Yahoo Discussing Sale of Internet Business (bloomberg.com) 129
An anonymous reader writes: According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal (paywalled), Yahoo!'s board of directors is considering the sale of their internet business in a series of meetings starting today. "Growing concerns around Chief Executive Marissa Mayer's lack of progress turning around Yahoo and an exodus of top executives have increased pressure on the company's board to consider her future and alternatives to her turnaround attempt, now in its fourth year. ... Much of the value of Yahoo's $31 billion market capitalization is tied up in two large Asian assets, Alibaba and Yahoo Japan. Its 15% stake in Alibaba is now worth about $32 billion, and its 35% stake in Yahoo Japan is now worth about $8.5 billion. Yahoo's cash and short-term investments totaled $5.9 billion at the end of the third quarter. That would mean investors are valuing Yahoo's core business at less than zero if the Asian assets were spun out tax-free."
Re:Yahoo has sucked for years and just wont change (Score:5, Insightful)
Yahoo should get out of Internet business long time ago
Yahoo was one of the many hundreds of Internet-related 'e-entity' jumping on the Net bandwagon, but unfortunately Yahoo did / does not seem to know what they want to do
When people offered webmail services (like hotmail, which was gobbled up by Microsoft) Yahoo started their own yahoo mail
Altavista offered search engine Yahoo also offer search engine
When Twocow offered file gathering / downloading service Yahoo followed suit ...
... et cetera
... et cetera
Even today Yahoo does not have a focus
It has a lab, and the lab people created a lot of neat and very useful stuffs ... and at the end, Yahoo kill almost all of those neat services
It wants to be like Google, except it doesn't know how to focus on selling ad spaces
The best Yahoo can do now is to sell all its assets, gather up all the money and then distribute it back to the shareholders, and then close shop
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You could say the same sort of things about Microsoft. They weren't first to market with a graphical OS, a word processor, a spreadsheet, a TCP/IP stack, a browser, a game system, or
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Microsoft has a core business, Yahoo does not. It is just a series of websites they have acquired through purchases over the years. Its old curated directories no longer exist and the company is nowhere close to a market leader in what it does pretend to do. The largest value of Yahoo is ownership of stock in two public companies, Alibaba and Yahoo Japan (which is majority owned by SoftBank). Effectively, they are a holding company.
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The best Yahoo can do now is to sell all its assets, gather up all the money and then distribute it back to the shareholders, and then close shop
Reminds me of something Michael Dell said in 1997 about Apple.
Of course, Yahoo doesn't have a Steve Jobs to bring back, so perhaps that really would be the best thing to do.
It's too bad, really. I rather like the Yahoo weather iPhone app.
Weather app from Yahoo (Score:2)
It's too bad, really. I rather like the Yahoo weather iPhone app.
Really? I think it's a piece of crap and the temperatures and predictions it gives are routinely wrong. I have several other weather apps because it is fairly useless and it's predictions are generally the worst of any weather app on my phone.
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I've never had an issue with its accuracy, but my casual use case may be a lot more tolerant. That or their data source is more accurate for my area.
Yahoo needs a competent CEO. (Score:2)
Want evidence for Meyer's lack of competence? (Score:2)
Khloé Kardashian Admits Sheâ(TM)s Had a One-Night Stand
Kylie Jenner Admits She Only Has TWO Friends
Sell to Apple (Score:2)
I had suggested this on a previous occasion, but will repeat: Yahoo should sell its internet business to Apple. That is the one missing thing that Apple doesn't have - unlike Google and Bing. And don't be too greedy on the price - just sell it to Apple at whatever they pay you
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Brilliant, sell Marissa to Apple too. That'll fix 'em.
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Yahoo was one of the many hundreds of Internet-related 'e-entity' jumping on the Net bandwagon
Fucking hell, how young are you?
Pre-Google Yahoo had one of the top web directories available. It was manually curated and therefore doomed to failure, but they were for a while a market leader.
Didn't last long though, admittedly. Wouldn't let that malware infested shitfest anywhere near one of my browsers these days.
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First things first: discussed negative valuation of the core is result of other valuations and their subtraction. All these valuations are largely approximate to allow for any reasonable conclusion in quantitive terms. Therefore casuistical nature of this must be nailed down first off.
Then, company in quite substantial extent follows Google model of presence on net and its sophistication. Allright, in less extravagant fashion, but with lesser part of failing attempts at exotic activities as well. Presence o
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They already stopped being a competitor in the search engine business when they subbed the task out microsoft "bing!"
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--Yahoo News is worth saving IMHO, but yahoo email got deprecated in my case pretty fast when they started doing Teh Stupid -- like getting rid of multi-tabbed email, datamining your private messages to serve ads, farting around with forced password changes, and now the latest - *blocking webmail entirely* for "a limited number of users" that use AD BLOCKERS. F'-d up Epic Stupidity there. It's like they're purposely trying to kill the experience.
--I'm unhappy cuz yahoo was a primary email account for me si
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Only service I use is email, and I use it somewhat grudgingly since I'm so entrenched (having used it for years).
You can export the mail to Thunderbird using Yahoo's IMAP interface. With the same method you can import it into any other Email service.
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That doesn't readily correct the behavior of others that send to a given e-mail address though.
You are right, there is no fix for that! I monitor addresses that I've not sent mail from for years, my regular contacts _still_ email those addresses even though I've told them not to and those addresses send replies stating that the address is no longer active. I just pretend that I've never seen the mails sent there in most cases.
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Set an auto-reply message up (it might be called something like vacation settings, autoresponse, or similar) instructing people that the address is no longer valid and that the message will be unread unless they resend it to the correct address (include said address). Where you can change it yourself, do so. You might even want to include basic instructions for a few email clients on how to make the changes. It'd probably take an hour to do it exceptionally well. I bet you have a very high success rate if y
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Re:Internet Business (Score:4, Interesting)
I think you're missing the problem here: if Yahoo closes up shop soon, that auto-forwarding won't work any more because Yahoo Mail won't exist.
This is one of the big problems with email: it's not really permanent, and only lasts as long as the provider lasts, or as long as the provider allows you to have an account there. That's why so many people have webmail accounts at one of the Big 3 (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft/Live/MSN/outlook.com/whatever they're calling it these days). Lots of idiots use email from their ISP, but then one day they have to move (or they get tired of their ISP's high prices and switch to a competitor) and suddenly that account is gone, along with all their email, and all their contacts are still sending emails to the old address which bounces. You don't have that problem with, for instance, Google's Gmail. But of course that assumes Gmail is going to be around indefinitely. The way things are going now, that's probably a safe assumption, however 15 years ago we could probably have said the same thing about Yahoo Mail, and it's looking now like it might not actually stick around that long. It's hard to say; it might just get sold off and turn into a paid service, it might get swallowed up by a competitor like Gmail, but there's also a chance it'll disappear entirely, which would affect a LOT of people.
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I have a bunch of emails - gmail, yahoo, netscape/aol, 2 hotmail accounts, icloud, ISP and a couple of more accounts. The first I ever had was netscape.net, right from the days Netscape had launched Communicator. Then I added yahoo, which was the catch all for everything - big mistake. So I created a gmail account that only family would use. When I was b/w jobs, I created a new hotmail account just for all my job applications and inquiries, and it became the primary LinkedIn account. When I got an iPh
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That wouldn't help me. I've had a Yahoo email address for nearly 20 years (ok, I think I signed up 1997 when they first started). First name and last name, and no numbers tacked on the end because somebody beat me to it. Everybody knows how to get hold of me. And before you ask, no, spam isn't bothering me. Furthermore, they've been reliable, which is pretty good considering both Hotmail/Microsoft and Gmail have had outages and data loss.
I've also been happy to pay them $19.99 since 2002 for a Plus acc
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Me too.
Time to get a backup email address, any recommendations? Don't need a secure mail service, just something that provides POP and webmail, doesn't get on spam blacklists, and doesn't tack some advertising at the end of transmissions.
Yahoo mail users (Score:2)
Yahoo mail (and occasionally AOL mail) users are the only people I talk to who regularly note the capitalization of their email addresses. I find that reason enough for Yahoo to die.
Does anyone use Yahoo anymore? (Score:5, Insightful)
That would mean investors are valuing Yahoo's core business at less than zero if the Asian assets were spun out tax-free.
There is a good chance it actually is worth less than zero. Yahoo hasn't been relevant for a while now. Yahoo used to matter in search but that hasn't been true for a long time and as a result there is no real reason for most people to go to Yahoo anymore. It's hard to concisely explain their business model anymore which is usually a bad sign for a company.
Yahoo should have sold to Microsoft when they were offered an obscene (and insane) amount of money for the company. The fact that they didn't was even dumber than Microsoft actually offering $53 billion for the company. Microsoft shareholders kind of dodged a bullet when that deal fell through.
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That would mean investors are valuing Yahoo's core business at less than zero if the Asian assets were spun out tax-free.
Yahoo should have sold to Microsoft when they were offered an obscene (and insane) amount of money for the company. The fact that they didn't was even dumber than Microsoft actually offering $53 billion for the company. Microsoft shareholders kind of dodged a bullet when that deal fell through.
Yahoo turning down Microsoft is like Groupon turning down Google's offer of several billion. There's a lot of due diligence involved in multi-billion dollar transactions and neither deal would have gone through, even if the target company had accepted the offer.
Arrogance and greed (Score:4, Insightful)
Yahoo turning down Microsoft is like Groupon turning down Google's offer of several billion.
Agreed. It was remarkably stupid on the part of Groupon to turn that offer down. Obviously it's easy to say that in hindsight but I remember thinking these companies were stupid to turn down that kind of money which was clearly well beyond their current valuations.
There's a lot of due diligence involved in multi-billion dollar transactions and neither deal would have gone through, even if the target company had accepted the offer.
I've worked in M&A in years gone by. If the offers had been accepted they almost certainly would have gone through. Much of the due diligence was already done by the time the offer was made. The only thing that would have derailed them would be anti-trust concerns but those probably wouldn't have been a problem for either the Yahoo or Groupon deals.
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When I got the offer to buy my company, I spoke with a lawyer and spent a few days talking with the employees and my family. It was a pretty nice number. I agree to (mostly) accept the offer and the sale was completed within a month, on paper. They'd already done due diligence before they made the offer. I might have been able to get more money from the company for the sale but I bargained for other things instead (such as them retaining staff for a period of time or offering severance packages - even if an
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"Does anyone use Yahoo anymore?"
Perhaps not on Slashdot, but it is actually currently the third most used web property in US, after Google and Facebook.
The reason the stock is depressed is not to lack of users and usage, but lack of growth and future prospects.
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It's hard to concisely explain their business model anymore which is usually a bad sign for a company.
Their business model is evidently asshattery [computerworld.com] indistinguishable from malware [wordpress.com], which is an even worse sign for a company.
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After 17 years I actually have to move off my Yahoo mail. Yahoo has become too pathetic to be trusted. Where the fuck to go now, who knows?
What is Yahoo ? (Score:2)
Maybe it is become I am European, but I have never used/seen/visited it, and I have been using the web for 20 years now...
Re: What is Yahoo ? (Score:2)
Once AltaVista came about Yahoo was kinda useless, I actually had a preference for web crawler anyway. It was a web directory, so it catagorized sites, in therory making finding stuff that was of interest easier.
When web indexed became a thing, it was pretty useless for search, they then tried to become a homepage (which turns out nobody wants), and email after hotmail offered (their email client actually has a lot to offer, not better, but not worse than Gmail, just different).
I think they try to produce s
Re: What is Yahoo ? (Score:5, Interesting)
It took me less than 24 hours and I found this new relatively unknown search engine called Google, people had been talking about which had a nice clean interface and NO POP-UPS. I changed my homepage and never looked back. Yahoo shot themselves in the foot and gave Google a serious foothold in the market they owned. When they became a "portal", I knew they were done. They damaged their brand, fell behind in technology and eventually became an also-ran.
Re: What is Yahoo ? (Score:1)
But even then, their search engine was just altavista with more ads if I'm not mistaken.
They completely missed the web index vs web directory shift, and were using their name only from a very early time.
And yes, X10, I still don't know what it is. , buI remember it. Some kind of home automation standard, but cameras were all that was advertised?
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Pretty much my story as well. I shifted around between Webcrawler, Altavista, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, but when I got turned on to Google, I was permanently moved over to it in less than a day. I keep my Yahoo account alive for a few things, but if it dies, I'm not going to lose any sleep.
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From what I can tell now they're an investment company, with Alibaba being the bulk of their value.
Yes and all those shares in Alibaba at that are not exactly unencumbered in terms of legal questions surrounding their value. It depends on Alibaba doing what they promise to do with the subsidiary the shares are actually in.
What legal recourse the share holders have if Alibaba ultimately decides to alter the terms is an open question. It also supposed the Chinese government won't for whatever reason decide to interfere with something that is well playing a bit fast and loose with their foreign investment
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Yahoo wasn't late to webmail, they just sucked at things like spam filtering and web design so Google ate their lunch in spite of coming out considerably later. Yahoo's infrastructure was also complete crap - Netapp filers I seem to recall - allowing Google to blow them way on storage limits. Remember Gmail landed with 1GB limit on april fool's day, but it wasn't a joke. Yahoo eventually got a clue and went to a Linux + raw disks data center strategy like Google but they were too far behind to catch up and
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Yes, I remember it as altavista.digital.com (remembering how to spell altavista was a pain), I'm actually surprised to find out it existed before Yahoo (even as a beta). I never really found what I was looking for in Yahoo (I do not remember it from before then, which probably means I did not have internet access, I would have guessed '94, but '95 must be right).
Either way, I never was able to get what I wanted in Yahoo. Didn't Mosaic also become Netscape Navigator (Mozilla being a Zilla added to Mosaic?)
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Re:What is Yahoo ? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Before that it was Lycos.
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First it was Archie. On the web usually it was a mix of lycos, altavista and yahoo, then dogpile, then Google provided a search engine that actually found what you were looking for.
Anybody that wasn't around back then can't imagine the difference Google made.
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I hear a lot about this company named "Yahoo", but can someone explain me what they do ?
They provide email addresses that are handy when selling stuff to dubious people on craigslist, or communicating with possibly
dubious people you met via okcupid or tindr.
Re:What is Yahoo ? (Score:4, Funny)
Search and portals, they also own Flickr.
Honestly, if you need to know about Yahoo, just Google it. ;-)
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Re:What is Yahoo? (Score:2)
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They do have some value [schlockmercenary.com].
The Anti-Google (Score:4, Interesting)
I have been following Yahoo since their IPO, and I have never really been sure what they actually wanted to do (except to spend their pile of cash acquiring stuff). While Google has always seemed very focused in increasing their share of the search / information processing market, Yahoo (which started, remember, as What Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle!, i.e., a web directory) was going to own search, then started using Google, then build their own (pretty bad) search engine after letting Google get big. That was pretty much par for the course. I can remember sitting through numerous presentations on this or that (Yahoo! Music!) where it seemed like the basic business model was "we will buy a promising startup, rebrand it as Yahoo and then let it die on the vine."
In other words, like a lot of Silicon Valley, they have made a lot of money, but it has been investor money, not actual revenue.
Anachronism here (Score:2)
As recently as 2007, they were still listed as the #2 search engine. [thesearchenginelist.com]
I still remember those stupid commercials. "Ya-Hooooooo!"
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As recently as 2007, they were still listed as the #2 search engine.
Yea but in the perspective of internet history, that is like saying As recently as 215 yeas ago France owned most of the land west of the Mississippi river.
Fate of SNL Archive (Score:1)
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Since yahoo bought the entire backlog of SNL footage...
Don't tell me, Marissa's idea?
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My first thought on reading the summary was that someone who had acquired Yahoo shares wanted their free money while there was still some to be had. No surprise to see it confirmed.
Yahoo has an Internet business? (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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They seem to have expanded in Japan. They off broadband and mobile service (I think they resell DoCoMo basically). Their auction site is still popular over there, more popular than eBay. People still use their search engine and homepage.
Somehow the Japanese team got it. It's interesting how often this happens. A foreign company comes in and sets up a local subsidiary, fails and the Japanese arm goes independent and flourishes. For example, the Lawson chain of convenience stores originated in the US, but the
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I'm shocked that they're still hobbling along. (Score:2)
When is the last time I used Yahoo! for anything?! It was before I switched to using AltaVista because I thought it was that much better. That's the time frame involved. I don't know anyone that uses Yahoo!. I just looked at their page. They're still going after the "Internet Portal" thing, apparently; it's cluttered and claims to offer everything under the sun, but does it in a way that makes me click, click, click and seems entirely geared toward reading and content consumption.
It's like they're stuck bef
Wow, Yahoo. (Score:2)
I haven't used Yahoo since I switched to AltaVista. That's a long, long time ago.
Just loaded up their homepage. It looks like they're still trying to do the "Internet Portal" thing, it's all very, very texty, tries to cover every last topic, requires multiple clicks, and seems social and mobile unfriendly. Like they're stuck in 2001 or something.
I don't know anyone that uses Yahoo. I can't think of a use case for using Yahoo. The "Internet Homepage" model just isn't something that people do any longer. Even
Why Google succeeded, but Yahoo didn't... (Score:1)
Yahoo snatched defeat from jaws of victory (Score:1)
Yahoo games used to be one of the most popular places to play a ton of board game clones, but Yahoo snubbed mobile devices for years. What makes this extra mystifying is that almost all of their games were written in Java, and most mobile devices support Java. Why weren't they ported?
History was recently repeated when several shows such as Community were purchased to promote Yahoo's video streaming service, "Yahoo Screen". But the apps and Chromecast support didn't exist until the season was almost over, an
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Re:So.. (Score:4, Insightful)
I've always said you could replace most CEOs with a magic 8 ball and notice little difference. No matter how badly a CEO fucks up a company they leave with a golden parachute.
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I'm trying to sort out Mayer could have done differently? She took over a company in long term terminal decline. If I were her, and I were offered the job, I'd want a big ass salary too, because I'd be blamed for all the mistakes the predecessor made. And remember that predecessor was Jerry Yang, who could have sold Yahoo off to Microsoft, but didn't, and ushered in this current decline.
Yahoo lacks focus (Score:2)
I'm trying to sort out Mayer could have done differently?
Hard to say. The company does make pretty substantial profits [google.com] and they have quite a lot of cash. The problem the company doesn't really seem to have organic growth prospects and they don't dominate an important segment like Google does with search or Apple does with devices. Yahoo just doesn't seem to have a focus to the company and I'm not sure anyone would be able to easily fix that.
And remember that predecessor was Jerry Yang, who could have sold Yahoo off to Microsoft, but didn't, and ushered in this current decline.
That is among the dumbest business decisions of all time. The board should have pimp slapped him when he didn't want to
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Its hard to say what she could have done. Their balance sheet isn't all that bad. Probably the thing to do was and still is turn it into an investment house. By that I don't mean the lets buy and re-brand start-ups kind of investment, I mean the Berkshire Hathaway type of operation.
A lot of people suggested Microsoft should go in that direction around 1999-2001 or so. Frankly in terms of maximizing shareholder value they were probably correct. MS had really lost its way there for awhile. Shortly after
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Someone has to hire the consultants. Do you think that just anyone can spend millions of dollars of their employer's money paying someone else to do their own job?
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Obviously to build a playpen for her baby and cut their remote workers.
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I've been typing 'yahoo.com' into my address bar for years. Many years ago, when my servers and my internet connection were less reliable, I always used Yahoo as a test to see if my connection was live. Yahoo servers rarely went down.
I still go to Yahoo about once a week, just as a reflex when my browser has an issue.
Have you seen their homepage lately? Evidently the Kardashians are REALLY popular with the Yahoo! demographic. The Yahoo! homepage is a mess of celebrity crap.
I've been wondering if this is
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Yeah, 'cos politicians have a long history of keeping election promises once in power. You can detect that is sarcasm, right?
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Actually, CompuServe was bought by AOL a long time ago. So, in fact, AOL *is* CompuServe (or the other way around?).
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Yahoo is the new Myspace
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She's not entirely unattractive so, if we're selling off her body parts then she might be worth more whole than in parts.
Disclosure, I owned some stock until about a year ago. I'd held it for about five years. I bought it at under 20 and sold for about 50. Filthy lucre is filthy but, damn it, it was pretty lucrative. I harbor them no ill will and it was simply profit. I seem to recall that I'd had some 1800 shares. ;-) I believe I can login and check but I am lazy.