> In 2002, Google offered to sell again for $1 billion. Yahoo hesitated and Google raised its price to $3 billion. Yahoo declined at the higher price. Google went on to become a trillion dollar company.
> Yahoo attempted to acquire Facebook for $1 billion in 2006, but Mark Zuckerberg turned down the offer. Had Yahoo increased its offer by just $100 million, Facebook’s board would have forced Zuckerberg to take it. Facebook also became a trillion dollar company.
In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.
Yeah exactly. Also I would consider the Overture acquisition extremely successful because their patent lawsuit v. Google gave them 8% of Google pre-IPO. If held (which it was not), that is a substantial asset today.
Yes, Overture what the best Yahoo! acquisition ever made.
But Yahoo!'s greatest mistake was to settle the Google lawsuit for a few million dollars - which meant that Google could keep using Overture's (parented) invention of keyword bidding based advertising; without it, Google may never have found a way to become profitable.
So Yahoo! bought its own gravestone for $50m, when all they would have had to do is stand firm and go to trial. If Y! exercised its government-awarded monopoly rights for keyword auction based advertising, there may still be that Y! portal that was so prominent in the early 2000s.
PS: Yahoo Inc. is not full gone - Yahoo Japan remains the last independent part of the former Y! - see https://www.yahoo.co.jp .
didn't they get bought by the koreans
Feels like a cliche at this point, but I’m not sure it’s true.
The current political climate has mainly happened because capital interest has taken control of unregulated news and opinion. Meta are a particularly bad example of this, but as long as there's money to be made by providing a platform for polarising politics and fake news, then I think someone will do so.
Who knows, maybe in that alternate universe you'd be posting "if Yahoo hadn't made such savy choices, I wonder if we would have the political climate we have today?"
This has always been the case for as long as society has been consuming the news. “Business tycoons” have bought up newspapers and media outlets since forever to push their narrative.
I think one component that has changed is the sheer volume and diversity of media makes competition for your attention (clicks) all the more fierce. Enter The Algorithm and optimizing for metrics above all else.
I dunno. That doesn’t invalidate anything about the original question about what present day would be like without Facebook. Would something else similar have replaced it? Is Facebook really “the problem” or is it algorithmic content because algorithmicly driven content was going to happen facebook or not.
For all of unregulated news's flaws, government controlled news would be worse.
We're seeing the opposite, though. As the traditional media companies declined and the masses gained a greater ability to voice their own views, polarization increased.
As someone who tries to avoid the news and politics, it's pretty easy to avoid the companies selling them. But I keep running into them because there are lots of users on Hacker News/Reddit/etc. who try to interject it into every discussion they can . Invariably, these people don't come at it from the point of view that they might be wrong and the other side might be right; they act like zealous crusaders on a mission to vanquish evil.
Believe in flat Earth? Are you a holocaust denier? Think the moon landing is fake? Is the government gang stalking you? Welp you are in luck, there's thousands of other people just like you and here is a forum.
Kinda wild when you think about it.
One analogy is local news media ecosystems across the US, which have generally looked pretty similar though not 100% identical over the past ~125 years or so, suggesting some determinism based on broader culture and technology.
If Facebook had stumbled, something else would have gotten the next microgeneration of college students and then their parents and grandparents.
It’s possible to me that an independent Instagram would have filled Facebook’s niche a few years later, and something like Snapchat would have taken the current Instagram niche. Maybe Twitter would have played a different role.
It’s also possible a web 2.0 answer to classmates.com would have grabbed the older crowd, and we’d have a slightly more profound age split.
But ultimately I think we’d end up where we are — a set of platforms algorithmically curating feeds of user-generated content — with a few cosmetic differences.
that's exactly where my thoughts went
A different MySpace clone takes over the same niche.
Tumblr, del.icio.us, ROI. Probably all should have continued growing and becoming established properties.
…god remember the “tags” phase of content organization?
Flickr incentivized uploading a lot of photos with metadata and was highly searchable. It was great for photo hobbyists building a personal archive for others to peruse.
Instagram was for smartphone photos and playing with filters to set a vibe, and ephemeral sharing with friends and people you wanted to impress. It’s hardly searchable at all.
They failed to buy Google and Facebook, instead they bought GeoCities, Tumblr, and Broadcast for billions and ran them into the ground.
I never liked Tumblr.
there is neocities now.
what was broadcast about?
I'm ambivalent as to how they became trillion-dollar behemoths, but I think that Yahoo would have strangled them in the crib; possibly, deliberately.
I've seen exactly that kind of thing happen, before.
And I’m not saying that only Page and Brin were the only ones who could have made Google, only that they clearly were two people who were capable of doing it. However, Yahoo was not run by such people. So Yahoo would have bought Google and would have made Google conform to Yahoo’s culture, probably relegating Page and Brin to lesser roles where they couldn’t drive company culture.
Doesn't Zuckerberg have majority control?
At the time in 2006 there were plenty of competing networks and any one of them could have climbed to the top.
Facebook wasn’t unique tech wise by all accounts one huge 20k line main file not like Google with PageRank or pegs viaweb written in Lisp or Amazon with early aspects of AWS.
FB could have been replicated and with right money scaled by anyone else , the challenge was there were series of spectacular growth and failures in the social network space
The tech innovations started first with Hack as a PHP compatible language couple of years later then things like relay , graphQL, react and so on.
Genuinely asking, what other software company did something like this back then? I'm tempted to say (tounge in cheek) FB was the original PaaS, but maybe im not old enough
The killer thing others couldn’t do Facebook did was make available social APIs for the app developers to integrate into their platform to make the apps viral, which benefited both them and Facebook.
OG PaaS in the Web 2.0 age IMO was the google app engine , it predated all AWS offerings and gave an actual application runtime .
https://news.microsoft.com/source/2008/02/01/microsoft-propo...
So for about $44 billion.
I had read the news at the time on multiple channels.
They didn't take the offer.
https://www.businessinsider.com/2008/5/jerry-and-steve-playe...
How successful were the six companies they aquired?
Is that true?
Zuck still controls 57% of all voting shares and that’s today, yearly 20-years later.
How could the Board force him to sell to Yahoo.
https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/zuckerberg-motivates-s...
Isn’t the Board supposed to act in the best interest of the shareholders?
And if one person holds a majority of shares, wouldn’t that mean the Board is effectively acting based on that individual’s direction?
I absolutely agree.
One fundamental reason why Yahoo failed is that they prioritized short-term revenue from search partners, over long-term reputation. One of the key people behind that was Prabhakar Raghavan.
And now, Prabhakar Raghavan is at Google. Where he has proceeded to make the same mistake, with the result that Google Search quality fell off of a cliff.
If Google had been acquired by Yahoo, he would have been in a position to destroy Google earlier than he actually did.
See https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ for more.
"Acquiring" is meaningless. Even "plans for the company after the acquisition" is meaningless. Credible reports of motivations that would lead the acquiring company to take a hands off approach to the company acquired means at least a little bit, having now seen companies taking that approach not immediately killing the golden goose.
Having worked for Yahoo, I have to agree. Acquisitions were always seen in terms of "what can they do for the Yahoo brand?" and "How can we cut costs by migrating this to Yahoo tech?", not "How can we grow this business?". A Yahoo owned Facebook would have been suffocated like Tumblr and Flickr were.
People also like to point to how foolish of Blockbuster it was not to buy Netflix when they had the opportunity to, but I’m also inclined to believe that the merged companies would never have made the decisive moves involving streaming video and content production. It’s tempting to say that Amazon would have filled in the streaming video gap (although perhaps late enough for feature film and TV piracy to proliferate a little further into the mainstream), but I wonder whether Apple would have adapted its iTunes service into Apple TV first. (Another dark horse I like to think about here would be RealMedia which may have identified a niche.)
They would stop the company by buying it.
Because Yahoo buying a company kills the company.
If only Yahoo hadn't run out of money before... (certain companies that are now too powerful and ruthless to be called out safely).
~ ping yahoo.com
PING yahoo.com (74.6.231.20): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 74.6.231.20: icmp_seq=0 ttl=50 time=42.366 ms
^C
--- yahoo.com ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 42.366/42.366/42.366/0.000 msping -c 20 -i 5 google.com; ping -c 20 -i 5 yahoo.com [snip] --- google.com ping statistics --- 20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 14.746/19.939/25.057/3.153 ms [snip] --- yahoo.com ping statistics --- 20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 14.561/20.883/25.080/2.675 ms
They look comparable to me?
ping 1.1Some 20-30 people I chat with were all the kind you should immediately fire and escort out of the building. Some had their next job lined up already just in case. lol
Going further back, Yahoo's web directory was also a good and fun way to explore the world wide web. When Google appeared, and its search was so good, the concept of "people don't need bookmarks any more" seemed to spread, but in the process the joy of discovery was lost. Rather like how browsing DVDs in Blockbuster means you could find something really cool by accident, but searching a database means you have to have an idea what you want to find to begin with.
She apparently has 1.4M followers with barely 20 likes. This was even worse a few months back.
Are those followers bought / dormant? Or is twitter suppressing it?
For example: https://bsky.app/profile/brandonfriedman.bsky.social/post/3l...
(Insert a distasteful joke about how she would have made a killing at DOGE).
I saw she re-Tweeted something from Bryan Johnson. Looking at his account, he has less than half as many followers, but many more likes and a lot more engagement. But it's almost all his own content, and it's content that readers would actually find engaging.
I checked Mayer's account and it's not under any sort of shadowban that's detectible with the regular tools, which are usually very accurate.
For example, they contributed heavily to the SMPng project (which made FreeBSD into a modern, multi-theaded kernel with fine grained locking). They even hosted the kickoff meeting: https://people.freebsd.org/~fsmp/SMP/SMPmeeting.html They employed Peter Wemm, who did the majority of the work for the AMD64 (eg, x86-64) port. And lots that I'm forgetting about probably..
Yahoo!'s greatest strength and primary role in the Internet could be summarized as this: It was the most useful site on the web. Users relied on it for their start page, email, finance, weather, news, sports, maps, casual multiplayer games, forums, instant messaging, answers, fantasy sports, evites, photos, and an amazing amount of search traffic. It was a one-stop shop for everything you needed online. Maybe not the best in every area, but always pretty good.
You know how Google starts and kills products constantly? Yahoo! rarely did that. It saw interesting business models, copied them or bought into them and kept them going and users loved them for it.
And all of this was profitable, just not Google-level profits. Remember Jack Welch's mantra of GE not having to be number one in every market as long as they were number two or three and were profitable? At one point, this was Yahoo! and they could have remained relevant to this day had they embraced this role.
But the company's divisions were siloed and competed against each other in a way that makes Microsoft machiavellianism seem like a Sunday picnic. And the leadership was obsessed with Google and wanted to outdo them, even though they had a completely different culture and mindset. It was never going to happen. Regardless, they ignored Yahoo!'s bread and butter services, confused their employees and customers, and generally ran the company into the ground.
Yahoo! needed strong leadership that understood the company's strengths and built on them to continue to be useful to web users. Sadly, that never happened.
I remember when I saw google for the first time, it was while searching for stuff on the redhat website, and I saw the Gooooogle at the bottom. I guess google had indexed the website for them. That led me to check out the google web site itself.
I think at some point that google was indexing the web for yahoo, I could be wrong though.
Money which needed to be burned I guess (for accounting tricks).
Many internet companies fancied themselves media companies in the 1990s and 2000s. They all are on the scrap heap now, some examples: AOL, Yahoo, Excite@Home, Lycos, iVillage, About.com.
The companies of the time that fancied themselves technology/infra/logistics did well: Google, Amazon, eBay/PayPal, Salesforce, Akamai, DoubleClick.
Of course any lists like this have selection bias, so maybe I am wrong.
Consider Flickr, which Yahoo bought for about $25 million in 2005. If you're a tech visionary, you look at this popular little photo-sharing site and say: "Wow, everyone's connectivity speeds are soaring, and we could morph this into a video site, too!" And then, maybe, you've invented YouTube.
Or, you look at the way Friendstr and Facebook are getting traction, and you say: "Wow, what if we built out easier commenting and a social-network feed with abundant sharing of popular photos among users' pals?" And then maybe you've invented Instagram.
But Yahoo's metrics-driven managers refused to stretch their brains in this direction. I've been told by two famous-name insiders at the time that Yahoo's approach to everything was to set short-term targets focused on existing metrics, with rigid focus on hitting quarterly targets. It was all about driving orderly growth of what was already there, rather than any desire to explore new and uncharted areas.
In essence, Yahoo had a Silicon Valley address but a Battle Creek, Mich., mindset. Purple logo aside, Yahoo owed a lot more to the way W.W. Kellogg had been running its cereal business for decades, as opposed to anything going on in the 650 area code.
SUPER unlikely.
Everybody forgets that YouTube was a massive money loser that was floated by VC money. Had Google not bought YouTube, it was doomed.
Yahoo just lacked the imagination and nerve necessary to see how its own assets could lead to the next big thing.
Verizon kept control of those lightly-maintained email accounts and pushed them into the Yahoo/AOL infrastructure. Users with a verizon.net email address had webmail access at mail.aol.com.
Verizon didn't make life easy. They changed POP/IMAP/SMTP servers every year or so. Just this May they changed again, from smtp.mail.yahoo.com to smtp.verizon.net - but the old servers still worked until the AOL outage 2 days ago.
During the years in between, customers got caught between AOL's mandate to use OAuth and Microsoft's refusal to support it in Outlook.
FF to now-ish and Verizon is purchasing those same FiOS customers back again. One more smack with the Verizon ping-ping paddle.
So that explains why my dad's email suddenly couldn't send outgoing messages (the configuration, for years, was outgoing.yahoo.verizon.net with normal password). After what felt like an hour, what worked was changing it to smtp.mail.yahoo.com and using OAuth.
Many applications depend on ZooKeeper's data model and client libraries, and can't switch to etcd. Things like watches and ephemeral nodes are different there.
Investing a billion dollars in your search engine in ~2008 might be considered insane of course. We were told by Carol Bartz at an all hands that they had done the work on their spreadsheets and they could not compete with the investment Microsoft and Google were planning. It still annoys me to this day that there was no discussion or attempt to decide if the engineers and the company were up for the challenge with Google, even with less money. I'm not saying Yahoo! would have won, but to not even have bothered trying still irritates me - where is your vision? where is your fight?
Anyway this is my take on it, the management decided to just give up on being technically excellent and even being a software company at some point. The mind boggles why you would do this while software was eating the world and you had loads of fantastic engineering talent...
They're the epitome of a corporate melange of services and products that resulted in far, far less than the sum of its parts.
Related post I saw an hour after writing this: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/edmund-ho-1277b2125_yahoo-jap...
During this period, the US had been exporting large amounts of dollars to foreign investors (US going into deficit) and these foreign investors didn't know what to do with all those dollars so they dumped them onto the US stock market. This has been going on for decades. It was the premise of the Japan carry trade.
US companies like Google or Facebook would have had access to plenty of capital during this time and maybe it allowed them to be picky.
rufus_foreman•9h ago
jeffbee•9h ago
rNULLED•8h ago
dvh•8h ago
DonHopkins•57m ago
kstrauser•7h ago
gscott•5h ago
bborud•8h ago
Don't forget that Yahoo bought three search engines.
(Full disclosure: I worked for one of the companies they acquired).
baal80spam•8h ago
Well put!