adventureful

His billion dollar marker is drastically high. He has been living in dotcom fantasy land for far too long.

There's no reason you can't raise $250k for 25% from an angel investor, to build a $10 or $20 million business. That's a helluva result to put it mildly. You know, building an actual business that produces actual profits, not vaporware built-to-flip companies that produce nothing and only exist in a tiny corner of the economy.

The stock market hasn't moved in real terms in 13 years or so. Interest rates are on the floor. Any investor outside the big VC game would kill for a 10 or 20 fold return over 10 or 20 years. There's a beautiful thing called dividends, which a successful business can pay to its owners. Dixon doesn't seem to know anything about that however, as his assumed scenarios require the big exit and ignore any other possibilities.

If you take $250k, and you build a $10 or $20 million valuation business, it's not difficult to kick off a very nice dividend to the investor that provides a stellar return on their capital. AND if you ever choose to sell, said investor also gets their big exit as well. You can also buy their stock back at the higher valuation and they get their exit that way. These types of results are common in the real economy, but not so common in the fantasy dotcom economy.

It became an inconvenient statement once Apple conquered the known universe. As is so typical with power and success.

It'll actually end up being a tax benefit while costing them no actual red ink.

The problem with using coercion is, the people using it never believe it's useless regardless of what's coming out of your mouth.

In an actual free market, collusion between companies is legal and occurs regularly.

You're talking about a regulated market in which labor is protected by government intervention from collusion between companies.

There has been talk about Google stealing Yahoo back away from Microsoft on an ad deal, so that would also be another reason. It could be worth hundreds of millions per year to land that deal with Yahoo. The legal hurdles are huge though.

There's enough prior art to demolish this easily. It won't even remotely hold up under legal scrutiny if it's ever used by Apple in a lawsuit. I think this is a complete non-issue.

One to grow on.

I find the China Study and Dr. Esselstyn's work to be far more interesting in regards to the results of a diet rich in the consumption of animal cholesterol and animal protein.

There are two big evils in American lifestyles: hyper consumption of sugar, and lack of exercise.

Americans walk a fraction as much as their grandparents every day, and consume several times more sugar. Worse, we consume insane quantities of high fructose corn syrup and its variants.

In the 1970s the US Government massively subsidized corn crops, which led to the creation of high fructose corn syrup. It's no coincidence our obesity epidemic really exploded from roughly then forward.

The caves and small places of Earth say otherwise. So do the intense environments on Earth that we've found life in. It's at least as plausible that life can hang on, sheltered in the smallest of places, as it can anywhere else. Micro organics often don't mind if you put them in a small place, with little sunlight, high or low heat, high or low oxygen, etc.

The biggest problem would be if the changes Mars underwent were too fundamentally anti-life for anything to survive whether it was in a cave or anywhere else.

In my opinion, we're going to find out on Mars that there are forms of microbes that can hang on in sedentary 'ready' state for a billion years, in extreme environments, just waiting to jump back to activity. Most of Mars will be barren, but there will be small pockets of microbes (most likely in a sheltered cave, under ice, or similar) in a form of extreme suspended animation.

Only 158 million of Facebook's 800x million users visit in any given month?

That's a dead link.

They can however get kick backs from open source integrators / specialists / consultants / etc. Companies ranging from IBM to Red Hat (a $10 billion corporation).

The notion that it inherently doesn't apply to open source is wrong. There are very large systems integrators in tech, and they don't care what software they install so long as their fees are big.

They're going to have to literally reinvent themselves. Not in the B.S. wishy-washy way they've proclaimed numerous times. But in the balls out risky reinvention where if you fail, the company potentially gets sold for peanuts. They're not going to get anywhere playing it safe at this point.

The smart phone market is still relatively wide open for new, not-yet-thought-of services. Yahoo could throw their focus strongly that direction and try to matter there, betting on the future.

Buying Netflix wouldn't be a terrible idea, they're cheap these days relatively speaking. They could bring a lot of cash to bear behind Netflix, which could be put to use beefing up their streaming selection.

There are a few potential acquisitions they could do to get pointed in the right direction in terms of products relevant to the future. Yelp and Foursquare for example. They need to be able to properly handle services they acquire however, and perhaps Mayer can do a better job of that than their previous leadership. They'd need to do something more like what Google did with YouTube.

Short of making a dramatic change, it's merely a game of milking old assets for cash and slowly fading away.

I didn't compare Armstrong to Mayer. I said the end result would be similar.

Apple is a once in a century example, good luck with that.

And besides, I didn't suggest nothing can be changed at Yahoo. I didn't say that at all.

I said it should be blown apart, and the stagnant 1990s products should go. Mayer should put her talents to work on a smaller core where growth can be achieved with new products.

Yahoo Finance? Yahoo Sports? Search? Yahoo Mail? 1998 era portals? There's no growth there. She might be able to revitalize energy into Flickr and adjust it to a smart phone world, that'd be one existing major product worth giving some attention to (for example).

Unless Mayer has something equivalent to the game changing PageRank approach to search, there's absolutely nothing she can do to improve Yahoo's search product. So what can she do with the existing product core exactly? Not much, stagnation is inherent to most of the product segments in question.

The real simple angle is: ok, what's the gorilla / whirlwind product that's going to revitalize Yahoo? Search? Not a chance. The content niche products like sports or finance? Nope. Web mail? Comeon. Classifieds & jobs? Nope, small potatoes. So what is it? To really grow a $20 billion company, you need to find billions in new profit. Mayer will only find that with new products. Unless you think she can take 1/4 of the search market back from Google or take a huge chunk of the rest of the web email market.

Yahoo needs a blue ocean change.

All the stagnant parts should be sold off for a huge amount of cash. And she should more or less start over and attack something new where Yahoo can own its segment and build a gorilla product with huge growth potential (instead of being 2nd or 3rd (etc) place in everything).

IBM under Lou Gerstner is one of the greatest turn around stories in business history.

"How Lou Gerstner Got IBM To Dance" http://www.forbes.com/2002/11/11/cx_ld_1112gerstner.html

Also, Michael Dell returning to his company has been a solid turn around in regards to profitability and improvement in product quality, both of which had languished under the former chief. It doesn't show in the stock valuation because of substantial PE compression, but Michael Dell has taken the company from losing money briefly and having some accounting scandals, to a solid level of profitability in the last few years.

Depends on if you think Mayer has some Steve Jobs magic in her.

This will play out much like Armstrong at AOL. Lots of flailing around, another attempt at altering Yahoo's trajectory, and ultimately a further devalued company (not specifically because of anything Mayer will do, but because there's nothing that can stop Yahoo's erosion).

At some point the conclusion needs to be reached that the core of Yahoo is the problem. The products that generate the bulk of their sales are at best stagnant with no growth left, and at worst are slowly collapsing. Once that's properly digested, the company then needs to be blown apart and liquidated to the highest bidders.

Maybe there's a smaller core that could be focused on as a source of innovation and growth, but it's definitely not what makes up the bulk of Yahoo's $20 billion market value. If the goal is to generate shareholder value, Mayer should focus on getting her hands around an engine of growth that she can really add value to; a smaller Yahoo where she can drive a few growth products (assuming those can be found first). So much of what Yahoo does is maintaining a flat-lined late 1990s group of products.

Extremely disingenuous. In fact it's a lot closer to flat out lying. The extension creators have 100 million users, not them.

They have 7,000 users (developers). They're basically taking credit for all of the work done on all of the extensions and claiming all of the users accordingly

Am I the only one that thinks Asus isn't getting enough credit for the Nexus 7?

I don't hire someone to brush my teeth for me at $65 / hour or $250 / hour etc.

The US Government disagrees with you.

"The cost of preparing and filing all business and personal tax returns is estimated to be $250 to $300 billion each year. According to a 2005 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the efficiency cost of the tax system—the output that is lost over and above the tax itself—is between $240 billion and $600 billion per year."

"The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is the audit, evaluation, and investigative arm of the United States Congress. It is part of the legislative branch of the United States government."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_preparation

A tax is a burden imposed upon me by an external force. In the case of taxes it's generally completely involuntary. I voluntarily brush my teeth. There's a very, very, very large difference between having a time and financial cost imposed upon you, and choosing to spend a few dollars and x hours per month on brushing my teeth.

If someone is imposing a tax upon you, it's properly their responsibility to make sure it's as efficient and as non-painful as possible (in terms of time to file, added costs, etc). The US Government has completely failed in that regard. It's almost universally agreed (aka bi-partisan) that we have a disaster of a tax code complication wise.

1.75 million accountants in the US. That's about 60% more than there are lawyers.

America doesn't have a tax base problem, it has a spending priority problem. The total government system in the US collects more in taxes than the entire German economy is worth. You'd think we could have nice roads given that. The problem is what that money is being spent on.

Our tax system is also extraordinarily complex, with thousands of taxes, and a tax code that the IRS doesn't even fully understand. Individual Americans spend $300+ billion (last I recall reading) just preparing their taxes each year.

Give me a hundred billion dollars in tax money to flush every year and I'll give you a Tesla-like result once every decade. What, you wouldn't consider that a stellar return on investment?

It's always tragic when the profit motive gets in the way of making good products that people want to use. Like in the case of Apple and the way it has made it impossible for them to make great products. Oh wait.

FB chat messages don't have to be saved either.

To take over something like Digg? Everything costs.

Legal costs. Infrastructure costs. Clearing out employees and transitioning with new employees to take over and operate it. New product development to change the product into whatever they have in mind.

It's ridiculously easy to blow $500k doing nothing in tech when salaries run $100k with total compensation. And that's just the employee costs.

It'll cost Betaworks several million dollars to get Digg the way they want it, all in, including the purchase price.

Absolutely agree. Digg should be run by 3 to 5 people tops at its current size.

It'll still cost more than $500k to transition the service to whatever it is they have in mind. It'll probably cost more than $500k just to trim Digg down to size.

I'd wager they spent it. Crunchbase reports they had 60 employees at some update in the past, so it was probably higher than that at the peak. 60 employees alone probably cost them $6 to $8 million per year depending on all the perks. You could easily vaporize $25 to $35 million over four years in San Francisco on 60 employees.

But keep in mind that $45 million wasn't raised in the past four years.

On 9/08 they raised $28.7 million, and then another $5 million on 7/11. So they've raised $33.7m over the last four years.