8 ms·

Microsoft + Yahoo comes to mind

by ajaimk 4y ago

tempnow987 4y ago
Exactly what I was thinking of! To catch folks up MS offered Yahoo $44B in their CHOICE of cash or stock (58B inflation adjusted). Yahoo said no, then imploded.
- sharken 4y ago
  That fate seems unlikely for Twitter, it's right now the go-to place for last-minute info on Putins invasion of Ukraine. After that who knows. Well, apparently Elon Musk knows.
  - lumost 4y ago
    reddit is pretty good at up to the minute information as well, it also benefits from topic filters/groupings and moderation.
    - tremarley 4y ago
      Reddit is infected with the same problem as Twitter and YouTube though. It use to be a place with free communities and free speech. But now, if you dare to post anything that doesn't align with what the MSM agenda for the day is. Your comment, post or even your whole sub-reddit gets banned.
      - swasheck 4y ago
        > if you dare to post anything that doesn't align with what the MSM agenda ... i think that this notion has lost its teeth as the MSM has been converted into some boogeyman and/or strawman. MSM certainly caters to an audience, and people are drawn to likeminded people, sometimes deluding themselves into believing that participating in a near-homogenous echo chamber would be an ideal expression of peaceful living. once there, though, they realize that it's still not quite perfect. foxnews not "right" enough for me so let's create newsmax or oan. biden's not "left" enough and so we should have nominated warren or sanders. people are going to disagree and that's fundamentally a good thing. how we disagree is where things seem to have degenerated. the whole "MSM agenda" seems like an incorrect and lazy narrative. they have agendas and they cater to the people who demand those agendas. i doubt, though, that newsmax employs people to troll my tweets disagreeing with desantis' signing of the florida abortion bill today, reporting them in an attempt to get me banned. the people trying to get me banned are the audience and they believe they're doing the correct thing to advance their cause by attempting to squelch me. MSM pours fuel on the fire, but they don't start it. same for reddit - it's going to be the collective of people and their ability to tolerate differentiated thinking. they're not brainwashed zombies, they're collectives of similarly-minded people who give in to their predisposed biases as exploited by MSM/social media for profit.
        inter_netuser 4y ago
        >they don't start it. Yeah, a powerful apparatus that is MSM, would never be used to influence opinions and install beliefs. > they're not brainwashed zombies, they're collectives of similarly-minded people who give in to their predisposed biases as exploited by MSM/social media for profit. you ever heard of the 50 cent army? do you think only China has that, doesn't exist in the US?
        swasheck 4y ago
        i'm not saying it doesnt exist, just that it's not as prevalent as people want it to be. i'd argue that even then, most of the time it's an exploitation of biases and not a new installation of foreign beliefs.
        inter_netuser 4y ago
        >not a new installation of foreign beliefs. if advertising works - installation of new beliefs is a huge successful industry. Do you think advertising works?
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - maxsilver 4y ago
        > But now, if you dare to post anything that doesn't align with what the MSM agenda for the day is. Your comment, post or even your whole sub-reddit gets banned. Where on earth does this opinion come from? All sorts of vile stuff gets posted to both Reddit and Twitter, and they rarely-if-ever take any action against it. Certain subreddits will still moderate, but community moderators (users of some sort) generally control the moderation of those places, not Reddit or their staff directly. And in cases where Twitter/Reddit directly take action, it certainly isn't based on an "MSM agenda", it mostly seems to only happen to limit their legal or financial liability.
        inter_netuser 4y ago
        a lot of subreddits are basically marketing departments of some corporates. those have paid employee mods where only posts and comments favourable to corporate goals are allowed. not quite the MSM, but I'd guess corporates would want to remain within the prevailing politically correct Overton window.
      - MisterBastahrd 4y ago
        This has literally never been true. Reddit was designed from the ground up to rotate heliocentrically around the whims of moderators.
      - mywittyname 4y ago
        WTF? I see a constant never ending stream of shit on reddit that goes against the "MSM agenda". And those are the types of places are very quick to ban posters.
  - flavius29663 4y ago
    yahoo was the goto place for new email accounts. It was the goto place for instant messaging too. It was also in top # for search and other features. And it still is...
  - mempko 4y ago
    Telegram is turning out to be really good at this. Tons of Telegram channels churning out realtime info.
    - shawn-butler 4y ago
      Discovery is difficult on telegram
- throwaway09223 4y ago
  No, that's not at all what happened. MS offered $44B for Yahoo inclusive of their almost 50% stake in then pre-ipo Alibaba. At the time, Yahoo's investment in Alibaba was valued at more than their entire market cap (negative valuation for Yahoo's domestic operations, or negative value taking into account tax implications of divestiture of these assets, etc). Yahoo turned down MSFT's offer. Yahoo then spun off its entire company, keeping the name Yahoo with this spin-off subsidiary. The parent company, now named Altiba, retained ownership of the stake in Alibaba. This is where the ~50B valuation remained. The spin-off company (valued in the negative by the market) was then sold for $4.5B to Verizon. Altiba retained its $56B market cap during this time. Yahoo, inclusive of Altiba, out-performed MS's offer. It was a far better deal for shareholders to turn down MSFT. The net value to shareholders exceeded $60B. There were a lot of poorly written articles at the time, which confused the sale of the subsidiary (YHOO) with the previous offer (for both YHOO and what became AABA) so your confusion is understandable. But this perspective is simply wrong.
  - kolbe 4y ago
    You are thinking of the wrong era. We're talking about the 2008 offer to buy Yahoo. Alibaba was worth around $10b when Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for $45b. https://www.forbes.com/2007/10/23/alibaba-ipo-pricing-markets-equity-cx_jc_1023markets1.html?sh=3579514430a6 https://www.forbes.com/2007/10/23/alibaba-ipo-pricing-market... https://news.microsoft.com/2008/02/01/microsoft-proposes-acquisition-of-yahoo-for-31-per-share/ https://news.microsoft.com/2008/02/01/microsoft-proposes-acq...
    - throwaway09223 4y ago
      Alibaba was pre-ipo at the time and did not have a market valuation. The most effective way to estimate a market value for Alibaba at this time is the 2008 MSFT offer itself. MSFT didn't offer $44B for Yahoo's internet business. The offer was in large part for the Alibaba stake. Regardless, MSFT priced it all at around $44B, which is less than it eventually was valued at.
      - 4y ago
FormerBandmate 4y ago
Yahoo actually returned more than Microsoft for a while, up until about 2017, thanks to their huge stake in Alibaba. Twitter doesn't have that tho, they're entirely tied to their mediocre product. Killing Vine was the dumbest thing they ever did.
- freefal 4y ago
  I believe Microsoft offered a cash option so not sure subsequent returns are relevant.
- andy_ppp 4y ago
  If nobody has noticed, Twitter aren’t very good at building software, it’s incredibly buggy what they’ve made, I regularly click on tweets that have a comments count but zero comments. It’s seriously glitchy from the notifications to even writing tweets (the MAX chars counter went crazy for me the other day). Don’t get me started on editing tweets their logic is terrible here that you can never design a UX that doesn’t stop people changing the meaning of their message after the event. Finally the spam is just totally next level and they still have people selling Bitcoin scams under every Elon tweet. Asleep at the wheel.
  - eropple 4y ago
    > I regularly click on tweets that have a comments count but zero comments As far as I can tell, that's because you're blocked by the commenter or the commenter is a private account.
    - wpietri 4y ago
      Correct. In internal Twitter jargon, some data is "perspectival" and some for performance reasons isn't. Actually viewing a tweet is calculated on the fly based on your personal perspective, as honoring privacy settings, blocks, etc, is crucial. But that's not true for counts, so those will be off. People who find this a shocking and objectionable sign of bugs are generally people who have not build software at such large scales.

Microsoft + Yahoo comes to mind

by ajaimk 4y ago

Microsoft + Yahoo comes to mind

Exactly what I was thinking of! To catch folks up MS offered Yahoo $44B in their CHOICE of cash or stock (58B inflation adjusted). Yahoo said no, then imploded.

sharken 4y ago
That fate seems unlikely for Twitter, it's right now the go-to place for last-minute info on Putins invasion of Ukraine. After that who knows. Well, apparently Elon Musk knows.
- lumost 4y ago
  reddit is pretty good at up to the minute information as well, it also benefits from topic filters/groupings and moderation.
  - tremarley 4y ago
    Reddit is infected with the same problem as Twitter and YouTube though. It use to be a place with free communities and free speech. But now, if you dare to post anything that doesn't align with what the MSM agenda for the day is. Your comment, post or even your whole sub-reddit gets banned.
    - swasheck 4y ago
      > if you dare to post anything that doesn't align with what the MSM agenda ... i think that this notion has lost its teeth as the MSM has been converted into some boogeyman and/or strawman. MSM certainly caters to an audience, and people are drawn to likeminded people, sometimes deluding themselves into believing that participating in a near-homogenous echo chamber would be an ideal expression of peaceful living. once there, though, they realize that it's still not quite perfect. foxnews not "right" enough for me so let's create newsmax or oan. biden's not "left" enough and so we should have nominated warren or sanders. people are going to disagree and that's fundamentally a good thing. how we disagree is where things seem to have degenerated. the whole "MSM agenda" seems like an incorrect and lazy narrative. they have agendas and they cater to the people who demand those agendas. i doubt, though, that newsmax employs people to troll my tweets disagreeing with desantis' signing of the florida abortion bill today, reporting them in an attempt to get me banned. the people trying to get me banned are the audience and they believe they're doing the correct thing to advance their cause by attempting to squelch me. MSM pours fuel on the fire, but they don't start it. same for reddit - it's going to be the collective of people and their ability to tolerate differentiated thinking. they're not brainwashed zombies, they're collectives of similarly-minded people who give in to their predisposed biases as exploited by MSM/social media for profit.
      - inter_netuser 4y ago
        >they don't start it. Yeah, a powerful apparatus that is MSM, would never be used to influence opinions and install beliefs. > they're not brainwashed zombies, they're collectives of similarly-minded people who give in to their predisposed biases as exploited by MSM/social media for profit. you ever heard of the 50 cent army? do you think only China has that, doesn't exist in the US?
        swasheck 4y ago
        i'm not saying it doesnt exist, just that it's not as prevalent as people want it to be. i'd argue that even then, most of the time it's an exploitation of biases and not a new installation of foreign beliefs.
        inter_netuser 4y ago
        >not a new installation of foreign beliefs. if advertising works - installation of new beliefs is a huge successful industry. Do you think advertising works?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - maxsilver 4y ago
      > But now, if you dare to post anything that doesn't align with what the MSM agenda for the day is. Your comment, post or even your whole sub-reddit gets banned. Where on earth does this opinion come from? All sorts of vile stuff gets posted to both Reddit and Twitter, and they rarely-if-ever take any action against it. Certain subreddits will still moderate, but community moderators (users of some sort) generally control the moderation of those places, not Reddit or their staff directly. And in cases where Twitter/Reddit directly take action, it certainly isn't based on an "MSM agenda", it mostly seems to only happen to limit their legal or financial liability.
      - inter_netuser 4y ago
        a lot of subreddits are basically marketing departments of some corporates. those have paid employee mods where only posts and comments favourable to corporate goals are allowed. not quite the MSM, but I'd guess corporates would want to remain within the prevailing politically correct Overton window.
    - MisterBastahrd 4y ago
      This has literally never been true. Reddit was designed from the ground up to rotate heliocentrically around the whims of moderators.
    - mywittyname 4y ago
      WTF? I see a constant never ending stream of shit on reddit that goes against the "MSM agenda". And those are the types of places are very quick to ban posters.
- flavius29663 4y ago
  yahoo was the goto place for new email accounts. It was the goto place for instant messaging too. It was also in top # for search and other features. And it still is...
- mempko 4y ago
  Telegram is turning out to be really good at this. Tons of Telegram channels churning out realtime info.
  - shawn-butler 4y ago
    Discovery is difficult on telegram
throwaway09223 4y ago
No, that's not at all what happened. MS offered $44B for Yahoo inclusive of their almost 50% stake in then pre-ipo Alibaba. At the time, Yahoo's investment in Alibaba was valued at more than their entire market cap (negative valuation for Yahoo's domestic operations, or negative value taking into account tax implications of divestiture of these assets, etc). Yahoo turned down MSFT's offer. Yahoo then spun off its entire company, keeping the name Yahoo with this spin-off subsidiary. The parent company, now named Altiba, retained ownership of the stake in Alibaba. This is where the ~50B valuation remained. The spin-off company (valued in the negative by the market) was then sold for $4.5B to Verizon. Altiba retained its $56B market cap during this time. Yahoo, inclusive of Altiba, out-performed MS's offer. It was a far better deal for shareholders to turn down MSFT. The net value to shareholders exceeded $60B. There were a lot of poorly written articles at the time, which confused the sale of the subsidiary (YHOO) with the previous offer (for both YHOO and what became AABA) so your confusion is understandable. But this perspective is simply wrong.
- kolbe 4y ago
  You are thinking of the wrong era. We're talking about the 2008 offer to buy Yahoo. Alibaba was worth around $10b when Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for $45b. https://www.forbes.com/2007/10/23/alibaba-ipo-pricing-markets-equity-cx_jc_1023markets1.html?sh=3579514430a6 https://www.forbes.com/2007/10/23/alibaba-ipo-pricing-market... https://news.microsoft.com/2008/02/01/microsoft-proposes-acquisition-of-yahoo-for-31-per-share/ https://news.microsoft.com/2008/02/01/microsoft-proposes-acq...
  - throwaway09223 4y ago
    Alibaba was pre-ipo at the time and did not have a market valuation. The most effective way to estimate a market value for Alibaba at this time is the 2008 MSFT offer itself. MSFT didn't offer $44B for Yahoo's internet business. The offer was in large part for the Alibaba stake. Regardless, MSFT priced it all at around $44B, which is less than it eventually was valued at.
    - 4y ago

FormerBandmate 4y ago

Yahoo actually returned more than Microsoft for a while, up until about 2017, thanks to their huge stake in Alibaba. Twitter doesn't have that tho, they're entirely tied to their mediocre product. Killing Vine was the dumbest thing they ever did.

freefal 4y ago
I believe Microsoft offered a cash option so not sure subsequent returns are relevant.
andy_ppp 4y ago
If nobody has noticed, Twitter aren’t very good at building software, it’s incredibly buggy what they’ve made, I regularly click on tweets that have a comments count but zero comments. It’s seriously glitchy from the notifications to even writing tweets (the MAX chars counter went crazy for me the other day). Don’t get me started on editing tweets their logic is terrible here that you can never design a UX that doesn’t stop people changing the meaning of their message after the event. Finally the spam is just totally next level and they still have people selling Bitcoin scams under every Elon tweet. Asleep at the wheel.
- eropple 4y ago
  > I regularly click on tweets that have a comments count but zero comments As far as I can tell, that's because you're blocked by the commenter or the commenter is a private account.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    Correct. In internal Twitter jargon, some data is "perspectival" and some for performance reasons isn't. Actually viewing a tweet is calculated on the fly based on your personal perspective, as honoring privacy settings, blocks, etc, is crucial. But that's not true for counts, so those will be off. People who find this a shocking and objectionable sign of bugs are generally people who have not build software at such large scales.