7 ms·

Twitter reminds me a lot of Yahoo about a decade ago. A company that lost its way. Cycling through lots of CEOs, re-orgs and visions and a culture that atrophie

Twitter reminds me a lot of Yahoo about a decade ago. A company that lost its way. Cycling through lots of CEOs, re-orgs and visions and a culture that atrophied along the way. Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for $45B in 2008. The board of directors declined, believing in much more upside. Yahoo became increasingly irrelevant. They later sold to Verizon for $4.5B https://www.onmsft.com/news/its-finally-over-yahoo-is-acquired-not-by-microsoft-but-by-verizon https://www.onmsft.com/news/its-finally-over-yahoo-is-acquir...

intsunny 4y ago
No. Yahoo played that situation smartly. They knew they were worth more than the $45B Microsoft offered due to their stake in Alibaba. This thread dives into how Microsoft lowballed Yahoo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31029289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31029289
- WisNorCan 4y ago
  No. Yahoo got lucky with the Alibaba stake. That wasn’t what Microsoft was after. Microsoft was desperate to be relevant in Internet consumer services and compete with Google. Yang and the board believed they could fix Yahoo. None of their predictions came true. —- “In an email to Yahoo employees after the board's rejection of the Microsoft offer was made public, Chief Executive Jerry Yang maintained that the company is well-positioned to grow, citing the Internet powerhouse's efforts to improve its standing in online advertising and build an alliance with newspapers. "We have accomplished a great deal in a very short time," Yang said. "Yahoo is a faster-moving, better-organized, more nimble company well on its way to transforming the experiences of its users, advertisers, publishers and developers." He said the company aims to "grow visits to key Yahoo starting points and properties by approximately 15% per year over the next several years." https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/yahoo-rejects-bid-microsoft-vows-to-continue-effort https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/yahoo-rejects-bid-micr...
  - snotrockets 4y ago
    There's a difference between what the board believed (we'll probably never know,) and what they communicated. No one would email their workers saying "we're waiting for payday, at the expense of you".
    - WisNorCan 4y ago
      That is fair. However I don’t think that applies here. if the board truly believed it, they would have sold the “pure Yahoo” piece to Microsoft for far more than $4.5B and spun out the Alibaba stake. They didn’t and ended up losing billions in shareholder value.
      - snotrockets 4y ago
        Maybe that wasn't on the table. We won't know until some executive would retire and end up writing a tell all.
        WisNorCan 4y ago
        You can just read the statements from Ballmer and others on what they were excited about. I wasn’t on the deal team, but I worked with them on parts of it. The statements below are reflective of the belief. Occam’s razor would suggest that Microsoft and Yahoo’s exec teams both talking about the value of the Yahoo Internet services as the rationale for the deal probably is the truth. And Microsoft would have paid much more than 10% of the $45B to get it. —— Microsoft sees Yahoo as a way to compete with arch-rival Google Inc GOOG.O in the Internet search and advertising arena, but it has limits to what it is willing to pay to get a deal done. “We’re prepared to move forward without a merger with Yahoo,” Ballmer said. “We think the best way to move forward quickly (and gain critical mass against Google) is to come together with Yahoo.” https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSMAT00810920080423 https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSMAT00810920080423
  - thebradbain 4y ago
    To be fair, I think Microsoft would have also fumbled Yahoo at the time. This was the era of Vista and IE and windows live/hotmail. My maybe-controversial(?) opinion is they just would have MSNd Yahoo in some directionless brand “synergy” at a time where Microsoft still seemed to be figuring out what its own future identity/company vision would be. I think Yahoo knew that. And while Yahoo had many of the same challenges internally at the time (which it eventually succumbed too, whereas there was no clear consensus that Microsoft would successfully reinvent itself), at least it was in control of its own destiny
- s3r3nity 4y ago
  > Yahoo played that situation smartly. This is one of the hottest tech takes I've read in the past 10 years. Getting lucky due to an investment in something that is _not_ their core business does not count as "smart" to me.
throwaway_1928 4y ago
Twitter still has fantastic network effects, making it difficult to supplant. If only someone, perhaps Musk, can solve the censorship problem for them.
- binarymax 4y ago
  Can you elaborate on what you think the censorship problem is?
  - blfr 4y ago
    Killing good (funny) accounts from various anons and even small celebrities, like Nick Mullen. It stifles discussion (people are worried about getting locked/limited/banned) and makes for a much less interesting scroll.
    - jungturk 4y ago
      So the censorship problem is that the twitter feed became less interesting for you as a user? That sounds more like just bad product choices (assuming it drives users away) rather than any sort of issue of rights.
  - sudden_dystopia 4y ago
    Censoring important news stories during an election and then a year later just being like, oops, ya that was real.
    - jacobolus 4y ago
      This supposed “important news” is an invented (probably Russian) propaganda story that couldn’t be confirmed by any of the news outlets who investigated it and was hyped up by armies of Russian bots and Russian-funded media trolls, immediately before a presidential election. [According to proponents of this story, the chain of custody of this laptop goes: Hunter Biden → Repair Shop (owned by a legally blind GOP partisan hazy about the details) → ??? → Rudy Giuliani → Steve Bannon → NY Post → Matt Gaetz. Seriously?] A year and a half later, the course of the Russian invasion of Ukraine provides solid evidence that we should be thankful for social media companies’ rare responsible anti-propaganda effort here. Instead of dissolving NATO and dropping Russian sanctions as the previous president repeatedly suggested, the US instead provided significant diplomatic, military, intelligence, and economic support, and now Ukrainians have a good chance of holding their country. Once again, remember that impeachment #1 was about a ham-handed explicit attempt by the US president to extort president Zelenskyy of Ukraine, denying US military aid unless he would fabricate dirt on the president’s political opponent and (falsely) exonerate Russia. For that effort, the president’s entire party (with only a few notable exceptions) gave him a pat on the back.
paxys 4y ago
> They later sold to Verizon for $4.5B After spinning out their share of Alibaba into a separate company worth $56 billion. Yahoo shareholders still got a lot more out of it than they would have by accepting the Microsoft buyout.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

intsunny 4y ago

No. Yahoo played that situation smartly. They knew they were worth more than the $45B Microsoft offered due to their stake in Alibaba. This thread dives into how Microsoft lowballed Yahoo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31029289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31029289

WisNorCan 4y ago
No. Yahoo got lucky with the Alibaba stake. That wasn’t what Microsoft was after. Microsoft was desperate to be relevant in Internet consumer services and compete with Google. Yang and the board believed they could fix Yahoo. None of their predictions came true. —- “In an email to Yahoo employees after the board's rejection of the Microsoft offer was made public, Chief Executive Jerry Yang maintained that the company is well-positioned to grow, citing the Internet powerhouse's efforts to improve its standing in online advertising and build an alliance with newspapers. "We have accomplished a great deal in a very short time," Yang said. "Yahoo is a faster-moving, better-organized, more nimble company well on its way to transforming the experiences of its users, advertisers, publishers and developers." He said the company aims to "grow visits to key Yahoo starting points and properties by approximately 15% per year over the next several years." https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/yahoo-rejects-bid-microsoft-vows-to-continue-effort https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/yahoo-rejects-bid-micr...
- snotrockets 4y ago
  There's a difference between what the board believed (we'll probably never know,) and what they communicated. No one would email their workers saying "we're waiting for payday, at the expense of you".
  - WisNorCan 4y ago
    That is fair. However I don’t think that applies here. if the board truly believed it, they would have sold the “pure Yahoo” piece to Microsoft for far more than $4.5B and spun out the Alibaba stake. They didn’t and ended up losing billions in shareholder value.
    - snotrockets 4y ago
      Maybe that wasn't on the table. We won't know until some executive would retire and end up writing a tell all.
      - WisNorCan 4y ago
        You can just read the statements from Ballmer and others on what they were excited about. I wasn’t on the deal team, but I worked with them on parts of it. The statements below are reflective of the belief. Occam’s razor would suggest that Microsoft and Yahoo’s exec teams both talking about the value of the Yahoo Internet services as the rationale for the deal probably is the truth. And Microsoft would have paid much more than 10% of the $45B to get it. —— Microsoft sees Yahoo as a way to compete with arch-rival Google Inc GOOG.O in the Internet search and advertising arena, but it has limits to what it is willing to pay to get a deal done. “We’re prepared to move forward without a merger with Yahoo,” Ballmer said. “We think the best way to move forward quickly (and gain critical mass against Google) is to come together with Yahoo.” https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSMAT00810920080423 https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSMAT00810920080423
- thebradbain 4y ago
  To be fair, I think Microsoft would have also fumbled Yahoo at the time. This was the era of Vista and IE and windows live/hotmail. My maybe-controversial(?) opinion is they just would have MSNd Yahoo in some directionless brand “synergy” at a time where Microsoft still seemed to be figuring out what its own future identity/company vision would be. I think Yahoo knew that. And while Yahoo had many of the same challenges internally at the time (which it eventually succumbed too, whereas there was no clear consensus that Microsoft would successfully reinvent itself), at least it was in control of its own destiny
s3r3nity 4y ago
> Yahoo played that situation smartly. This is one of the hottest tech takes I've read in the past 10 years. Getting lucky due to an investment in something that is _not_ their core business does not count as "smart" to me.

throwaway_1928 4y ago

Twitter still has fantastic network effects, making it difficult to supplant. If only someone, perhaps Musk, can solve the censorship problem for them.

binarymax 4y ago
Can you elaborate on what you think the censorship problem is?
- blfr 4y ago
  Killing good (funny) accounts from various anons and even small celebrities, like Nick Mullen. It stifles discussion (people are worried about getting locked/limited/banned) and makes for a much less interesting scroll.
  - jungturk 4y ago
    So the censorship problem is that the twitter feed became less interesting for you as a user? That sounds more like just bad product choices (assuming it drives users away) rather than any sort of issue of rights.
- sudden_dystopia 4y ago
  Censoring important news stories during an election and then a year later just being like, oops, ya that was real.
  - jacobolus 4y ago
    This supposed “important news” is an invented (probably Russian) propaganda story that couldn’t be confirmed by any of the news outlets who investigated it and was hyped up by armies of Russian bots and Russian-funded media trolls, immediately before a presidential election. [According to proponents of this story, the chain of custody of this laptop goes: Hunter Biden → Repair Shop (owned by a legally blind GOP partisan hazy about the details) → ??? → Rudy Giuliani → Steve Bannon → NY Post → Matt Gaetz. Seriously?] A year and a half later, the course of the Russian invasion of Ukraine provides solid evidence that we should be thankful for social media companies’ rare responsible anti-propaganda effort here. Instead of dissolving NATO and dropping Russian sanctions as the previous president repeatedly suggested, the US instead provided significant diplomatic, military, intelligence, and economic support, and now Ukrainians have a good chance of holding their country. Once again, remember that impeachment #1 was about a ham-handed explicit attempt by the US president to extort president Zelenskyy of Ukraine, denying US military aid unless he would fabricate dirt on the president’s political opponent and (falsely) exonerate Russia. For that effort, the president’s entire party (with only a few notable exceptions) gave him a pat on the back.

paxys 4y ago

> They later sold to Verizon for $4.5B After spinning out their share of Alibaba into a separate company worth $56 billion. Yahoo shareholders still got a lot more out of it than they would have by accepting the Microsoft buyout.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]