Still the third most visited Web property in the United States
According to Alexa it's the 5th [1] but I'm sure it's not a huge difference between third and fifth.
Yahoo still makes almost $5BN a year. It's a 24 year old internet behemoth.
I mean by any reasonable measure of a company, those are ungodly numbers. Given how people talk about Yahoo though you'd think it was populated with lepers.
Part of it is that this is HN, and Yahoo as an internet company has been boring for a long, long time[1].
Another part of it is that it shows the incredible value of inertia. Sports scores and email is with $5B.
And I think a third is just a bit of schadenfreude from the internet insider set. Selling half of yourself to a Baby Bell-revenant and turning the rest into a tracking stock is a sad way for the first internet directory to die.
[1] The last vaguely interesting thing I can remember was Yahoo Pipes.
> Part of it is that this is HN, and Yahoo as an internet company has been boring for a long, long time
It's like the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M). They make $30 billion in annual sales with 55k products. How often do you hear about them?
They're big, profitable, and news is mostly boring to HN interests.
They are used in many MBA courses as the reference story for a conglomerate and also for the idea of core competencies, namely "applying coatings to backings".
Part of why you probably don't hear about "Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing" is that the company is no longer named that. :-) Wikipedia says "formerly known as". But, fascinating, I didn't know that.
As an aside, isn't Alexa sampled from a self-selecting set of people who install a browser toolbar of dubious value? Should its figures really be relied on at all?
I'm not sure there is a great way to really measure this type of data. Granted I don't think Alexa is a good point to argue if something is top 3 or top 5. It at leasts provides some sort of indication of overall measurement error. We can probably say it is at least in the top 10 which is probably meaningful enough for the discussion at hand.
The Alexa rankings follow what is superficially akin to a Zipf distribution [0], so one would actually expect something like a 40% difference between the 3rd and 5th sites.
I don't think you're being downvoted by people who necessarily disagree with you. I think you're being downvoted out of fatigue. Not EVERY thread needs to pivot to discussing Trump's latest tweet, or how deplorable everyone over 30 is, etc.
The new name is meant to be a combination of the words “alternative and Alibaba,” according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the individual was not authorized to speak on the record about the name change.
Verizon spends a lot of money for what essentially is a widely recognizable brand, popular destination, and an email service, and they change it?
"I saw it on Altaba"???
All these people with emails @yahoo.com is free advertising for yahoo.com, but guess what, no more yahoo.com? Will they try to force a change of email domain over 20 years and kill the email service for good?
I have no clue now why they bought Yahoo in the first place...
Edit: got it all wrong. Thanks all for clarifying which piece is what.
There is a lot of misunderstanding about what is going on. The current Yahoo basically exists of 3 main parts:
1. The Yahoo website and properties that most folks think of when they think "Yahoo".
2. The 15% share of Alibaba
3. The share in Yahoo Japan.
Verizon bought part #1. That is not changing its name and will continue to be accessible on yahoo.com. Parts 2 and 3 are being left behind in a company that is being renamed Altaba.
Not quite- the part of Yahoo owned by Verizon will still be called Yahoo, but the part not acquired by Verizon (essentially the Alibaba shares) will be called Altaba.
We just had this discussion at work.. one of the recent reports stated over 2 million subscribers still pulling in ~600 million a year just from that (pales in comparison to ad revenue and past performance, but still... 2 million!). The average per-account income was something like $21/month.
Well, the AARP has 38 million members, so that's not too surprising, I guess. (I'm saying that a lot of old folks don't realize there is an Internet, or email, or online news, etc. without AOL.)
My grandparents still use AOL, because they live in the absolute middle of nowhere (aka they drive roughly an hour to be able to do groceries). Their options have been basically dial up, or extremely expensive satellite internet.
Verizon has been promising the little place they live for around 5 years that they will eventually get some sort of service, however last time i was there i could barely get any cell coverage.
My previous company built web caching servers for independent ISPs. We served a bunch of providers in rural areas who offered WiMAX to customers that were too far out to get DSL or cable internet, and with lower latency than satellite. It was usually somewhat expensive, compared to DSL/cable, but the ISP could profitably serve individual customers the "last mile" (or last dozen miles, with a repeater or two). A lot of those ISPs died as antitrust regulation in the broadband industry failed and their nearby customers got poached by the telcos and cable operators, making it harder to operate at large enough scale to make it work. So, there was a moment where it looked like a lot of those difficult to reach customers would be reached by ISPs willing to roll out WiMAX with tall antennas and repeaters. But, it didn't work out, and most of them died.
Anyway, I agree with you that there are still stretches of the US that have people but no broadband. And, my primary internet is mobile broadband (from two different carriers, since I travel and often find only one of them works reliably), so I know the pain of it first-hand. But, still, I'd wager that most AOL customers are older folks (even if the reason is also that people living in rural areas tend to be older).
Wi-Max or alternatives like DIY long range Wi-Fi, cannot have both 10 miles (~15 km) range and high throughput.
At the very minimum because earth curvature, and also because the radio signal has to go right through the moisture in between the sender and receiver.
I came up a few years ago with the idea that it would be possible to use the mesospheric layer as a passive relay for communications at 40 miles range in desert areas. This even during daylight.
It is inspired by the "laser guide star" in astronomy with coding à la 802.11 (Golay/LDPC).
Sure you can, you just need a bigger tower; you can get gigabit speeds with microwaves, no sweat, very directional too. Signal loss due to moisture? Up the power. It doesn't work? Use more power, or add 5 feet to the tower and try again. Remember, if brute force isn't working, you aren't using enough of it.
BTW: I like how you kinda gloss over the advanced math for atmospheric corrections. The idea is interesting, though.
* About the horizon problem: You need a tower which is 90 meters (270 feet) high to reach a 40 km receiver. It exists but it is pretty costly ... and hugly.
* About the power problem, this is regulated. For Wi-Fi I think it is around 80mW. It is not much.
* About glossing on math. You are right about it, but after all this is well known: The idea is used heavily in astronomy exactly for this purpose since 10 years. No need to reinvent what more gifted people have already invented.
That's more an indicator of how large parts of America don't have affordable or any broadband access. I'd trust AOL to be around longer than NetZero or any other bottom feeder ISP.
A lot. Most of the upper midwest lacks cellular coverage. You need to drive to the top of a hill to even hit a gsm signal at one bar. The old analog signals were better but they're gone now.
My grand parents do not get celluar where they live in very remote Montana. Apparently ether Verizon/AT&T (i can't remember which) has been promising them Celluar/Cable service for over 5 years now, and has never come through with it.
Honestly i think the only reason they even pay for AOL is because they use it to keep in touch with relatives via email.
And it would, except that Charter communications owns rights to the cellular spectrum there. So once such a system were in place Charter would no doubt come in and take it away from you and then operate it at a profit if they could.
With Aabaco being taken by the original spin-off plan, this is simply an alternative company name so that they still get the stock symbol they want for the investment company that will remain behind after all the web assets have been sold to Verizon.
What "stereotype" does "Ali Baba" invoke? As I recall the story, Ali Baba was a clever man who started out poor but made his fortune by outwitting dangerous thieves with the help of his brother's super-capable slave girl. Is there something bad there? Even if there is, is there something that anyone would have a stereotype about?
There are other characters from literature that could be problematic, but this just isn't one of those.
How is Alibaba a racist stereotype? The character is from a timeless classic... its like claiming a hypothetical company called Lancelot is a racist stereotype.
According to Alexa it's the 5th [1] but I'm sure it's not a huge difference between third and fifth.
Yahoo still makes almost $5BN a year. It's a 24 year old internet behemoth.
I mean by any reasonable measure of a company, those are ungodly numbers. Given how people talk about Yahoo though you'd think it was populated with lepers.
I guess it's all about managing expectations.
[1]http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US