And that's a fair, justified opinion to have. But attacking someone who holds a contrary opinion for having ulterior motives is an extremely uncharitable thing to do.
It's crazy i am seeing this on HN. I feel Yahoo is all worth for the following reasons:
1) 2 decades old brand name everyone aware of
2) Yahoo! has some good products which is used by tons of people like Flickr, Finance, search(12% market share [0]), weather, media.
They just don't have a mammoth money making one product which subsidizes the rest of the business like Google. Not to mention the tech talent and the culture that Yahoo! brings to Verizon.
If you have any solid argument about why $4 billion is a waste, i would definitely like to hear.
Market share is irrelevant if you have to run at a loss to obtain it. I can steal all of Netflix and Hulu's market share if you give me a few billion quarterly and don't require that I'm ever profitable, care to invest in me? I'll have an excellent brand as well, everyone loves free TV.
The price is pretty low now, if you are confidant in your assement why not buy?
The profitability of Yahoo isn't everything. Verizon can just buy it as a loss leader in order to convert more users to their profitable products. The value of Yahoo to them is more than numbers on a spreadsheet. It isn't as simple as just buying a revenue stream.
Maybe you'd have more friends if you could recognize that you're impugning someone's integrity by claiming they could only hold an opinion if they had ulterior motives that they aren't being forthcoming about.
how can you work in tech and not have "a connection" to yahoo?
also how is your comment not an attack? you're saying his opinion is tainted... because he knows people who work at yahoo? does that mean no one can have a fair opinion on apple, amazon, google, microsoft?
