Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses
Certainly the end of the beginning. Yahoo!, one of perhaps a handful of companies, was the first &quot;Internet&quot;[1]. Those companies blazed an interesting trail and brought the mainstream population of the US into the &quot;online&quot; world. That they emerged across the chasm that was the dot.com crash, was a testament to the amount of momentum they carried with them.<p>I have a tremendous amount of respect for them, but even with Marissa at the helm the biggest challenge they have not seemed able to overcome, was to tranform into something more &#x27;web 3.0&#x27; ish.<p>I would not be surprised in the slightest if Microsoft spun out Bing as a subsidiary, and absorbed the assets and IP of Yahoo! into their own search centered business with a portal attached.<p>By resizing that combined business to be profitable based on the search and ad revenue I expect the case could be made for that as a long lived entity that remains when Google implodes. And having an already separate (or separable) would allow Microsoft to step away to avoid anti-trust concerns while keeping a partial interest to capture the value appreciation.<p>[1] the 0th Internet was what emerged right after HTTP started propagating, GNN, bookmarks etc.