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They turned down buying Google. Zuck smartly buys his competitors.
by cenal 8y ago
They turned down buying Google.
Zuck smartly buys his competitors.
- throwaway2048 8y agoYahoo bought plenty of other "next big things" Geocities, tumblr, flikr, viaweb, Broadcast.com, del.icio.us, zimbra, and hundreds of others besides. It wasn't clear at the time Google would be any kind of success, you are looking at things with hindsight.
- jpatokal 8y agoYahoo's acquisition track record goes beyond unlucky picking, it shows that they can't maintain or grow the services they bought either. Compare with Google: Maps (Where2), Earth (Keyhole), Waze, YouTube, DoubleClick were all acquisitions they grew to be far larger under Google than they were before. Disclaimer: I work for Google, although I have nothing to do with acquisitions.
- rubyfan 8y agoAt what point did Yahoo’s core business start to shrink or get the stench of being a loser? I have to imagine that Yahoo! acquiring them was a stinker for their users. Did anyone think of Yahoo as bringing strategic value to the services they were acquiring? By the time they bought delicious and tumblr they had a track record with flickr and any of the users of those services saw the acquisition as a negative.
- dspillett 8y agoA key problem with some of Yahoo's acquisitions is that they missed the right point of the curve: buying things once they were already Quite A Thing. While this may look like a safer gamble than buying something small that might be a thing and the next big thing eventually, but might be nothing at all next month, getting in late can have two key problems: already being a thing means it commands a high price, and you already have an invested user-base who may fight tooth-and-nail (or simply leave) when you inevitably make changes.
- malvosenior 8y agoI don’t think any of the properties Yahoo! bought were very big (by today’s standards). Del.icio.us was great but it was a hobby project compared to Instagram/WhatsApp.
- johnnyfaehell 8y agoActually isn't buying competitors a bad thing from the Anti-Trust point of view? If you own all the social networks and then refuse to let Influencers to share their post stats with their clients because "Facebook is not in the value chain" it really seems like it really becomes a real Anti-Trust issue. If you only own one, you can always claim there is competition.
- mschuster91 8y ago> Actually isn't buying competitors a bad thing from the Anti-Trust point of view? Anti-trust legislation is scarcely enforced these days. No matter if in the US or Europe.
- johnnyfaehell 8y agoTo be fair, Anti-Trust takes ages to investigate and then go through the courts. But Google just got hit with an Anti-Trust fine of $5 billion. I'm surprised Facebook hasn't been hit with EU antitrust already. But the EU is already talking about forcing Facebook to split up.
- mcintyre1994 8y agoIt'll be interesting to see how effectively they can keep that up now their VPN's been taken off the App Store.
- robterrell 8y agoInteresting, when did this happen? From the outside it definitely seems like it's been their x-ray vision for sure.
- mcintyre1994 8y agoA few months ago: https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/22/apple-facebook-onavo https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/22/apple-facebook-onavo Still seems to be gone, and seems like Apple have banned the data stuff they were doing.