So Verizon is buying the heart of old Yahoo! I include the exclamation point because it was always there in the Yahoo! we knew back when the Internet was young. $4.83 billion in cash is a lot of cash, but for Verizon it’s a way of buying into the future while buying what to many of us seems to be the past. So let’s get the business part out of the way: Verizon can see Yahoo! as a bargain because Yahoo! has nearly always been more profitable on a gross margin basis than Verizon, a phone company. Even Yahoo! in decline will pull Verizon up. But that’s not why I’m writing […]
Is anyone at Yahoo! paying attention? Probably not.
2011 prediction #6: Yahoo barfs
This is a sad one. Venerable Yahoo, the original web portal, is in such trouble that it doesn’t know what to do. So Yahoo will this year begin tearing itself apart.
This will be presented as a semblance of a strategy but I doubt that’s true. More likely it will be the company attempting to maintain or even increase earnings by selling its seed corn. So look for Yahoo to dispose of its huge assets in China, to sell the part that it owns of Yahoo Japan, and to spin-off photo-sharing site Flickr as a separate company.
It will make the stock look great… for awhile.
