I used to work for a company owned by Apollo - if its the one i'm thinking of...and if so then "corporate raider from the 80s" is putting things mildly. Those guys really were the type to squeeze every ounce of value of any org without remorse for the future or without thinking of the long-term value that an org could produce.
Yahoo had good tech, sadly well hidden thanks to a bad board and execs. it was still doing bleeding edge freebsd, like netflix just found out and can't stop talking about lately.
last good ceo was bartz, but she lost for carl Icahn who wanted to destroy Yahoo so his shares on MS and google ad business would go up. then he managed to get mayer to go in and do his bidding from the inside and the rest is history.
That makes me wonder, regarding AOL/Yahoo/Verizon/... what's the story behind "8 BITMIME" and their mail server's broken 8-bit handling ([0],[1])? Did they just get server software with bugs in one of the acquisitions/mergers? Or is it some incompatibility or configuration issue comparable to the 500-mile e-mail story [2]?
(Note: I had no idea they hadn't fixed it yet (at least the utf8 part)... I tested just now, and, sure, it's still broken... currently it is operating in "State 2".)
that actually matches the timeline i described. it's already on mayer and Icahn destroying it. i think only senior left on mail was responsible for spam and nothing else.
I've never worked for AOL nor yahoo so I have only an outsider view...and I'm sure to a degree you're not wrong. But still, these Apollo guys are just another level of value extraction.
