Yahoo! dumps! thing! that! made! it! Yahoo! and! told! to! bed! AOL! A hedge fund is urging Yahoo! to form a "strategic combination" with fellow internet dinosaur AOL – just as Yahoo! announced it was killing off its founding feature, created about 20 years ago. In an open letter to Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, investment house Starboard Value asked her to consider making a number of moves it …
It's soooo fucked up, and awful isn't the word. In fact, is there even a word for AOL outside of A O L? It's like those 3 letters are present around the internet, but they represent nothing. Several things come to mind when I hear Yahoo, but when I here AOL........
In all seriousness, this might be the most fucked up thing I've heard all year.
Some time ago, before AOL tried entering the Australian ISP market, their name was pretty much mud here.
When they did get here, it was common to see discarded AOL cover discs by the road, in bins, and bushes.
Anyway, I haven't heard or seen their name anywhere in Australia for quite some time - though it is possible they still have a presence here - I just haven't noticed.
And yeah, I agree, this is the most stupid idea I've ever ever heard of! A good way for Yahoo! to commit suicide! :D
It's soooo fucked up, and awful isn't the word. In fact, is there even a word for AOL outside of A O L? It's like those 3 letters are present around the internet, but they represent nothing. Several things come to mind when I hear Yahoo, but when I here AOL........
All I hear is S.O.L.!
First, AOL who? "America Online" or "AL's Oil & Lube"? Nevermind, AL's has far too much credit to be considered by Yahoo.
Second, "Starboard Value"? Did they merge with "Overboard Value"? "Walk The Plank Investments"? I wouldn't be surprised if they list Autonomy+HP as one of their brain childs.
Here I sit poor and solo and would of never thought of this, all the while, there are multiple heads of an ENTIRE firm with millions that come up with this idea. The fact that Yahoo is even considering this should be a red flag to their own company of why they are where they are.
Oh pleeeese.... the only thing they give a damn about is their profit. Either they want Yahoo to be profitable to the point of insanity or they want to break the company up and sell off the pieces. They really have no reason to consider Yahoo anything but fodder for their profit feedlot. It's possible too that there's more money to made by selling off the AOL/Yahoo assets together than separately I'm suspicious.
I never thought of that, but you're probably right. However, if you outright change Yahoo! to AOL, what does that do for share prices? Short term investments or not, I don't see how that name change could be at all beneficial. Why change your companies name to one of which is doing worse off than you?
This post has been deleted by its author
My advice to Yahoo!?
Use the billions from Ali Baba to buy back stock and go private, shake off these leeches.
Then, concentrate a bit on letting people know what you already have, and improving that, rather than trying to buy the next 'big thing'.
Yahoo Education, Qwiki and the Yahoo Directory? I've been online for years, actually use the occasional Yahoo! service, and I've never heard of these!
I use two of the Yahoo! services - Groups and Flickr. ...or rather I should say I used to use them. I keep my logins just in case they come full circle and make those products useful again.
Even occasional forays into Tumblr when following searches are no longer possible. Their users are complaining that the latest Yahoo! changes are responsible for their page formats falling apart.
Before Google, you were our only map of the web, Yahoo Directory. The only one who would take us by the hand and guide us through the webernet. Besides Excite and Alta Vista and AOL and all the others, that is.
But you were the best, Yahoo Directory. Kind of. Well not really, actually you were a pretty crappy, disorganized guide and half your links were broken.
OK never mind - good riddance you worthless piece of garbage.
"Based on our analysis, we believe that a combination of Yahoo and AOL could offer synergies of up to $1 billion by significantly reducing the cost overlaps in their Display advertising businesses as well as synergies in corporate overhead," the letter reads.
Did anyone outside the US even know they had an advertising business like Googles? Ever since I found out, and tried to apply years ago, I was told it was US only. AdSense has had no such qualms. Now colour me naive, but isn't there a remarkable pattern between the time Yahoo has enforced this artificial restriction (i.e. for ever) and the stellar Ad profits Google has enjoyed, contributing to 98% of its revenue?
I've used Yahoo's email, calendar, contacts, and groups for many years, both at home and at work, and I've always been pretty happy to have all that functionality for free. Yes, Google and Microsoft have improved their offerings in recent years, and like everyone else I'm forced to use Google for some things, but I stick with Yahoo as my go-to choice. If they started charging a fee for business services, I would pay it. I just wish they would quit fiddling with the interface design. They keep breaking things while they are re-arranging them to no apparent purpose.
Are you sure about their mail and weather services being of any use whatsoever?
I have a yahoo mail account and every time they update it they somehow manage to remove any remaining useful features and make it harder to use and just more stupid. It also tends to fail on more browsers and devices and they intentionally cripple the "old" version by making it as useless as possible while still nominally keeping it the same.
As for yahoo weather, I gave up looking at that even purely for laughs a long time ago. It seemed to have some form of time-displacement problem where the weather it forecast and reported often seemed to have no correlation to actual weather or what was being forecast by other services. Just to be fair and reasonable I have just checked the yahoo weather for where I am now. A mere difference of 3 degrees in the current temperature (vs met office / bbc weather) and the 5 day forecast bears little relation to the met office / bbc weather forecast. Also in typical dumb-US style (the US is one of the three remaining countries on the planet to not use metric measurements), the mouse over tips only give information in Fahrenheit and not the selected / default temperature units elsewhere on the page.
The functionality of Yahoo! Mail depends partly on your ISP. Some ISPs (like mine) pay Yahoo! to host their email, and so for people like me Yahoo! Mail is actually pretty decent, and works fairly well.
The rest of the world... well it varies depending on their mood I think.
I still use My Yahoo! as an RSS reader. It's handy to be able to jump between systems and keep all my feeds.
The Yahoo! Directory didn't used to be called that. When it started that was just Yahoo!
That was the whole website. Just categorized links. And it actually predated Alta Vista, although not by much and AV was always a much better way to find stuff than Yahoo! was.
Yahoo! did give Apache to the world though. I wonder how fast the web would have spread with just the NCSA junk for free server software.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
