Originally published at: Yahoo and AOL fall to private equity as Verizon exits media business | Boing Boing
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Does anyone remember that 2000 film Frequency in which the main character has a radio that can broadcast backwards in time to the 1960s? In it, he convinces his financially unsuccessful friend to remember the name Yahoo! and invest in the company when it starts. The movie ends with that friend being wealthy and driving a car with a Yahoo! license plate. I think 2000 was pretty much the only year where that scene makes sense.
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Didn’t Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan make a romantic comedy about Yahoo back in the nineties?
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The only thing worse for an American tech brand than being owned by a sclerotic telco is being loaded up on debt and then scuttled by private equity bust-out artists.
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AOL, actually. “You’ve Got Mail!” (the title of the movie) was AOL’s catchphrase and their mail client would play a clip saying that when you got an e-mail.
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I should probably remove the Yahoo! license frame from my car. It and my old job there are about the same vintage.
Yahoo! was actually still pretty reasonable around 2005 or so when I started there, doing QA automation development. Y! had a lot of internationals with differing restrictions on what could and couldn’t be shown in response to searches, and automating the checks on Y! Search before new versions shipped became necessary after the day that porn searches worked for Y! India and the head of Y! India was arrested at work. This of course meant that I spent about a week writing and testing automated porn searches. I had to post a sign outside my cubicle saying “I’m developing porn search tests this week and you probably don’t want to look at my screen right now.”
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Any time I’ve found myself on a Yahoo! page in the last 15 years or so I’ve invariably gone ‘whoops’ and backtracked to where I actually meant to go.
Yahoo was a large dead zombie around the time it started resorting to tricky and deceptive ‘uncheck’ boxes on various other bits of software to get itself installed on our browsers. Looking at you McAfee!
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For the same reason as:
AOL and Time-Warner
wtf?
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Related. Not many people are paying AOL for dial-up anymore, but it’s still a $180-200-million/year business.
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I was an early taker of email addresses on AOL, Yahoo, Earthlink, etc.; always managing to grab the user name of my first initial and last name. I still have the yahoo one for no other reason than that’s what I use when being forced to sign up on a web site.
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Yahoo is my default junk email, too. Any time I have to provide an email for buying something online, I use my Yahoo email because they always send marketing emails even when I uncheck their box.
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Gods.
I’ve had the same Yahoo! email address for 20+ years.
I log into it every so often to keep it alive, but I don’t even get SPAM in the thing.
AOL?
Never used it.
It was the butt of jokes on the first job I had doing ISP tech support.
Although realize that there are people in the rural US that still use dialup (not necessarily through AOL) because broadband doesn’t reach them. Reminds me of how when my grandfather was growing up he didn’t have electricity on his farm because it wasn’t worth it for the electric company to run lines to it. That changed with the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 under FDR, of course.
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