
Oil Traders May Be the Only Ones Who Want Yahoo to Survive - justinv
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-01/oil-traders-may-be-the-only-people-who-want-yahoo-to-thrive
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sputknick
Sounds like an opportunity for someone to buy yahoo messenger, make it work
the way the oil industry wants it, and sell it to them as an industry specific
chat service. No need to bring the rest of Yahoo along for the ride.

~~~
profeta
you forgot they are running a multi trillion dollar industry on free-as-in-
beer software.

I doubt they would pay $5 per user. or even a <your yearly salary> year flat
fee.

and since they will not pay, you will have to run it on ads. And supporting
online/mobile offerings (that do not have their requirement of local
client/local logs) will always give you more money.

it is a lose/lose situation.

~~~
curun1r
No need to make them pay or support it with ads. Keep offering it to them for
free and make a killing front-running them on commodities trades. Or just
trade regular stocks since the whole market seems to move based on the crude
prices. Either way, it should be pretty easy for a hedge fund to make way more
money from eavesdropping than it costs to run the service.

It would be a good way to teach an industry with plenty of money the virtue of
paying for mission-critical services. Given that the industry runs on a
service like Yahoo's, it's a pretty good bet that you could slip an innocuous
looking change to the privacy policy past them.

~~~
intended
While tech will eventually reach there, today is not the day that deceit
becomes an acceptable business plan.

~~~
Finnucane
Yeah, this is the oil business, not the finance industry. Way more honorable.

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IVDV
When an industry is so reliant on one service, it's very difficult to shift an
entire industry to a new platform. Segmentation is a real thing.

A good example I'm familiar with is within electronic sports (competitive
video-games): almost every executive, player, personality, etc has been using
Skype since ~2010. Unfortunately, Skype has a large number of security
vulnerabilities and users can be subjected by DDOS attacks- which is
especially important if such an attack impacts their performance in a game, or
interrupts a livestream. Even though there are, arguably, better products
being created that serve the same purpose as Skype and that don't fall victim
to this problem (Discord, Slack), those within the industry don't want to
segment themselves from everyone else.

~~~
huac
What you're thinking of is product lock-in, not segmentation.

Besides, many superior solutions exist and have for a long time: TeamSpeak,
Ventrilo, Mumble. Skype is laggy, buggy, and high memory overhead, without
mentioning the DDOS risk (exposes IP).

~~~
IVDV
Thanks for the correction.

Truthfully I would not consider TeamSpeak, Ventrillo, or Mumble as a superior
solution. The benefit of Skype has always been that it dod not require joining
more than one server. In the article example, consider the line about
individuals having their Yahoo username on their badge.

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tchitra
Doesn't this article feel like it was written for Yahoo's benefit? Since they
have a blinded bidding process (See [1]), it seems as if this article could
help drum up higher bids. Maybe Yahoo is the anonymous source that provided
the "hot tip" about commodity traders on Yahoo Messenger.

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-20/yahoo-
bid...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-20/yahoo-bids-and-
stock-lending)

~~~
lordnacho
I don't know about the timing, but I have a relative in the industry and he
told me it's actually the case. Everyone and their mom is on Yahoo chat when
it comes to commodities.

~~~
saiya-jin
confirming, ex-gf who is commodity trader (coal, energy and oil lately)
mentioned yahoo chat all the time. most of them are not very tech-savvy, so
they are happy with it as long as it works

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smegel
> In Geneva, the epicenter of Switzerland’s $21 billion commodity-trading
> industry, accounting for about one-third of the world’s daily oil
> transactions

That's pretty impressive for a country that has never even been visited by an
oil tanker.

~~~
rqebmm
I'm sure it has nothing to do with Switzerland's extremely strong financial
privacy laws.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _Switzerland 's extremely strong financial privacy laws_

We are also subject to relatively draconian surveillance [1].

[1] [https://www.bestvpn.com/blog/30241/switzerland-passes-
severe...](https://www.bestvpn.com/blog/30241/switzerland-passes-severe-new-
surveillance-laws/)

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meric
It sounds like Yahoo has wasted one opportunity after another.

Yahoo clearly did not know why the oil industry is using Yahoo Messenger.
Instead of doubling down and building a product for that market, they build a
replacement product that's going to be detached from the needs of its users.

~~~
zump
You think Yahoo would release Yahoo Oil Messenger (tm)?

~~~
meric
I have no idea what harbourmasters and oil traders do. But pretend
harbourmasters look at maps and use the radio a lot, and oil traders like to
look at positions of oil tankers, and charts of oil futures prices, a Yahoo
Oil Messenger that lets users embed maps with positions of ships, charts of
commodity prices within the conversation itself, view log of recorded radio
transmissions, might be very useful. If Slack is worth $3.8 billion, I'd say a
Yahoo Oil Messenger could be a billion dollar business, building an industry
specific communications product.

It's like Yahoo had all these tenements for the past decade and it's only when
the tenements are expiring they finally found out there's bonanza of gold
beneath, but it's way too late to do anything about it. With the new Yahoo
chat product, it's like they registered some tenements next to their present
ones and say something like "hey we got something nearby so it'll be alright."

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27182818284
I know someone in the oil industry and was surprised by this as well, but it
is absolutely true. They really do use Yahoo a lot.

When I asked why they haven't switched, I was given a response similar to what
the articles says, "that all regulatory and internal controls are addressed"

I believe natural gas communication is still done by AIM a lot.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _natural gas communication is still done by AIM a lot_

Lots of U.S. securities trading happens over AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). When
I traded equity derivatives, I'd have three communication tools open: internal
IM, Bloomberg chat and AIM.

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neutralhogan
They aren't the only ones who want Yahoo to survive. There are tens of people
at Yahoo that want them to survive, too.

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javiramos
Why didn't Yahoo focus on further developing businesses around these services
(Finance, Fantasy etc.) that people love?

~~~
benkomen
Yahoo has a huge number of services that remained popular with different
groups of people well after they should have gone to dot.com hell - yahoo
groups,answers, finance etc. I attribute their neglect to poor management and
misplaced priorities. Yahoo could have been quora, instagram, pinterest etc.
even well after those upstarts arrived on the scene.

~~~
gaius
Yahoo is more interested in the colour palette of its apps, than who its users
are. No effective leadership is the problem.

------
gyardley
Once everyone in an industry starts using a particular platform to do
business, switching is very very hard.

The porn industry still uses ICQ.

~~~
angry-hacker
Is there a reason or just like with oil it happened? Do you happen to work in
the industry?

~~~
gyardley
No, I don't work in the industry - but I have an acquaintance, and if I want
to message him, he's rarely on anything but ICQ.

As far as I know it's just 'tradition', like the oil industry - once ICQ hit
critical mass it became the de facto standard.

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jcdavis
A lot of big tech companies also use Yahoo chat. Salesforce did as late as
2012 when I left, with 1k+ people in the eng org. (No idea if they still do).

Seemed crazy at the same, still does now too

~~~
WiseWeasel
Doubtful; Yahoo stopped supporting OS X in the last couple years with the
official YIM client, and the service is completely unreliable on the platform
with 3rd party clients, with messages randomly failing to be delivered. Pretty
much any company with non-Windows users has been forced to migrate away,
including my workplace (thank Jebus).

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tomc1985
And Yahoo Messenger is stillll waay better than Slack

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DaOne256
They should start using XMPP/Jabber. At the beginning with a Yahoo-Transport
to be compatible with the people that are slower to switch:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#Connecting_to_other_proto...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#Connecting_to_other_protocols)

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havetocharge
Ironically, if all these traders paid for the app, they might not have been
scrambling now to find a replacement.

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powera
Because they use Yahoo! Messenger, not because it will impact the oil market
in any other way.

~~~
twinkletwinkle
Yeah I was disappointed when there wasn't some complicated economic phenomenon
involved. They just all use one of Yahoo's products.

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Hydraulix989
One thing Yahoo has is an excellent university recruiting program with
bombastic pampering, puzzle challenges, and hackathons. Seeing what other
companies also have extremely hyped up university recruitment programs, I
almost treat it now as a negative signal for a company's future success. I
suppose the harder you have to try to win graduates' hearts, the less
appealing you are to work for, and consequently, the worse off of a company
you are going to be without the right kind of talent on staff going forward.

------
tim333
The oil traders could move to WhatsApp or somesuch but I'd be kind of sad if
they went. The other day I was trying to get free historical stock data via an
API and Yahoo Finance was about the only thing that did it ok.

Yahoo could assure their financial future by going massively long oil futures
and then putting out false messages about Saudi Arabia having been nuked by
ISIS or some such. A tad illegal perhaps but an offshoot in some ill policed
part of the world could do it.

~~~
MrMullen
Can you record your conversations (I think you can)? But most importantly, can
you use WhatsApp without a cell phone number? It has to be tied to your email
address and not a cell phone.

~~~
meric
The recorded conversations are gone when you switch devices. They are saved
locally and not on the server.

~~~
dasil003
This sort of blew my mind when I discovered it since I often travel with a
second phone and realized to my horror that I could not be logged into the
same whatsapp from two phones. Is this the promise of a mobile-first app
world?

~~~
mahyarm
It's the side effect of running a very learn architecture. It also has a side
effect of not being able to secretly subpoena your chat history after the fact
too. Now with E2E encryption they can't even do that easily.

------
cphoover
Anybody want to create a chat app tailored to securities trading? Seems like
there is a market demand for an unobtrusive messaging app in this space.

~~~
rwc
You mean Symphony? [https://symphony.com/](https://symphony.com/)

[https://next.ft.com/content/111e433c-5b8c-11e5-9846-de406ccb...](https://next.ft.com/content/111e433c-5b8c-11e5-9846-de406ccb37f2)

------
Apocryphon
Isn't this superficially similar to the Westgroup storyline in season 2 of
Halt and Catch Fire?

------
kchoudhu
Why the hell aren't these chuckleheads on Bloomberg where they belong?

~~~
FireBeyond
"Everyone, including harbormasters and terminal operators"

Hard to see a harbormaster with a Bloomberg terminal.

~~~
kchoudhu
Does the same pathology apply in other commodity markets as well?

~~~
leroy_masochist
My understanding is that it does for anything that comes in bulk by boat.
Copper, met coal, etc.

~~~
kchoudhu
Out of genuine curiosity: how often are traders taking physical delivery?
Don't they just roll contracts forward? Why do they even care what the
(figurative) harbormaster is doing/saying?

I absolutely see the reason for the ops side to be on YIM. But the traders? At
the end of the day, in well regulated markets, that's just asking for trouble
when the regulators come calling.

~~~
crdb
If they're talking about traders "in Geneva", they're talking about physical
traders. Can't speak for oil which we didn't trade but for ags and metals, you
would take delivery since it's your business (getting stuff from A to B).

Speculation on price is not done by taking paper positions in one direction,
but by limiting or increasing your paper hedge, aka trading the "basis" or
margin between your physical and your paper.

The physical side requires a fair amount of "RTFC" ("caring what the
harbormaster is saying") and being aware of operations.

As an example we were given in training, one of our grains trader went to
inspect a ship before loading it with grain, and the local guy thought
something was dodgy so he closed the doors, and shone his torch at the walls.
Thousands of "stars" blinked back at them. Turns out the ship had been used
recently to carry broken glass, which obviously made it highly unsuitable for
grains.

But the more common stuff is e.g. overloading the ship on one side so that it
leans on the side you know the controller will measure the load, or playing
with the percentage admixture (basically dead beasts and dirt) to net yourself
a bit more margin.

~~~
leroy_masochist
What he said.

These are physical traders -- they actually have a heavy workload in terms of
communicating with everyone associated with delivery.

Boat captains, harbormasters, mine supervisors, you name it.

------
pbreit
This article seems ridiculous both because Yahoo messenger isn't going
anywhere. And if it did, moving to another service would be a small hiccup.

~~~
test_log_5
I don't believe the article to be ridiculous at all.

I work in physical trading and use yahoo on a daily basis to trade swaps,
execute physical deals, and chat with customers. If yahoo were to drop support
unexpectedly, there would be a pretty large problem.

We have already been briefed by our IT departments that we are moving to
another service with the front end being one of the following - IceChat(from
the ICE exchange), Reuters, Bloomberg, Trillian. Although Yahoo will be the
back-end in protocol sense, I believe that will be phased out once the trade
migrates to another service.

It's a bigger problem than most imagine and can't be executed at a drop of a
hat due to legal compliance in logging all communications in the case
something went awry or other similar situations.

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zump
What's the salary of the oil trader?

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peterkshultz
If Yahoo goes under, perhaps they can open-source pieces of their product
line.

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anonymous7777
This is insane. Why does guy who digs a hole and sell's oil need to care about
high tech?!

~~~
pjc50
Oil industry is extremely high-tech.

~~~
oh_sigh
Nah, don't you know that the oil industry is just digging holes. Real high-
tech is working on hard problems like how to deliver grilled cheese sandwiches

~~~
Aloha
Artisanal, organic, locally sourced, (and optionally) vegan and gluten free
grilled cheese sandwiches.

~~~
bzbarsky
Organic and gluten free oil should not be too hard. Locally sourced is pretty
location-dependent. Artisanal may take more work; whether one considers
petroleum vegan is an interesting philosophical question.

I sense a business opportunity here; perhaps artisanal, organic, locally
sourced oil sandwiches?

~~~
pjc50
Drill an artesian well and hope that nobody notices the spelling?

~~~
Aloha
can confirm; am writing business plan and looking for seed funding ;-D.

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draw_down
They can afford to build a messaging tool. Come on.

~~~
tekklloneer
Flinging money at the network effect is a great way to lose money.

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spelunker
This article seems to be making a mountain out of a molehill. Just use one of
the competing, recordable chat services if Yahoo! Messenger disappears?

~~~
mark-r
But which one? It's all about the network effects. And losing the address
you've had for 15 years isn't a trivial thing either.

