
Ask PG: What's your take on the Yahoo! situation? - stevenboudreau
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?
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pg
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.

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

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

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sutro
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.

~~~
pg
A glass of prune juice or a nice marshmallow salad.

~~~
kirubakaran
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) :-)

~~~
pg
we invited you; it's a mistaken metaphor; ff6600

~~~
as
That's always been my favorite color. I feel so validated.

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startingup
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.

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

~~~
SwellJoe
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.

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

~~~
SwellJoe
I must be new here. I've never seen that happen.

~~~
byrneseyeview
Go to your profile, and change 'showdead' to 'yes'.

~~~
SwellJoe
It sounds confusing. I think I'll leave it alone.

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

~~~
e1ven
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.

~~~
andrewf
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)

