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> In 1998, Yahoo turned down the opportunity to acquire Google for $1 million. Yahoo made six acquisitions that year, spending $107.3 million. > In 2002, Googl
by thunderbong 1y ago
> In 1998, Yahoo turned down the opportunity to acquire Google for $1 million. Yahoo made six acquisitions that year, spending $107.3 million.
> In 2002, Google offered to sell again for $1 billion. Yahoo hesitated and Google raised its price to $3 billion. Yahoo declined at the higher price. Google went on to become a trillion dollar company.
> Yahoo attempted to acquire Facebook for $1 billion in 2006, but Mark Zuckerberg turned down the offer. Had Yahoo increased its offer by just $100 million, Facebook’s board would have forced Zuckerberg to take it. Facebook also became a trillion dollar company.
In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.
- jeffbee 1y ago> In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo. Yeah exactly. Also I would consider the Overture acquisition extremely successful because their patent lawsuit v. Google gave them 8% of Google pre-IPO. If held (which it was not), that is a substantial asset today.
- arresin 1y agoThey had 8% of Google at one point and sold it?!
- jll29 1y agoYou are spot on, but you are drawing a slightly wrong conclusion, IMHO: Yes, Overture what the best Yahoo! acquisition ever made. But Yahoo!'s greatest mistake was to settle the Google lawsuit for a few million dollars - which meant that Google could keep using Overture's (parented) invention of keyword bidding based advertising; without it, Google may never have found a way to become profitable. So Yahoo! bought its own gravestone for $50m, when all they would have had to do is stand firm and go to trial. If Y! exercised its government-awarded monopoly rights for keyword auction based advertising, there may still be that Y! portal that was so prominent in the early 2000s. PS: Yahoo Inc. is not full gone - Yahoo Japan remains the last independent part of the former Y! - see https://www.yahoo.co.jp https://www.yahoo.co.jp .
- morkalork 1y agoDo you think any of their other successful acquisitions had the same potential if left on their own?
- blueboo 1y agoOr even, did any of the other successful acquisitions have potential that was perceptibly curtailed by said acquisition? Feels like a cliche at this point, but I’m not sure it’s true.
- recursivecaveat 1y agoTumblr was 2-3x bigger than reddit apparently at acquisition time (just looking at google trends). Now reddit is public at 27B market cap, and tumblr is virtually worthless. I don't think there's anything fundamental about tumblr that would have prevented it from being the one in the sun instead. They're not dissimilar, and they could've used those years to grow tumblr in whatever direction they liked if there was indeed something stalling it.
- sfblah 1y agoI know a fair bit about this deal. Some massive percentage of Tumblr's traffic was porn. And, shockingly, Yahoo management did NOT know this when they signed the check.
- mongol 1y agoIt is an interesting thought experiment. Would Yahoo have become Google, or would another company have taken Google's place, or perhaps something entirely different would have played out. Would we have had Android? Would we have had Chrome, or Google Maps, and so on
- Mobius01 1y agoNow I want a counter factual story about Yahoo acquiring Facebook, which then never flourishes into the influential network it became. What happens to society? Would we have the same political climate?
- benrutter 1y agoI want to know this too! If I invent a time machine, I'll message you but till then here's my ungrounded take (Obviously everything here is my personal opinion and not evidenced) The current political climate has mainly happened because capital interest has taken control of unregulated news and opinion. Meta are a particularly bad example of this, but as long as there's money to be made by providing a platform for polarising politics and fake news, then I think someone will do so. Who knows, maybe in that alternate universe you'd be posting "if Yahoo hadn't made such savy choices, I wonder if we would have the political climate we have today?"
- cruffle_duffle 1y ago> The current political climate has mainly happened because capital interest has taken control of unregulated news and opinion This has always been the case for as long as society has been consuming the news. “Business tycoons” have bought up newspapers and media outlets since forever to push their narrative. I think one component that has changed is the sheer volume and diversity of media makes competition for your attention (clicks) all the more fierce. Enter The Algorithm and optimizing for metrics above all else. I dunno. That doesn’t invalidate anything about the original question about what present day would be like without Facebook. Would something else similar have replaced it? Is Facebook really “the problem” or is it algorithmic content because algorithmicly driven content was going to happen facebook or not.
- Eisenstein 1y agoIt wasn't that bad when we had the Fairness Doctrine, which was removed in 1987. From there you could see a steady slide in US politics as polarization increased, from the Clinton scandal, to Gingrich and then Bush 2000. By the time Facebook hit it was already too late.
- pilingual 1y agoInclined because, for example, Viaweb didn't become Shopify. Tumblr, del.icio.us, ROI. Probably all should have continued growing and becoming established properties.
- cruffle_duffle 1y agoDelicious was the only useful bookmark manager ever. Nothing ever came close to replacing it. Though for me the “social” part was pretty useless (plenty of actual link aggregators out there to discover content at the time) …god remember the “tags” phase of content organization?
- firesteelrain 1y agoDelicious was cool because of the constant streaming of links and things that I was able to discover back then. I would sit there and just click on links, finding good content
- MattSayar 1y agoWhat's the superior phase of content organization now?
- dehrmann 1y agoLLMs.
- mrkramer 1y agoFor me it was always: Google, YouTube, Reddit and forums. There are also niche sites that cater to certain groups and interests like Steam and Twitch for gaming or IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes for movies. There is no universal content discovery platform or engine(besides maybe Google).
- paradox460 1y agoFlickr was the Instagram of it's era. It could have maintained that crown if Yahoo gave half a duck about it
- skizm 1y agoI guess the question is how many other companies did they correctly identify as not being trillion dollar companies. They will be optimizing for different things than VCs. Also, it is very possible they would have run one or both into the ground, making them bad investments anyways. We like to dunk on Yahoo with our perfect hindsight, but they were probably reasonable decisions at the time. So yes I agree with this comment.
- pyman 1y agoThe truth is that bad leadership and no clear vision led to Yahoo's decline. They went through over half a dozen CEOs in a short span and each had a different strategy. They failed to buy Google and Facebook, instead they bought GeoCities, Tumblr, and Broadcast for billions and ran them into the ground.
- fuzztester 1y agoI was on geocities and tumblr for a while, long back. I never liked Tumblr. there is neocities now. what was broadcast about?
- pyman 1y agoBroadcast = An early version of Spotify, Netflix and YouTube
- fuzztester 1y agoThanks.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoI'm inclined to agree. I'm ambivalent as to how they became trillion-dollar behemoths, but I think that Yahoo would have strangled them in the crib; possibly, deliberately. I've seen exactly that kind of thing happen, before.
- bena 1y agoExactly. If Yahoo was capable of nurturing Google into what it became, it was also capable of simply becoming that first. But it didn’t, because it wasn’t run by the same people who ran Google. And I’m not saying that only Page and Brin were the only ones who could have made Google, only that they clearly were two people who were capable of doing it. However, Yahoo was not run by such people. So Yahoo would have bought Google and would have made Google conform to Yahoo’s culture, probably relegating Page and Brin to lesser roles where they couldn’t drive company culture.
- Jabbles 1y ago"Facebook’s board would have forced Zuckerberg to take it" Doesn't Zuckerberg have majority control?
- dpe82 1y agoSure; but (IIRC) at the time Facebook was burning cash and the board could have threatened future funding if he refused the offer. He may have been able to get more funding anyway but the larger point is these things are never as simple as the legal docs might imply.
- manquer 1y agoYup It is power dynamics always, legal documents only matter in court. At the time in 2006 there were plenty of competing networks and any one of them could have climbed to the top. Facebook wasn’t unique tech wise by all accounts one huge 20k line main file not like Google with PageRank or pegs viaweb written in Lisp or Amazon with early aspects of AWS. FB could have been replicated and with right money scaled by anyone else , the challenge was there were series of spectacular growth and failures in the social network space The tech innovations started first with Hack as a PHP compatible language couple of years later then things like relay , graphQL, react and so on.
- sthuck 1y agoWhere I live, the early Facebook apps were the killer feature of the early days of Facebook. Genuinely asking, what other software company did something like this back then? I'm tempted to say (tounge in cheek) FB was the original PaaS, but maybe im not old enough
- manquer 1y agoFlash Apps hosting which was Facebook did then was not ground breaking at all, There were many other competing flash hosting sites . The killer thing others couldn’t do Facebook did was make available social APIs for the app developers to integrate into their platform to make the apps viral, which benefited both them and Facebook. OG PaaS in the Web 2.0 age IMO was the google app engine , it predated all AWS offerings and gave an actual application runtime .
- fuzztester 1y agoIn 2008: https://news.microsoft.com/source/2008/02/01/microsoft-proposes-acquisition-of-yahoo-for-31-per-share/ https://news.microsoft.com/source/2008/02/01/microsoft-propo... So for about $44 billion. I had read the news at the time on multiple channels. They didn't take the offer.
- dh2022 1y agoThe follow-up after Jerry Yang initially refused Ballmer: somehow Jerry had a come-to-Jesus moment and decided to sell but by then Ballmer changed his mind. Jerry even chased Ballmer on a golf course trying to sell but to no avail. https://www.businessinsider.com/2008/5/jerry-and-steve-played-golf-together-meanwhile-yahoo-pleading-for-offer https://www.businessinsider.com/2008/5/jerry-and-steve-playe...
- rasz 1y agoWasnt that deal pricing whole of Yahoo as worth minus billion dollars with Alibaba stock the only valuable thing in the package?
- fuzztester 1y agoCould be. I don't remember.
- croes 1y agoHindsight is 20/20. How successful were the six companies they aquired?
- alberth 1y ago> Had Yahoo increased its offer by just $100 million, Facebook’s board would have forced Zuckerberg to take it. Is that true? Zuck still controls 57% of all voting shares and that’s today, yearly 20-years later. How could the Board force him to sell to Yahoo. https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/zuckerberg-motivates-supervoting-stock-resistance-2022-10-27/ https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/zuckerberg-motivates-s...
- everfrustrated 1y agoThe board is in control of any company. Having the controlling votes means being able to reappoint the board but would have to do so by following the company's constitution which may take some time. For example, some companies only allow reappointing board members at certain times of the year.
- alberth 1y agoI don’t think that’s entirely accurate. Isn’t the Board supposed to act in the best interest of the shareholders? And if one person holds a majority of shares, wouldn’t that mean the Board is effectively acting based on that individual’s direction?
- SoftTalker 1y agoWhy have a board then? Just let the shareholders vote directly on corporate decisions.
- chistev 1y agoYea, I'm really confused on this. Someone who understands it well should explain please. Like the Astronomer CEO that was forced to resign, could the sane thing happen to Zuckerberg in similar circumstances since he has majority share? What If it was something entirely different, could they force him out? I don't understand it.
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- btilly 1y agoIn inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo. I absolutely agree. One fundamental reason why Yahoo failed is that they prioritized short-term revenue from search partners, over long-term reputation. One of the key people behind that was Prabhakar Raghavan. And now, Prabhakar Raghavan is at Google. Where he has proceeded to make the same mistake, with the result that Google Search quality fell off of a cliff. If Google had been acquired by Yahoo, he would have been in a position to destroy Google earlier than he actually did. See https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ for more.
- throwup238 1y agoThe HN discussion on that article has a lot of great commentary, including from some insiders: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
- findingMeaning 1y ago[flagged]
- crossroadsguy 1y ago> In hindu mythology, Raghavan (also Ravana [1]), who was blessed by gods and turned into villain by abducting Sita from lord Ram. WTH :D Raghavan != Ravana (Only relation is that they were on the opposite sides and that made pretty much the whole epic Ramayana) Raghavan comes from "Raghu" (another name for Ram). Raghavan kinda means "from Raghu" or so like "His descendants" or so. AFAIK
- amitheonlyone 1y agoYea this is just pure bs. If you had taken to search for the name, you'd have found the wiki explaining the name's origin. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raghavan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raghavan Also,Raghavan is most probably his father's name and Prabhakar will be his given name.
- dehrmann 1y agoThe story also mentioned Yahoo!'s best investment: Alibaba. What was different was Yahoo! was just an investor, not a buyer.
- QuantumGood 1y agoThere is no strong method for predicting the future. Acquired/could have acquired in particular doesn't have predictive ability. "Acquiring" is meaningless. Even "plans for the company after the acquisition" is meaningless. Credible reports of motivations that would lead the acquiring company to take a hands off approach to the company acquired means at least a little bit, having now seen companies taking that approach not immediately killing the golden goose.
- Macha 1y ago> In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo. Having worked for Yahoo, I have to agree. Acquisitions were always seen in terms of "what can they do for the Yahoo brand?" and "How can we cut costs by migrating this to Yahoo tech?", not "How can we grow this business?". A Yahoo owned Facebook would have been suffocated like Tumblr and Flickr were.
- noAnswer 1y agoSo it would have been a net positive for society. :-)
- whynotminot 1y agoGood guy Yahoo murdering companies that would have been net bad for society lol
- indymike 1y ago> Yahoo owned Facebook would have been suffocated like Tumblr and Flickr were. This is really the story for most acquisitions in tech. Interesting that Facebook was able to really do positive things with WhatsApp and Instagram.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- kaonwarb 1y agoI'm still sad Yahoo shut down Astrid [0] after acquisition - my personal intersection with the many, many small companies they acquired and shuttered. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrid_(application) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrid_(application)
- flopsamjetsam 1y ago> Yahoo! acquired the company on May 1, 2013 and shuttered the Astrid service on August 5, 2013. Ouch! That's pretty awful.
- xxr 1y ago> In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo. People also like to point to how foolish of Blockbuster it was not to buy Netflix when they had the opportunity to, but I’m also inclined to believe that the merged companies would never have made the decisive moves involving streaming video and content production. It’s tempting to say that Amazon would have filled in the streaming video gap (although perhaps late enough for feature film and TV piracy to proliferate a little further into the mainstream), but I wonder whether Apple would have adapted its iTunes service into Apple TV first. (Another dark horse I like to think about here would be RealMedia which may have identified a niche.)
- neilv 1y agoI used to joke that Yahoo were benevolent time travelers from the future, sworn to stop companies that would become threats to humanity. They would stop the company by buying it. Because Yahoo buying a company kills the company. If only Yahoo hadn't run out of money before... (certain companies that are now too powerful and ruthless to be called out safely).
- crossroadsguy 1y ago> Facebook’s board would have forced Zuckerberg to take it. Then what's that Zuck always having >= 51% votes since the beginning?
- disgruntledphd2 1y agoHe did at the very beginning, but lost it because of dilution and then gained it back as FB became bigger and he could play investors off one another.
- rightbyte 1y agoIt is saddening to know how close we were to no Facebook and Google. Butterfly effect...
- johannes1234321 1y ago> In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo. True, but they also wouldn't have developed into companies reducing Yahoo's reach ..
- al_borland 1y agoAfter those companies didn’t sell to Yahoo, they went on to develop new things, which led to growth. If Yahoo has bought them, they’d just let them get old and fade away, eventually shutting them down… or at best keeping them around with minimal maintenance. Yahoo is where once great sites go to die.
- username135 1y agoAnd maybe the world would be a better place? We'll never know.
- nemo44x 1y agoAnd yahoo! leadership agreed. They probably intended to just bury the tech and keep some staff which is why they didn’t pay the asking price. Had they thought either of these properties were transformational they’d have paid.
- indymike 1y ago> In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo. Having lived through several acquisitions - both as a founder exiting and as an employee being acquired/acquiring... Very rarely does the acquirer have the vision to see when the acquired company has a better long term trajectory. The CEO who does the deal might, but the senior management team and line managers usually just intentionally and unintentionally rob the acquired company of resources (cash, people, marketing, facilities) and then the exodus of smart people begins. It takes a very special team to make acquisitions actually add up to 1+1=4 most are lucky to get 1+1=0.5.