Bungling, Inc.: Yahoo Sold to Verizon

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Yahoo is arguably the worst-run major company in the history of high tech. In 1998, Yahoo could have bought Google for a mere $1 million. Four years later, after Google was already crushing Yahoo’s search-engine business, Yahoo offered $3 billion for Google, and was turned down. Google wanted $5 billion, but Yahoo wouldn’t pay that much. Google is now worth more than $350 billion. In 2008, Microsoft offered $44 billion for Yahoo, an offer Yahoo rejected. And then on Monday, it was announced Yahoo would be sold to Verizon for a mere $4.8 billion:

Yahoo was once the king of the Internet, a $125 billion behemoth as big in its time as Facebook or Google are today. Now it’s being sold to Verizon for comparative chump change.
On Monday morning, Yahoo announced the end of the long process to extricate itself from a mess of its own making with a sale of its core operating business to Verizon for $4.8 billion in cash. The transaction ends the independence of one of Silicon Valley’s most iconic pioneering companies. Yahoo’s seventh and final CEO, Marissa Mayer, will reportedly depart upon the deal’s conclusion with severence pay worth more than $50 million.
The sale will unite Yahoo with another fallen star, AOL, the first web portal Verizon bought last year for $4.4 billion. The United States’ largest wireless provider is betting nearly $10 billion that combining the two formerly dominant websites will give it an edge in mobile content and advertising technology it can leverage across its more than 140 million subscribers.

Yahoo’s record of disastrous decisions is arguably the worst business bungling since Esau sold his birthright to Jacob for a mess of pottage. Instead of evolving into a modern media powerhouse, the company repeatedly stood still while agile competitors rushed to capture highly profitable new online markets. While rival networks busily monetized mobile app ecosystems and secured premium ad placements from high-traffic digital entertainment sectors like the best bitcoin casinos, Yahoo remained paralyzed by executive indecision. The pioneer brand possessed both the massive capital reserves and the initial user base necessary to dominate almost any emerging vertical on the web, yet it systematically squandered those early advantages and watched its digital empire crumble into irrelevance.

 

78 comments

  2. I’m not sure what Verizon’s official politics are, but they couldn’t be worse than Yahoo’s – their Yahoo news was always the most left leaning bits of AP.

  4. Yahoo really is terrible. I remember when they updated their mail service. It’s almost unusable. It’s got so many bells and whistles, even someone like me that doesn’t like to change accounts had a hard time making function and just give me my freaking email so I got frustrated and gave up.
    Their search engine is the same way. While Google is simple and charming and spits out answers, Yahoo takes forever to load and is constantly stalling out.

  7. I’ve never had any trouble with either their search engine or with the email service. I have noted that some services have trouble caused by the ISP. For example, when I get disqus notification in my email and click the reply button it works fine at the office, but fitfully at home, usually failing. The only difference is the ISP is different at the two locations.

  8. They weren’t too bad in the early days. But in the last 10 years have been pretty sorry in that department, and gotten a lot worse in the last 5. Frankly, that may have had a lot to do with Yahoo’s problems and inability to pull things out.

    I’m wondering how things are going to change with the homepage I’ve used since ’99.

  9. Remember when older people used to refer to having Internet accesss as being “on the Yahoo?” Nowadays the only thing I use Yahoo for is Flickr.

  13. I avoid anything Google as much as possible (still pissed at them for handing over Chinese dissidents to the PRC for access) and whenever I see a reference to Yahoo my reaction is “They’re still around?”

    My default search engine is Ixquick. Claims to be the most private search engine. Maybe so. And even if they are, doesn’t mean they will remain so. But in addition to the sucking up to the ChiComs bit, I hate Google for their relentless assault on individual privacy. So anybody who at least appears to respect it gets my custom.

  14. The irony is that despite the news pieces and articles being surely leftwing in some non-English countries the comments below more than make it up, they are all by majority anti left.

  15. So that’s what Verizon did with the money they got from Frontier for selling out FIOS in CA, TX, and FL…

  18. IBM was focused on the hardware, because in the mainframe world that’s where the money was. Software was just a service you wrote up for the client so he could use the room sized computer you sold or leased him.

    That was the genius of Gates and Allen and Ballmer (I don’t know if any one of them can claim credit or if it was all three). It helped them too that Gary Kildall flaked out when IBM came calling for an OS. CP/M could have been DOS and GEM could have been Windows.

  19. Microsoft is nearly as bad as Google when it comes to invading your privacy.

    One reason I resisted Windows 10 so long was their incredibly cavalier approach to anything you did in your own home on your own time with your own data. Finally one of the two new PCs I just built got 10, but only after I learned how to disable their damned snooping.

    This is a really useful video by a former MS developer:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1kGMCfb2xw

  20. Heck, when I was using CompuServe I used to sneer at people so hapless they used AOL.

    Most AOL people thought that WAS the Internet.

  22. *nods*

    It’s one of the great “what-ifs” in technology. Bill Gates, Microsoft, and a bunch of hired-gun lawyers invented the software industry. No one was talking about copyright for software before Gates. IBM was built on the premise that computing would always be Big Iron.

    Another big mistake was when the East Coast Xerox muckety-mucks didn’t realize what they had in PARC. That’s what inspired much of the original GUI for the Apple Macintosh and later versions of Windows. With a lot more work, Xerox could have owned personal computing just as they owned copiers.

  24. In the previous century their was the awesome visual chat room called WebChat Broadcasting System (or WBS for short). First is was bought by infoseek then by Disney then disappeared. And guess what; Yahoo bought the remnants from that disaster. It seems the more they “improve” the less likely anyone is willing to use their product.

  25. PARC also, IIRC, invented the mouse.

    An old friend from college has a track record of getting established just a little too late. He joined Atari at about the same time Warner and Sculley were getting ready to run it into the ground (his office mate was Chris Crawford). He also worked briefly for PARC before Xerox decided “screw this cutting edge crap!”

  27. Oh cool, I hadn’t seen that.

    I remember reading back in the mid eighties that the mouse came from PARC. Guess that was in error.

  29. I think the whole demo is on YouTube, it’s about two hours long. I read about it in Time/Life understanding computers I think. Amazing demo.

  31. Don’t know if you’ve heard but the ChiComs have bought the browser Opera. If anyone is using, I’d suggest getting rid of it. I expect it will have a large number of back doors installed soon.

  32. Kildall didn’t flake out. Gates offered IBM a real deal after they bought what became DOS from Seattle Computer Products. CP/M 86 was offered for a number of years. That ended when Kildall was killed in a bar room fight that is still suspect. CP/M became Concurrent DOS was actually a better product than DOS, but it went away.

  33. PARC was the one that assembled everything and made it work reliably. Apple then ripped them off to create Mac, which I still detest.

  35. Well, when IBM went to see Digital Research (at Gates’ suggestion) Kildall for whatever reason decided he had more important things to do (I have read that he was intimidated by the idea, but whatever the reason was we’ll never know for sure now). So his wife and attorney met with IBM and both balked at the NDA they had to sign before starting discussions.

    So IBM came back to Microsoft and Gates said “Sure, we have what you’re looking for, no sweat!” Then he, Ballmer and Allen bee lined it back up to Seattle to buy out DOS.

    Thing was, Gates et. al. were smart enough to see that the real money in the PC was going to be software, and that bundling their programs with IBM would automatically make them the world standard.

    So sure, lots of people liked CP/M better. Lots of people liked OS/2 better. Hell, I had a succession of Atari computers and liked them a lot. But I’m not spending my evenings hanging out with the Amiga folks grousing about what could have been.

    Well, not all of my evenings anyway.

  36. Oh yeah, saw that a couple days ago. Meant to spread it but forgot.

    Good looking out – however global our economy gets, there is no good reason to trust the PRC. Not just them – I have a friend who used to exclusively use Kaspersky for anti-virus and switched a year ago because he decided he didn’t like the idea of Putin having the keys to his systems.

    I browse with Pale Moon, search with Ixquick, and use Trend for antivrus. Just put Spybot on my newest one to see how it works. And I am still not satsified that I’m secure.

    When people ask me “Why are you so paranoid that you think they’re looking at you?” I answer “Because they’re looking at everybody they can find.” NSA was monitoring cell phone calls just because they could, not because they were looking for anything. It may be a lost cause but I’m not giving anything away if I can help it.

  38. Macs – overpriced and limited, designed for smug clowns with no clue what they’re doing.

    I have always hated the whole lifestyle aspect of the Mac cult. It isn’t a computer, it’s virtue signalling for arrogant hipsters.

  41. I still don’t trust 10. Even if you remove the snooping, you have to go over every update with an evil eye to be sure they don’t try to put it back. I just formatted a buddy’s laptop and put 7 back on, because 10 was so laggy and crappy. I’d personally go back to 3.1 if I could get my apps to run on it.

    I was a teenage nerd girl in the early 70s, on the cutting edge of technology, building computers in my garage and programming them in machine language. Now I hate computers so much, I’m turning into a luddite.

  42. Kaspersky used to be awesome, but then turned into bloatware, like the Chicken Heart That Ate New Jersey (any old Cosby fans out there?), and it took too much work to completely get rid of it. I WAS using the small business version of Symantec, but that costs way too much now.

    So I’m looking for a good antvirus now, that doesn’t eat my PC alive, performance-wise. Built it myself, so it’s fully tricked out. There’s no excuse for any kind of performance hits with it, other than, you know, poor programming and garbage collection.

    I’m AM liking the pay version of Spybot though, malware-wise. For the moment, anyway.

  43. Everyone forgets that what’s being sold is not Yahoo, it’s their users and viewers.

    Which is why the decline because they lost so many over the years to other plantations.

    That’s right. If you’re on Twitter, or Facebook, or even Google, you’re being sold on a second by second basis.

    Soon to become more real and with more of an affect on your life than you can believe.

    It won’t be government that enslaves us (at least not directly) it will be large companies, conglomerates who’s only goal is more control and more money and you’re the crop they’re making money off selling in the marketplace.

  44. That’s the biggest reason why I don’t think it matters anymore who is elected to the White House. The “beast” prophesied in the book of Revelation will take over the system, which already has all our magnetic ink, and use it to put chains around anyone still here. The excuse for his mark will be to insure our identity isn’t stolen, but it will also be a mark of allegiance.

  45. I use Avast! which is free. It’s done well for me on the malware front. I run Malwarebytes now and again as a check, but it’s been a couple since anything got through.

    Computers get bloated now again no matter what you do. I use CCleaner to fix my registry and clean other junk out that gunks up the system. It’s not 100% effective and probably need to get something else, but I would have to pay for it. CCleaner is free from FileHippo, or other such sites.

  46. I used to love those specials. Hope and Crosby would make cameos on each other’s shows just to stir up a bit of “trouble.” Never failed to be funny.

    Loved those Road pictures.

  47. ”but only after I learned how to disable their damned snooping.”
    Small business opportunity. I won’t buy anything with 10 or 8 for that matter unless the snooping can be disabled. Windows has been trying to give me a free download for months.

  48. Same here. I’ve been messing with the things since the Mits Altair 8800. Got an Imsai 8080 later. You had to do the final hardware engineering to get the stuff to run together, and then get a ROM Monitor program to be able to boot from a disk. I remember using the front panel to keyin and deposit C3 (8080 jump instruction), the memory location of the monitor to boot the system. Those were the days!

  49. The story you got is different from what I got. Mine came from people that had been close to Kildall.

    CP/M had some weaknesses relative to DOS. in CP/M, for example, you had a user number, rather than a user name. DOS, in that regard, was easier to use and keep straight. Other than that, I liked CP/M, but that was what I was used to with 8 bit systems. DOS had a very strange feeling compared to CP/M, but it is what it was. I got used to it and didn’t think about it after that. In many ways, I wish that DOS had been upgraded to handle more than 640K and allow windows to run as a shell, instead of what we have now. As windows has “advanced” it has, in may ways, regressed. I hate the fact the Win10 is itself spyware now.

  50. When I was at Tennessee Tech the Microcomputer Association, of which I had been treasurer, ahd an open house and invited others, members and nonmembers alike, to bring their computer to the meeting. A couple brought Macs and set up next to an Altos. A friend, who was a Poli Sci prof, who had a Northstar was standing next to be and pointed the Mac and said “The computer for the rest of us.” Then pointed to the Altos and said “The computer for the best of us.” I thought that pretty much encapsulated what we thought of the Mac.

    Another friend is a retired antenna Engineer from Raytheon and he went Mac. Mac does have some nice software that works well for photographers. that’s why he bought his system. At the time, there wasn’t anything equivalent in the Windoze world.

    Another friend, a former classmate, went to work in the Computer center after graduation from the CS program refused to support Macs. He said they were a nightmare from a support stand point and simply would not help people with them. Of course, his experience was like mine, with CP/M systems.

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