As some of you know, I’m an old hand at the world of connected computers. I’ve been online since 1981, wrote a (rather prophetic) book in 1983 called The World Connection, and have been neck-deep in computers and the Internet for my entire life.

With these bona fides, I stand by my statement that Yahoo has always been a piece of garbage, and were it not for their accidental investment in Alibaba, they probably would have gone belly-up years ago. (Astonishing footnote: Yahoo is being sold for only FOUR times what they paid for Tumblr, which they drove into the ground).

Yahoo’s charred remains were finally purchased, though, by Verizon, for less than one TENTH the price Microsoft offered them nearly a decade ago. Don’t let the chart fool you: although it shows Yahoo’s stock price is the same as it was in January 1999 (which in itself is pretty dismal), virtually the entire value in this price is represented by the aforementioned Alibaba investment. They got lucky... just like Marissa Mayer, who scored a $300 million payday just by hanging around Yahoo long enough for it to get sold.