

Ballmer Speaks, Yahoo’s Market Cap Jumps More Than $3 Billion - qhoxie
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/16/ballmer-speaks-yahoos-market-cap-jumps-more-than-1-billion/

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fallentimes
Am I the only who thinks Yahoo is going to be in excellent shape after they
trim down and start focusing on what they're good at?

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zandorg
My Mother uses Yahoo for mail and news, I use Geocities for a few small
webpages. I think they're a great company with the best PhD-to-riches story
ever from the 2 founders Jerry and David. I think their founding story is even
better than Google, even if their market cap is a fraction of that.

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hhm
What's so interesting about Jerry and David's story? I remember to have found
what I read about it quite uninteresting, so maybe I lost something.

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zandorg
I think it's because they turned a website list into a 60 billion dollar
company in about 5 years. And one investor in the early days was Masayoshi
Son, and he was once the second richest person in the world in 1999.

And that advert in the film Inspector Gadget.

It's not worth a corporate biography book, I admit.

[Edit] And after the dotcom crash, their market cap (in 2006/2007) was just
half of its peak, quite impressive. And they never chickened out and bought,
say, Disney. They stuck to their guns.

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13ren
What's the PhD part? What I like about Google's story is the PhD-technology-
research that went into it (tho Woz wasn't a PhD student, I'd put the Apple
story in a similar category).

Creating a $60B co from nothing is an astonishing achievement - but this one
sounds like a business victory, not a technology victory. Although cool++,
it's not a PhD-to-riches story - they just happened to be PhD students.

<http://docs.yahoo.com/info/misc/history.html> "Before long they were spending
more time on their home-brewed lists of favorite links than on their doctoral
dissertations."

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hhm
May I also ask a language-related question. Why are you saying "story" in all
these posts, when you are talking about a true story? I thought the word
"history" was to be used in those cases, but I think there is a subtler
difference between story/history than I previously thought (I thought:
story=fiction, history=non-fiction). Could anybody please give me a pointer on
this?

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zandorg
Sorry, story is used in British English (from my experience) to mean a
description of an event or a sequence of events, fictional or not.

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hhm
Thank you very much! I'm glad to know this now.

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iigs
Every time MS nods at Yahoo the stock rises X%, and when the deal is obviously
not going to happen it drops > X%. This is a really interesting way of
battering your competition.

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mtw
I'd look in my own backyard if I were Balllmer. dump everything that is
average (msn, vista, live, etc.) and come up with brand new products, from
scratch

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jdunck
This is why you're not in charge of MS. They make tons of money on their
existing, if problematic, products.

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cstejerean
Not for long they won't.

Just in the consumer space right now they're fighting Google and Yahoo in web,
Sony and Nintendo in gaming, Apple in mp3, Android/IPhone in smartphones.

Plus most of their money comes from lucrative deals with computer
manufacturers. Sooner or later Dell, etc will realize that Apple is eating at
their market share and Vista isn't helping and they'll start reconsidering
their agreements with MS (and perhaps consider investing in customized
versions of Linux)

All while Google Apps is starting to compete with their Office/Exchange
offering on the low end and IBM and Sun are getting ready to step in at the
high end with cross platform solutions. I'm curious at how MS is going to turn
the situation around.

