Verizon Admits Defeat With $4.6 Billion AOL-Yahoo Writedown (bloomberg.com) 100
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Verizon is conceding defeat on its crusade to turn a patchwork of dot-com-era businesses into a thriving online operation. The wireless carrier slashed the value of its AOL and Yahoo acquisitions by $4.6 billion, an acknowledgment that tough competition for digital advertising is leading to shortfalls in revenue and profit. The move will erase almost half the value of the division it had been calling Oath, which houses AOL, Yahoo and other businesses like the Huffington Post. The revision of the Oath division's accounting leaves its goodwill balance -- a measure of the intangible value of an acquisition -- at about $200 million, Verizon said in a filing Tuesday. The unit still has about $5 billion of assets remaining. Verizon also announced yesterday that 10,400 employees are taking buyouts to leave the company. The cuts are "part of an effort to trim the telecom giant's workforce ahead of its push toward 5G," TechCrunch reported.
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Re: Should have been written down to zero dollars (Score:4, Insightful)
During an electrical outage landline phones still work. They're self powered.
They are not self powered. They are powered by the telco exchange switch which is also on battery back up should they lose power. If you have even a modest Internet set up you should have the modem, router, and switch on UPS. Put the Ooma on that UPS and your phone works as long as the internet does. Even the telco exchange will eventually go down unless they have a generator.
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I've worked with my fair share of telco as well. AFAIK the substation's generators will not help the VRAD [wikipedia.org] once its battery packs are depleted. I'd be happy to be educated if this is not the case. As for how cablecos do it...as cheap as possible and still avoid a class action lawsuit. After TS Allison [wikipedia.org] my next door neighbor who had Comcast was without service for six months! And we weren't even in a flooded area. Can't say enough bad things about cable.
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They are not self powered. They are powered by the telco exchange switch which is also on battery back up should they lose power. If you have even a modest Internet set up you should have the modem, router, and switch on UPS. Put the Ooma on that UPS and your phone works as long as the internet does. Even the telco exchange will eventually go down unless they have a generator.
Both the FTTN DSL and cable ISPs where I am fail during power outages even though my modem and local network are completely backed up which is especially annoying because my POTs phone connection comes through the modem.
When I had DSL over POTs, then the self powered POTs phone still worked.
I assume the FCC regulation is that services which are required for POTs are suppose to be backed up but who wants to change the batteries in the cabinets every year? U-Verse had a bunch of cabinet fires when it was fir
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How many out of the money puts did you buy?
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How many out of the money puts did you buy?
I'm not sure how to answer that. Mostly because I'm not sure what you're asking.
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An out of the money put option is (more or less) a bet that a company will lose value. If you know a company is going to tank and you can point to publicly available information that told you that, you're golden.
An out of the money put will allow you to sell the stock at a 'strike price' (below the current price...'out of the money') at some future date. You pay a premium up front for that. That premium is calculated using 'bookie methods'.
Short answer: Legal high odds gambling on stock prices with a f
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If you do it right, it's not gambling. But you need to pass a test (proving you understand what you are doing) and have a couple of thousand dollar balance with your broker.
Keeps the riffraff from using the option market as a lottery, which might undercut the state run tax on people bad at math.
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It's called 5G they get to be ISP's and content creators if they can get the government to foot most of the $11 Trillion price tag to blanket the USA in massive MIMO towers.
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Yeah who couldn't see that a bunch of zombie corpses were worthless? Oh wait, anyone with half a brain did.
I wouldn't say worthless. You have a decade's old company that has millions of active email addresses. That's a captive audience you can advertise to. AOL/Time Warner biggest mistake was getting rid of their chat service. That is what was keeping them alive.
AOL already had created communities that could be accessed by keywords. If those were standardized a bit the platform could have have created and AOL Timeline. So you had AOL Groups. You had an AOL Messenger. Restrict who could see or send you messa
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I wouldn't say worthless. You have a decade's old company that has millions of active email addresses. That's a captive audience you can advertise to. AOL/Time Warner biggest mistake was getting rid of their chat service. That is what was keeping them alive.
AOL already had created communities that could be accessed by keywords. If those were standardized a bit the platform could have have created and AOL Timeline. So you had AOL Groups. You had an AOL Messenger. Restrict who could see or send you messages and you would have had AOL Facebook.
Yahoo was destroying their chat services before they were purchased. It was big talk in the groups I participated in and they all moved to alternates many of which specifically implemented ways to transfer the contents off.
Really? (Score:2)
Oath, which houses AOL, Yahoo and other businesses like the Huffington Post ... [has a $4.6 Billion Writedown.]
Oath? More like Ooof.
.*? *I* didn't know that. But I can't lose them -- how will I know what my default position is on anything? (BTW, My default position is exactly 180 degrees from them. If they say the Earth is round I'm immediately starting out a Flat Earther. And that's only when I hear about them from echos.)
And V now owns the Huffington
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I don't know a lot about Oath, but I have noticed that since they bought out Engadget the site is inaccessible a fair bit of the time. Its preferred method of falling-over seems to be redirecting any story link to a login screen - was like that for days, until just recently (and this wasn't the first time).
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Engadget's still around?
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It's amazing how so many people are proud to be a modern-day know-nothing.
Why did they buy HuffPo? (Score:1)
It's essentially a website that posts links to real news and summarizes them with a liberal slant. Leftist version of Breitbart
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I'm surprised they even need staff at any of these places. It seems like you could train a bot to trot out the same old tal
Re:Why did they buy HuffPo? (Score:4, Informative)
Leftist version of Breitbart
Literally. Huffington Post was co-founded by Ariana Huffington and ... Andrew Breitbart.
what they were thinking? (Score:2)
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The smart money would've been allowing Microsoft to buy Yahoo. Although, Verizon did way over pay on the zombie corpse. Jerry Yang was quite the idiot.
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The write-down still leaves it valued at around $5 billion. That's still more than the multiplier you state.
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Tumblr (Score:5, Interesting)
Seems like they might actually be underselling(?) the loss?
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i am sure there is always the next year writedowns
That was fast (Score:2)
Wasn't it just last year VZ completed their deal? And does anyone know anyone who thought it was a smart thing to do? Cuz I sure don't, everyone I talked to said VZ were idiots.
Makes one wonder what goes on in those CXX suites while the worker bees wonder who will lose their jobs.
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The real idiots were Jerry Yang and company who turned down Steve Ballmer's offer of tens of billions to buy Yahoo. They could've bilked so much more out of Microsoft and Verizon ended up paying.
Re:That was fast (Score:4, Informative)
The real idiots were Jerry Yang and company who turned down Steve Ballmer's offer of tens of billions to buy Yahoo.
Microsoft offered Yahoo $44.6B. They later sold out to Verizon for $4.8B. Now they are worth $0.2B.
After Jerry rejected the deal and Microsoft walked away, many people wondered what Jerry's plan was. It turned out that he had no plan, no ideas, nothing. The company just continued to spiral the drain.
At least Jerry lost his job for that blunder.
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At least Jerry lost his job for that blunder.
Unfortunately, so did thousands of his subordinates.
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Microsoft offered Yahoo $44.6B. They later sold out to Verizon for $4.8B. [That's a delta of "only" $40B, enough for most people to notice.]
Jesus. That's got to look great on a resume.
Interview: "And what was do you think was your greatest accomplishment at your last company?" "Well, I sold the entire company for nearly $5B dollars."
"Nice. And your greatest failure?" "(Sweating) Ummm, I didn't order comfy enough chairs for everyone."
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But Microsoft may have gone bankrupt and today wouldnt be making contributions to Linux kernel and becoming an open source company.
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Tim Armstrong. I don't remember where I read the article, I believe it was when he announced his resignation, but his goal/hope was for Verizon to spin off Oath into a separate company after the merger of AOL & Yahoo, essentially turning it into a massive media company to compete with others like Google. Verizon didn't though, hence his resignation at the end of the year.
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I know some people who thought it was a great idea and they were right. Of course, they owned AOL stock at the time...
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That was a really great deal ..... for AOL shareholders. No so much for anyone else.
Here's my "Oath" (Score:2)
Fucking Brilliant!
"Stupid" is making the same mistake 3+ times (Score:3, Interesting)
Mergers of larger tech-related companies seem to always fail. Can anyone name a success in the last 2 decades?
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Next + Apple?
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Although that technically is just passed two decades ago, I guess.
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Next arguably wasn't "big". They pretty much had one product. Big companies typically have hundreds of products. And the Next computer was a flop. If there was any net benefit, it was that Steve got a crew he knew and helped pick to work for Apple, and possibly some OS-related IP.
Okay, I'll compromise and give that example half a credit.
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Apple had tried and failed twice to write their own decent OS.
They bought Next after being asked to pay an insane price for Bee. Bee got a big old finger instead. Like Yahoo turning down MS, Bee did an epic fail.
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There was more net benefit than you mention. They went from being a dying company to one that has hundreds of billions in cash and jostles for the highest-valued company in the world.
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That's probably because Steve Jobs became the CEO, not because of Next itself.
Re: "Stupid" is making the same mistake 3+ times (Score:2)
Most devices at Apple share the shared heritage of the original MacOS and OpenStep. MacOS as we know today was essentially a reskined version of OpenStep. The OS at the core of the iPhone, the Apple Watch and MacOS are all based on what came from NeXT. Without that the Mac would be dead.
Yes Steve Jobs being CEO was certainly important, but so too was the software he brought with him.
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We don't know that. That's mere speculation. Perhaps Apple would borrow even more Unix & OSS if Next not around.
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We don't know that. That's mere speculation. Perhaps Apple would borrow even more Unix & OSS if Next not around.
It is speculation, but the next best alternative was BeOS and from what I know of it, it didn't seem like a great option. The Unix underpinnings of OpenStep was a very real strength and combining that with a generally good UI and top level stack was another strength. Adding Steve Jobs into the mix further helped cement the advantages. I am not convinced that Jean-Louis Gassée would have been the right person for the job?
Developing an operating system is hard. Developing a great operating system takes m
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Technically, yes, in terms of profits. But it's because those co's get oligopolier when they merge, not better. They essentially were buying away competition. You wouldn't call them "better" after, would you?
When DirectTV announced they had Internet available in our area, I was ready to jump at the chance because the other 2 ISP/cable co's suck eggs bigly. Then I read about the merger, and said un-family-oriented words.
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Apple is doing pretty good selling rebadged NextStep computers.
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That was more than two decades ago.
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It was 21 years ago. You make it sound like it was 40 years ago b
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Well, if we exclude the content consolidation driven by the desire to own the streaming market, e..g Disney/Fox, as "non-tech-related", we are still left with of choices:
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I'd argue most of those are not "big", but rather purchased specialists. Most of MS-Office and VB were from purchased smallish companies who mode the original software titles, for example.
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Let me rework the last sentence: Most of MS-Office and MS Visual Basic came from Microsoft purchasing specific software titles and sometimes the entire company that made them. They were small companies, which doesn't fit my original criteria.
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If you don't think Activision/Blizzard was big enough, I'm not sure your sense of scale. And, frankly, I'm not sure what would qualify. AOL/TimeWarner wasn't two tech companies. Maybe Verizion/Yahoo? I mean, Google/DoubleClick were two huge companies at the time, although both are much smaller than what Alphabet is now.
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They have to have known Yahoo was worthless (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:They have to have known Yahoo was worthless (Score:4, Insightful)
a defeat? No, a victory for accounting! (Score:1)
With this big write off, Verizon might not be paying any taxes, yet again! [americansf...irness.org]