), then I hit Back and voila, not a problem.
Yahoo invented using the word "My" before anything having to do with the Internet. Need I say more.
--------
Bill Gates Is My Evil Twin.
I cannot contemplate why Yahoo would want to even associate itself with such a lame web page provider. Don't they understand that most of the pages stink, the servers are slow and require resuming for downloads, and people get extremely annoyed when that stupid banner keeps popping up every time you try to close it. According to the most recent PC Computing magazine, Geocities "barely snagged $5 million of a $906 million online ad market," because "advertisers shun the site's user-generated content." A fine investment indeed.