6 ms·
Does anyone have any real insight into the strategy behind all of these acquisitions? Apart from blasé speculation about acqui-hiring (for what products?) and s
by ForrestN 13y ago
Does anyone have any real insight into the strategy behind all of these acquisitions? Apart from blasé speculation about acqui-hiring (for what products?) and supposition that Yahoo executives are merely stupid, I'd be interested to understand the broader pattern. It's a real news story, and something is going on.
There is a strategy. What is it?
- chimeracoder 13y agoRockmelt has (had) a very strong leadership team (founders were very successful in the 90s), and a number of strong engineers. It seems clear that this is an acquisition for talent, since they're shutting the product down with less than 30 days' notice. For <$70MM, that could be a relatively cheap acquisition of talent that has proven their ability to make things (if not necessarily proven their ability to make a product that people want to buy - which is where Yahoo's responsibility and vision come into play).
- badclient 13y agoFor <$70MM (and for a company that raised $40MM), that could be a relatively cheap acquisition How much money Rockmelt raised says little about how good of a deal Yahoo received. The reverse may be true: Yahoo may have had to pay way more than the real value simply to ensure a return to the investors, not because it valued the company at the price paid.
- photorized 13y agoMany people were very successful in the 90s... It was way too easy, not necessarily an indication of talent or strong leadership.
- geargrinder 13y agoQuote from 20 years in the future: "Many people were very successful in the '10s... It was way too easy, not necessarily an indication of talent or strong leadership."
- jusben1369 13y agoYahoo needs talent to succeed. Yahoo, in general, cannot compete with Google, Facebook or smaller startups for talent. They're better off now than they were prior to Marissa but they're still a definite second best. So they are buying talent to stock the shelves with first rate devs and leaders - mostly in mobile. At some point - say in 6 - 18 more months - talent may come to work for them to work with some of these smart people they're acquiring reducing their need to acquire companies at such a frantic pace. It's a smart strategy.
- nashequilibrium 13y agoThis article might disagree with you: Yahoo Keeps Buying Startups That Don't Make Their Own Apps http://readwrite.com/2013/07/03/yahoo-qwiki-lawsuit-chaotic-moon#feed=/tag/yahoo&awesm=~odoHUBW0wUgPUY http://readwrite.com/2013/07/03/yahoo-qwiki-lawsuit-chaotic-...
- hga 13y agoOh my. Yahoo has lots of problems with execution, we shouldn't be surprised if due diligence is another example, especially when they think they're in the 11th hour.
- hkmurakami 13y agowell considering Yahoo doesn't power their own search engine, maybe they're okay with teams who are adept at creating great UI and UX wrappers around 3rd party licensed technology.
- jclos 13y agoThis is actually quite sad considering Yahoo has an excellent research division in Barcelona in information retrieval. Maybe they should start funding them more instead of letting them fund themselves with huge european projects.
- wikiburner 13y ago
- lonelycoder 13y agoMarissa's a woman. Women like shopping.
- xj9 13y agoCan the sexism, dumbass.
- pawrvx 13y agoBail out the VC who sit's on public company boards.
- joeblau 13y agoI think Yahoo just needs great engineers and acqui-hiring is a good way to get them quickly. I think that as long as Yahoo can keep the teams together, they have a good shot of building some great tools. If I was to guess their strategy: Sumly + Tumblr + Rockmelt looks like a new content distribution system.