Ask PG: What's your take on the Yahoo! situation?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191048

by stevenboudreau • 18 years ago

19 35 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Given the recent events, and that you sold Viaweb to Yahoo!, I'm curious to find out what you think of the whole Yahoo! situation. Carl Icahn has recently engaged in a proxy fight. Or is at least flirting with one. Should it have accepted Microsoft's offer?

jpeterson2• 18 years ago

Only two things would've caused them to spurn Microsoft—excessive self-worth or hubris—both of which are bad.

e1ven• 18 years ago

I'm not sure that I agree here.

Despite the public statements to the contrary, I suspect that Yang's motivations are not about the short-term financial plan, but about the long-term survival of the company and of their culture.

Microsoft is a massive organization, and has had several problems integrating smaller players into it's corporate structure. My suspicion is that a number of higher-level Yahoo members are convinced that if the Microsoft were to go through, they'd lose the ability to continue to decide their own fates. Look at the AOL-TW merger for an example of the clashes that can arise when trying to combine two massive companies with dissimilar cultures.

Yahoo employees may additionally be concerned, given that their potential suitor has quite a history of purchasing, or nearly purchasing companies, and not fully utilizing them.

In immediate dollar terms, no, turning the deal down doesn't make sense.. But in a long-term view of "where do we want Yahoo to be in 5 years", it makes all the sense in the world.

The problem for the Board is that the stockholders are more interested in the former, than the later, so Yahoo is trying to contort to justify using a framing they don't agree with.

ideas101• 18 years ago

i totally agree with you - also if you're trying to get my baby (for whatever reason and price) then I would certainly make sure that my baby grows healthy, but the history says that chances of growing healthy with microsoft is very rare. Yang would also make sure that people (shareholders, employee and end-users) who love my baby so much today, keeps loving in the future as well - but it looked like only one person was loving the deal and other two (employees and end-users) were certainly not that happy with the deal so....

andrewf• 18 years ago

Once the shareholders have sold the company off to Microsoft, if Yahoo falls apart, that's Microsoft's problem. It wouldn't hurt the people who had already sold Yahoo, so it's not a scenario that Yahoo's board should be considering.

(One caveat: the Microsoft offer is part cash, part stock. Since part of what Yahoo shareholders will receive is stock in the combined entity, I suppose that predicting a meltdown a year down the road means you're saying the offer is worth less than the current calculated value)

sutro• 18 years ago

Ask PG: What should I have for lunch?

PG seems to have become a gnomic magic 8 ball of sorts. I can only hope for his sake that he's built Eliza-like behavior into HN such that his responses to all "Ask PG" questions are fully automated.

jpeterson2• 18 years ago

I vote for tuna sandwich.

stevenboudreau2• 18 years ago

I wonder who submitted the first "Ask YC" and "Ask PG" posts?

keating• 18 years ago

Ask.

chengmi• 18 years ago

rms: http://ask.searchyc.com/20070225

mattmaroon2• 18 years ago

It would be hilarious if all Ask PGs just got the reply "make something people want."

kirubakaran2• 18 years ago

Come on, he wouldn't just hard-code his mini-me!

pg6• 18 years ago

A glass of prune juice or a nice marshmallow salad.

kirubakaran2• 18 years ago

When we were going to say hi to you on the pre-Startup School dinner, we were joking that we should corner you and ask ALL the questions we have, existential or otherwise ("why am I here", "what is the meaning of life", "what is the best color" etc) :-)

pg6• 18 years ago

BTW, http://members.wizzards.net/~mlworden/atyp/auden.htm

mattmaroon2• 18 years ago

I so want my own site where people worship me. Now all I have is a site where I worship me.

It is the next best thing though.

kf• 18 years ago

Breaking news! Paul Graham ate breakfast.

http://reddit.com/info/4jxe/comments

as2• 18 years ago

Why do you hope for his sake he's built Eliza-like behavior into HN such that his responses to all "Ask PG" questions are fully automated?

rplevy• 18 years ago

When did you first know that you hope for his sake he's built Eliza-like behavior into HN such that his responses to all "Ask PG" questions are fully automated?

stcredzero• 18 years ago

That's strange, because PG looks less gnomic now than in years past. (To be fair, some may have thought he once looked wizardish, not gnomic.)

pg6• 18 years ago

I think if Jerry and Filo had a chance to run the company for a while, they could probably surprise people. They're probably as smart as Larry and Sergey, but they've never had a chance to run Yahoo the way they'd like. If they had, it would have more of a hacker culture, and Google wouldn't be trampling them so badly.

stevenboudreau2• 18 years ago

Do you stay in touch with them, and/or with Yahoo in general?

pg6• 18 years ago

Not really. And that was 10 years ago. Most of the people I know at Yahoo now started after I left.

byrneseyeview3• 18 years ago

Slightly offtopic: this thread showed up as dead earlier today. Was it resurrected?

SwellJoe4• 18 years ago

You must be new here. Links on the site fall off the stack eventually--but when you reload the page, new ones are made. It's a "feature" of the architecture pg used to build the site (continuations based).

So, if you sit idle on any of the comment pages for more than a few minutes it becomes unavailable. You have to start over on the main page and dig your way back down. I imagine this is not a fundamental flaw of a continuations-based design, since Seaside seems to cope with it OK (I guess?)...merely something that pg, or someone else, has not added the code to handle yet.

byrneseyeview3• 18 years ago

No, no. I mean the title of the article ended with "[dead]".

pg6• 18 years ago

Yeah, an editor must have killed it. But it seemed harmless enough so I unkilled it.

startingup• 18 years ago

The long term consequence of "exit strategy" at work here. Yahoo "exited" way too soon, and the founders never really had any chance to shape the company. CEO Koogle assembled Yahoo (one of the smaller parts being ViaWeb) and Semel tried to remake it in a Hollywood direction.

Contrast this to Amazon, and later Google, where the founder(s) have had very strong influence on the culture. Another company where the founder exited too soon (voluntarily) is Ebay, and Ebay has no soul whatsoever, and they are doing everything they can to lose their natural monopoly.

Ask PG: What's your take on the Yahoo! situation?

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