Mozilla Could Walk Away and Still Get More Than $1 Billion If It Doesn't Like Yahoo's Buyer (recode.net) 144
Kara Swisher, reporting for Recode: Under terms of a contract that has been seen by Recode, whoever acquires Yahoo might have to pay Mozilla annual payments of $375 million through 2019 if it does not think the buyer is one it wants to work with and walks away. That's according to a clause in the Silicon Valley giant's official agreement with the browser maker that CEO Marissa Mayer struck in late 2014 to become the default search engine on the well-known Firefox browser in the U.S. Mozilla switched to Yahoo from Google after Mayer offered a much more lucrative deal that included what potential buyers of Yahoo say is an unprecedented term to protect Mozilla in a change-of-control scenario. It was a scenario that Mayer never thought would happen, which is why she apparently pushed through the possibly problematic deal point. According to the change-of-control term, 9.1 in the agreement, Mozilla has the right to leave the partnership if -- under its sole discretion and in a certain time period -- it did not deem the new partner acceptable. And if it did that, even if it struck another search deal, Yahoo is still obligated to pay out annual revenue guarantees of $375 million.
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People are stupid, and also lazy.
Re:that's a lot of $$ for nothing (Score:4, Informative)
Marissa Mayer has to be post-menopausal and likely has short mannish hair. Bonus points if she's fat like all the other americans too!
Seriously? Live under a rock much? Not only does she have three very young kids, she is seriously attractive (in my opinion.... Actually, no, she is objectively, factually attractive). She might run tech companies equally as poorly as Meg Whitman, but she is way, way better looking than 99.8% of CEOs.
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Never understood why anyone would pay that kind of money to be the default.
This should give you an insight as to the mind-set of the upper management at Yahoo.
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Google does the same thing.
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Yeah, you have to admit, that's a pretty sweet deal. Whoever managed to negotiate that at Mozilla really earned their pay.
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You think designing a new UI every 6 weeks is cheap ?
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You think copying Chrome's latest changes every 6 weeks is cheap ?
FTFY
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You think ignoring what your users want is cheap?
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You think "never change anything because some user somewhere will complain" is a path to success?
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It's more likely that he thinks "if 99% of your users loudly declaim that your latest change is an utter bucket of septic arsedribble" then it may be worth at least considering that it might be, to a degree, a bit suboptimal round the edges.
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Of course, 99% of users never say anything at all no matter how they feel about changes.
Either you do a proper survey or you have to guess whether those users raging on the Internet are a representative sample.
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If you keep losing users every day, you should be able to understand that what you're doing is not right.
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That doesn't follow. Sometimes you lose market share for reasons entirely outside your control.
Even when you lose market share due to factors under your control, it doesn't necessarily follow that you made bad decisions. You have to make decisions under uncertainty and sometimes the best decisions given the data available don't turn out to be the best in hindsight.
And even when you lose market share because of decisions you should have known are bad, it doesn't necessarily follow that those are the same dec
Privatise praise, socialise blame (Score:2)
Of course you do.
The C-suite's actions are only responsible when it improves.
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If their marketshare went down so much [computerworld.com] it's not because of "some user somewhere", it has to be the majority of them and it means Firefox is just making one extremely bad decision after another, non-stop, for years.
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There are many possible causes of marketshare decline, some of which are not under Mozilla's control ... Google properties saying "works best with Chrome!", for example. So it's difficult to know how much of the decline is due to, say, browser UI changes.
It's also difficult to know how what would have happened had no changes been made. It's pretty clear that *some* users would only be satisfied if Mozilla had made no UI changes since 2001, which would clearly not be winning.
Well (Score:2, Funny)
$997 million of it will go into a program to get more lesbian Eskimo Little Person left-handed albinos into programming, and $5 million will go into studying ways to make Firefox more like Chrome, then they'll have emergency fundraising to keep from defaulting on the $2 million they're in debt.
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Some google chrome features like multiproc and sandbox is worth copying. I agree the Chrome UI is crap and that the Firefox one is better. But yes, you seem to well understand their real funding priorities.
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If it gets any money.
Yahoo! will sell of the company piece by piece until "Yahoo!" is worth less than $0.
Yahoo is already worth less than zero. Their market cap is less than the value of their shares of Alibaba and Yahoo Japan.
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What does Yahoo actually have left? The most frequent web real-estate must be Yahoo answers which comes up often in search query results. There are still people who never migrated away from Yahoo mail but to my knowledge most people who used it switched to Gmail years ago.
I think one major thing that should have been done long ago was to change the name. Face it, Yahoo is a stupid name and has like zero marketing appeal, especially to the groups you would want to be reaching.
Once when Firefox forced my
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"baked it into Firefox" ... except that you can change it with literally two clicks.
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Yeah and then it magically gets changed back on its own.
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What does Yahoo actually have left
Their real estate holdings are pretty valuable. I think they own 8 or 9 large buildings in and around Sunnyvale. The Sunnyvale campus alone has got to be at least 10 acres. 10 acres in the Silicon Valley in the hottest real estate market since the dot com. Real estate developers are probably drooling at the thought of all that land coming up for sale.
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The traffic there is *appalling* every day starting at 3 p.m. and doesn't get better until almost 8 p.m. That entire area has become a logistical catastrophe and the fact that greedy developers want to keep putting shit there - like a huge sports stadium - keeps making it exponentially worse.
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Mozilla sponsored a surfing contest in Hawaii [mozilla.org]. That isn't cheap.
YES: Where DOES all the money go? (Score:2)
I understand that Mozilla Foundation now gets most of its money from Microsoft: Microsoft pays Yahoo. Yahoo pays Mozilla Foundation to make "Yahoo search" (actually mostly Microsoft Bing search) [searchengineland.com] the default search engine in Firefox. That means Microsoft gets more money from advertisers when Firefox users do a search.
Firefox is now, apparently, mostly controlled by Microsoft, who is apparently trying to destroy it. In the past, Goo [allthingsd.com]
i expect great products from mozilla (Score:1)
with a deal like this, well mozilla, you guys have to build a new, better/secure and faster browser. oh and by the way keep working on thunderbird also...
and i am a user who never left for chromium/chrome family...in fact i really don't like google's browser for several reasons....privacy being one of them.
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They should just pull the trigger (Score:5, Insightful)
They really ought to just exercise the option unless the buyer is someone they really really want to work with. Its a lot of money and it would be very good for the foundation to get that money.
Yahoo investors were fools.
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What other search engine is there? There's Microsoft and Google with deep pockets. Does DuckDuckGo have fat stacks of cash sitting around for some reason? How bad would it be for Mozilla to take Facebook funding? Would we really stand for it if Moz got funding from Baidu or Yandex?
I mean, insofar as we stand for things that the Mozilla foundation does now, which are mostly terrible and stupid.
So probably Facebook then.
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Microsoft as the source of funding seems possible. They've had no issue spending gobs of money recently and it would be mutually beneficial for both organizations. No clue if it'll happen.
If they go with MS and Bing, then Firefox will be the premier browser for porn....
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When I hear of some company agreeing to suicidal terms like this, my first thought is always "exit strategy". What percentage of Yahoo's revenue would those payments be?
Nice... (Score:5, Funny)
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At worst it drops yahoo's value by a billion dollars.
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I think that's an optimistic estimate.
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they have a lot of active email users, I don't see why a competent company couldn't make money there.
allegedly they have 12% of search too.
if that's true, it's worth a ton (based on payments made to various companies to be default search).
Google has the advantage of not needing to buy them (they'll get practically the same benefit from their collapse), but there's money to be made with the Yahoo customer base, and e-mail customers are pretty loyal, as it's a PITA to change emails.
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No one should be stupid enough to buy Yahoo under conditions like that.
No one should be stupid enough to buy Yahoo under any circumstances 9unless Yahoo has assets that can be liquidated for more than the purchase price).
Yahoo is company that no longer has any reason to exist. They are the Radio Shack of the Internet.
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Stop that. Radio Shack sells batteries and cheap Chinese trinkets. That's more than Yahoo does.
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RadioShack (no space) had enough value for Sprint to buy them up
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We should be singing her praises now, for negotiating this deal. Sure, it might look bad for Yahoo, but maybe she did it for the greater good, knowing that Yahoo was doomed anyway.
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Re:Unreal (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe that was actually the point. It's a "poison pill" clause. It's well known that Mayer has been against selling off the company all along but her hand is being forced by the board.
Recode huh? (Score:2, Interesting)
So Recode saw this contract? Why didn't it post the exact language used? Because it sounds plenty fishy for me ... what court would enforce a contract that says that if I walk away from a mutually agreed-upon deal, you have to still hold up your end of the deal? You still have to pay even though you get nothing in return? A concept called "consideration" comes to mind...
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Reading between the lines, it sounds like Mozilla was afraid that Yahoo! would be bought by Microsoft and they wanted an out in that case. It's not a good strategy to send your users to your competitor.
I'm trying to recall if the "you should be using Chrome instead" notifications started before or after Mozilla switched away from Google.
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Courts are brought in all the time for contract disputes. It's been true for hundreds of years.
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You can sign away all kinds of things in employment contracts where you'll never be held accountable for what you signed. For example, non-compete agreements are unlawful in California but I still see them all the time. Same with renter's agreements; I see all kinds of contracts that people have just photocopied from some do-it-yourself law book that could never be enforced in my municipality. You might still need to go to court and get a judgment in your favor to have that recognized, though.
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Change of control provisions aren't at all uncommon in contracts. This is an unusually punitive one, but I really doubt that a court would judge it to be a unconscionable, since it's not like Yahoo didn't have competent counsel.
It's a matter of principle (Score:3)
Poison Pill embedded intentionally (Score:5, Insightful)
Poison Pill [wikipedia.org]
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Not that I doubt your comment (and in fact that was my speculation), but that may itself fly in the face of fiduciary responsibility if in fact there's a paper trail of her intentionally adding the clause for the purpose of securing her control over corporate operations.
$375 Million?? (Score:2)
$375 million a year??
For that much per year maybe they could create a browser that have memory leaks that render it unusable after a day or two.
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In general Firefox memory usage and leakiness is pretty good. Just like any other piece of consumer software, it gets into a broken state for some small number of users.
But I'm sure your witless slur made you feel good.
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In general Firefox memory usage and leakiness is pretty good. Just like any other piece of consumer software, it gets into a broken state for some small number of users.
It's more than just a "small number" of users.
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But I'm sure your witless slur made you feel good.
No, what would make me feel good is if they fixed the fucking memory leaks, you assclown.
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> It's more than just a "small number" of users.
Fine. How many users is it, and what is the source of your data?
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How many users is it, and what is the source of your data?
I confess, I didn't commission an independent study to count them all one-by-one, but a google search for "memory leak in firefox" brings back 1.8 million results. Lets say that 99% of them are bullshit or irrelevant. That's still 180,000 users who are apparently complaining about or discussing memory leaks. And we all know that for every person who complains, there are probably 10 who either don't what's wrong or who just muddle through. Either way, there are a lot of people who've been complaining about m
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And how many of those complaints are about bugs that have been fixed?
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"if you aren't experiencing it, it's not a real problem" is a fallacy. So is "if you are experiencing it, it must be a huge problem".
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Exactly. I should be able to open hundreds of tabs, and then after I close them all (except one to keep the browser running), the memory usage should be right back to the initial memory usage the browser had when opened with a single tab.
Memory leaks are always bugs (which doesn't mean they won't happen; software is complex and humans make mistakes, but they're supposed to fix them). The fact that this is even being argued on Slashdot just shows how far gone this site is.
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The reason Yahoo is in trouble (Score:1)
Deals like that is the reason Yahoo is in trouble. Mozilla doesn't care, it found another sugar daddy after Google dumped them. Yahoo can't afford to be a sugar daddy.
Mozilla will need that money... (Score:1)
Why chorme become winner? (Score:1)
And nothing of value would be lost. (Score:2)
$1 billion and still no sandbox (Score:2)
These people have so much money yet they cannot get multi-proc and sandbox to work. Tottally and utterly negligent. Really security features like this need to come first to protect the users. You would think they could also keep XUL for backward compatability, with more security and user control for security purposes