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Why is Verizon buying Yahoo?

Verizon 2015 logo -vector.svg

I have a yahoo! email box. I have other email addresses, too, but the yahoo box is the one I've had longest, its use is second nature to my personal friends, so it has long functioned as my default.

I don't believe that is about to change. Verizon is buying the core of yahoo, and it will presumably continue to be happy to allow me to get my mail in the old way.

But that isn't why Verizon is spending the $4.83 billion buying the venerable internet company's core operations. Verizon doesn't likely care about preserving the convenience of lil ole me. So what do they care about here?

Well, Verizon already owns AOL, another venerable internet brand, going back to the '90s of blessed memory. Presumably it can wrap the two companies together now, eliminate 'redundancies,' and look for 'synergy. All that business school stuff.

Beyond that, I suspect that there is some empire building at work. Somebody in executive ranks wants to be a somebody in roughly the sense that was true of the characters in On the Waterfront. This person or these people don't think that being a wireless provider makes them somebodies. Getting into the content, web design and search businesses, though: ah, there is a scratch for the Napoleonic itch!

I read too much John K. Galbraith in my impressionable youth perhaps. He would have jumped on this hypothesis.
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