I have a Yahoo userid. I bet you do too. I wonder how many of those there are, in total? I wonder what that number divided by $44,600,000,000 is?
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I have a Yahoo userid. I bet you do too. I wonder how many of those there are, in total? I wonder what that number divided by $44,600,000,000 is?
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Pedro (Feb 01 2008, at 10:33)
I have little (see: no) interest in having a Microsoft ID and have Yahoo taken over by M$. The conversation that happened earlier at work today about this was just that - every web entity that Microsoft seems to put their hands turns to their usual crap. I'm afraid it's going to be like their other acquisitions: a need/desire to incorporate their MSN passport stuff, convert the system to being fully .NET code, then incorporate the existing server infrastructure with their own, then slow things down by X%. I only use yahoo for Flickr, but I think I might need/want to start looking elsewhere for that. Ugh.
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From: James Snell (Feb 01 2008, at 10:34)
I have a flickr account. If the deal goes through, I'm likely going to just make sure I have backups of all the photos I have there then close the account. I can just as easily just upload the photos to my personal site.
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From: Guillermo Esteves (Feb 01 2008, at 10:37)
One of the "fun facts" that randomly pops upat Yahoo!'s press room page is that supposedly there are the number of Yahoo! Mail users is twice the population of Mexico. By that estimate, the answer would be about $205 per user.
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From: Marcos (Feb 01 2008, at 11:23)
They will probably keep the code base, because it's too huge for even them to digest and rewrite. Hopefully better support for PHP in Windows-based stacks will come from it.
To answer the original question, we're probably talking about a little over one hundred per active user account, certainly cheaper than the deal with Facebook.
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From: Aristotle Pagaltzis (Feb 01 2008, at 11:23)
I’m already thinking about what to do about my del.icio.us account. If the MSFT deal goes through, I’m a goner.
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From: Geoffrey Sneddon (Feb 01 2008, at 12:05)
Marcos, Hotmail originally was on FreeBSD (4?) servers, so I think it is safe to assume that that wasn't written in ASP (yet alone .NET, seeming that didn't exist yet), but was totally re-written.
Funny story of trying to move servers over to NT 4.0 from FreeBSD and them being unable to cope with the load, so having to revert back to FreeBSD. Eventually moved to Windows 2000.
It's likely that over time everything would be totally rewritten, and probably become absolutely rubbish in the process.
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From: Lucian Pintilie (Feb 01 2008, at 12:25)
"I have a Yahoo userid. I bet you do too." Not anymore. My user account was hijacked a while ago - how, why? I don't know. Whatever I've tried, nothing worked in getting it back. And I'm not the only one.
I believe it's still "Google vs. the rest of the world." It always was for the last years. It's just that the rest of the world becomes smaller.
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From: David Hall (Feb 01 2008, at 13:29)
less than $100... Yahoo better not take this deal. I'd be sad.
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From: Janne (Feb 01 2008, at 15:40)
At 42Bil, this is more than twice Microsoft's fabled cash horde. They will become a "leveraged" company; a business in debt. Most businesses are, of course, but Microsoft has not, until now, and having that pile of money as a backstop has been one reason they've been able to sustain money-losing divisions for so long.
And what they are doing is trying to shore up a foundering business segment by buying a competitor - that is also adrift. It doesn't have to end badly, but the track record of such acquisitions is pretty poor.
So, either the Yahoo business slowly implodes, in which case it's time to find a replacement for my Flickr account; or it becomes a success in which case I'll need to look into finding a replacement.
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From: Noah Slater (Feb 01 2008, at 16:19)
Total users divided by business value gives the number users bought per dollar. Perhaps a more interesting figure would be how many dollars were spent per user. Heh.
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From: James W (Feb 01 2008, at 22:48)
I only have a Yahoo ID because of signing up to complain about Flickr going with Yahoo IDs, funnily enough.
(I canceled my Pro account when that happened).
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From: Marius Mathiesen (Feb 02 2008, at 03:37)
Now, given that Flickr has an API, how long will it take until somebody offers the possibility of entering your Flickr username and then importing all your photos, comments and profile stuff into another service?
One click and you're out...
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From: Walter (Feb 03 2008, at 21:48)
i just hosed my yahoo email account...it was ful of spam and nothing else. will cease using flickr as i am sure another service will be coming soon.... so sad to see yahoo being eaten up.
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From: Anwalt Walter (Feb 05 2008, at 04:17)
It's our luck that most MS products are shoddy. The only thing they are good in is marketing. So yahoo will go the way of all MS acquisition :: downhill.
The internet remains the biggest challenge for MS - they can't make a bundled version for free, they can't destroy it and the can't buy it.
It's way over time that MS re-thinks it's strategy for the future.
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From: David Simmons (Feb 05 2008, at 13:40)
I agree. I had a hotmail account when M$ bought them. It went to hell in a handbasket, and I deleted the account. I cannot see M$ *not* putting their heavy hand all over Yahoo as well, and shoving it down the toilet in the process.
My Flickr account will be deleted in favor of SmugMug (something I was considering anyway).
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From: Marcos (Feb 06 2008, at 05:05)
I turned out I was an order of magnitude wrong due to the huge overlap in user bases:
http://blog.compete.com/2008/02/01/microsoft-yahoo-merger-valuation-impact/
Since many of these accounts are from people that chose Yahoo because it wasn't Microsoft, the final $/user figure will probably be even higher, maybe $2000.
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