5 ms·
Yahoo lost $650 million last quarter, why do you think anyone would take the deal in the first place?
by iaw 10y ago
Yahoo lost $650 million last quarter, why do you think anyone would take the deal in the first place?
- bduerst 10y agoIP. Yahoo!'s patents are valued between $4B and $8B, depending on who you ask.
- nilved 10y agoWhat if you ask Verizon?
- handedness 10y agoIf you ask Verizon, this leak was a great way to get a better price on a deal they already wanted to have happen.
- _audakel 10y agowith the way things are going, they just need to wait a few more months to get a even better deal.
- DannyBee 10y agoThat's probably completely wrong. The patent landscape has changed dramatically in the past 5 years. The likelihood they could extract significant sums of money from these patents drops every day.
- bduerst 10y agoLike I said, depends on who you ask. The point isn't the amount but that some people value it for the IP, not net income.
- tptacek 10y agoI'd really love to read the summary of the patent landscape that explains that.
- tclAmockingbird 10y agoThis might be a good starting place, "Software Patents: A One-Year Review of Alice v. CLS Bank" (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2619388 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2619388)
- bogomipz 10y agoI mentioned this in another comment but how does Yahoo even know that its intellectual property wasn't taken? Is it unreasonable to suspect that a company that has had multiples breaches of security of this extent might also not have had its IP taken out from underneath them as well?
- jlebrech 10y agowhen you patent something it's always in the public domain, that's the point of patents, except that the ownership isn't public domain just the knowledge of a particular tech. but yes, nothing guarantees that tech they had in the pipeline isn't being stolen right now. but if the details of a patent have been stolen the patents still have value, except for when the exact implementation of a patent can be circumvented due to access to plans.
- x0x0 10y agoThey make plenty of money gross. Fire 80% of the staff and they'll be very profitable net as well.
- Kurtz79 10y agoYou are assuming that other costs apart from salaries are negligible and that firing 80% of the staff will have negligible effect on revenue. They are pretty big assumptions to make.
- x0x0 10y agoFirst assumption, other costs are negligible: no, I'm not. Every dollar spent on salary is a dollar that doesn't go to profit. Second assumption: letting 80% of staff go won't hurt. For that, I simply have to describe what I've heard from friends / coworkers / scuttlebutt about working at yahoo. But there are a lot of eng doing maybe a couple hours of work per day. from https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/YHOO/financials?p=YHOO https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/YHOO/financials?p=YHOO under opex it looks like there's plenty of fat to cut.