What Do Yahoo and AOL Have To Sell That's Worth Buying?

I think it's time to look at AOL and Yahoo's core asset base of technology and see what's worth buying.

For example both have/had developed amazing Voice Platforms. AOL spent millions on a VoIP service that was reportedly stifled by Time Warner and their parental spanking of AOL for daring to develop a phone service when the cable company was part of their family and was trying to sell cable telephony. It didn't matter that the AOL product was better and worked in more places. The cable guys had another agenda. Spin out, get richer, and be their own company.

Yahoo has a lot of telephony technology, including Dialpad, which they bought a few years ago. Internationally their IM platform carries a lot of voice ala Skype and it does video (not very well but that could be fixed). With AT&T mothballing CallVantage sometime this year, either the AOL or Yahoo VoIP platforms would be ideal (if they could be brought back to life the right way) to be what CallVantage was going to be. A real IP based telephony service that is everything the PSTN is (and a lot more--2.0 like, and of course, all IP.

Streaming Media Distribution-Yahoo owns the rights to Broadcast.com and MusicMatch, plus a lot more. AOL at one time had services like Spinner, WinAmp's Shoutcast, AOL Radio. Yahoo has a similar array of Intellectual Property such as MusicMatch, Yahoo MusicCentral, MediaCode and more, all of which was best of breed. Now their Yahoo Music Beta is really the REAL Rhapsody platform the same way their voice platform is run by Jajah.

But all you need to do is look at both companies and realize that the day is being ruled by ad sales, not content. The content folks have left both buildings and so have the real technologists who understood what they were buying and why. So now these companies are left with all kinds of great assets, but no way to make money from them. Instead they should sell them off, or give them back to the founders who can make something of what they could have been.

A few weeks ago we all heard of an investment consortium wanting to buy Skype. I say, buy up a few companies in the VoIP and Mobile VoIP space, take the assets of Yahoo and AOL's voice and video platforms and do it right. Same for the video and music streaming assets. The IP that's there was really good. It hasn't been replaced yet by anything really better. Maybe it just needs new masters who know how to do more than buy eyeballs that are no longer really there.

Comments

[DrVoIP]

Instead i would encourage to work on the products it owns rather planning to return them back to the founders.