Verizon is buying Yahoo’s core business for $4.8 billion. Yahoo. The company that was the internet’s front door when I first touched a browser; the company that turned down buying Google for peanuts and turned down selling to Microsoft for $45B. Sold for the price of a nice office campus, to become part of a telco’s ad play. The kicker every article notes: Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba is worth vastly more than Yahoo itself, so the acquisition they got right outperformed the entire operating company. There’s a lesson about portfolios and a meaner one about focus, and Yahoo is somehow the cautionary tale for both.
My first internet homepage is an asset-purchase agreement. Nothing is permanent; archive your nostalgia locally.
Also this fortnight: leaked DNC emails (a hack with a geopolitical return address, per the security firms) detonated the week before the convention. “Email server” is now the most politically loaded phrase in America, which is a strange timeline for those of us who run them for a living. And Pokémon GO’s servers have stabilized, mostly, right as the think-pieces pivot from “phenomenon” to “fad.” Both can be true; DAUs are a decaying function like everything else.
TIL: acqui-metrics, how deal-makers value eyeballs vs. infrastructure vs. patents. Reading the Verizon analyst notes was an autopsy report where the corpse is my childhood.