Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/07/24/verizon-to-buy-yahoo-for-5bn.html
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Wasn’t Myspace available?
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RIP Tumblr, Flickr (RIP-more?), Yahoo Mail?
Also, is Alibaba going along for the ride to VZN, or is it just “everything else” that is getting sold.
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It’s an odd thought. Yahoo runs two legit refuges for young women on the net, Tumblr and Yahoo Answers. Verizon will guillotine them fast.
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Verizon plans to unite the two companies to create a Facebook-killer made of nostalgia and its own users’ personal information—and the zoo of startups and internet publishers the two companies gobbled up in their dying years.
You know, one of the many small reasons I high-tailed it from industry to academia was because of the amounts of money being moved around by people who were demonstrably utterly clueless about the markets in which they traded. But here there’s an object lesson for the modern tech industry to learn from the dot-com bubble - most especially because a lot of them weren’t around for that little lesson in market capriciousness - and that’s that seemingly invincible giants can be swept away like dinosaurs by forces utterly beyond their control. I wonder who will be buying Facebook and Google in ten to fifteen years for pennies on the dollar. I’m being snarky, but completely serious.
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Oh man my oldest still-going, email address is at yahoo. I have email there dating back nearly 20 years. I always liked that I had a non-google owned or operated email address as a back up.
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That $45 billion doesn’t sound too bad now, does it?
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Myspace lost something like a factor of ten in ‘value’ under Rupert Murdoch’s regime: that probably gave Verizon a hint that it wasn’t a good fit for their ‘just add evil’ strategy.
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I hope not! That’s my main email, probably not a smart move but goes way back to when I was traveling and having to pick a web based email, and it looked like a perfectly decent option at the time. It was working so well I dropped my paid email (attglobal). At this point so many years of resumes are out there with that email address that I’d be nervous about changing it.
If this starts to look dodgy, what would be a good option for an email address that is not-google and I can trust? I’m willing to pay a few bucks, but only if it means reliable non-fuckery far into the future (sorry Apple, this means not you). I don’t want to change more than once for a really long time.
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Verizon thinks that people will flock to their crappy ecosphere if Yahoo is part of it? I don’t think so. I block or remove as much Verizon bloat on my phone as I can. I refuse to use their extra services. I need the access, but I don’t need their crap. Same for the crap that Samsung tries to seduce you with.
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In all of Yahoo/AOL’s zoo of acquisitions and sub-companies, Tumblr is really the quiet little gem. It’s where young people fled to when Facebook started being creepy and Twitter too death-threaty. Most people I know under 30 use Tumblr more than any other social media. I’m not sure what Verizon will do with it, but I expect they’ll sell it off quick or leave it to die.
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I’ll put $1 on hamfisted scrubbing of something visible but not advertiser-friendly (e.g. weird porn), a backlash, then selling off to something a bit shady like a Brazilian paper company or Russian telco or whatever. And it ends up a kind of incomprehensible version of livejournal (which is very nearly is anyway)
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It is sad; this COULD be the makings of a real alternative, with Verizon integrating and updating some of the nice services that people recognize (Flickr as a photo cloud service instead of whatever crappy thing Verizon offers its users, for example).
But that’s what I thought when Mayer came in, too. My skeptical side at the time said the opposite, of course – that it was just going to “streamline” things but otherwise leave them the same. Flickr actually did see some nice changes, to follow up the earlier example, but there is no “yahoo experience” nor any real reason to use the platform if you’re not already drawn to it.
Verizon is pretty well known for relying on people unable to leave their service, due to monopolies or long-term contracts, and having customer service to match. I expect they will, instead, integrate these services into similar models, driving the services into an abyss. Oh well.
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Government-protected monopolies like telephone, power, and cable companies should not be allowed to buy up other companies like this. Look at Comcast/Universal/NBC… they wield too much power.
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Worth every penny, indeed.
[note sarcasm & schadenfreude]
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This is all of Yahoo minus the alibaba shares.
There’s a good breakdown on the deal over at vox
To mollify Wall Street, Mayer announced a plan last year to spin off Yahoo’s Alibaba shares into a new holding company. Under tax law, a company can spin off part of its business tax-free if it’s doing so for a legitimate business purpose, but it can’t do so merely as a tax dodge. In the past, the IRS hasn’t enforced this rule very strictly, but when Yahoo asked the IRS to bless its spinoff proposal, the IRS demurred. That meant Yahoo could face a multibillion-dollar tax bill. So in December, Yahoo announced that it was canceling the spinoff.
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Same here. It’s my only email address that doesn’t require a series of numbers after the handle.
Apparently not.
After the deal, expected to be complete in 2017, Yahoo will be left as a holding company for its valuable stake in web businesses in China and Japan. Yahoo has a 15% stake in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba and a 35.5% interest in Yahoo Japan.
The sale does not include Yahoo’s cash, its shares in Alibaba, its shares in Yahoo Japan, Yahoo’s convertible notes, certain minority investments and Yahoo’s non-core patents.
Well it’s actually time for me to migrate over to Gmail, after half-heartedly trying for the past 2 years and not really committing to it. Fuck Verizon.
I’ve been using that email address since the late 90’s though, i did a quick search and i guess you can migrate emails into Gmail so i shouldn’t be losing anything. But i lament having to make the move finally.
