Ah the good old days!
Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)
41–50 of 122 posts
Re: Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)
#42Wow, people can get super-rich off the internet! Let's all invest our money in internet companies!
I think this was part of what Larry Page was trying to get across yesterday after Google released a bunch of services that (potentially) trounced many hotly contested competing services. There's been a lot of billions thrown around over some relatively uninspired ideas and it seems like a concerted attempt to create a false, easily manipulated, bubbly marketplace.
I guess I don't understand what Page was trying to communicate? That there is still room in this world for people to make a living, as long as Google decides they aren't interested in that market? Do we really need, for example, another music streaming service from Google/Facebook/Amazon when we already have _several_ excellent, focused, and competitive streaming services out there?
IMNSHO DoJ needs to hit Google and the rest of these 800lb gorillas very hard with the anti-trust stick...
Re: Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)
#43This is very relevant now because rumors are that Yahoo is about to buy Tumblr for over a billion dollars. If they only took care of Geocities they would not have to buy it all over again in Tumblr form.
For the history books, Yahoo's M&A has been more trend-defining than anybody else. Geocities in 1999 -- spawned the dot com rush Flickr (2005) -- the official web 2.0 start date! Tumblr (2013) -- ???
I'm not sure what you mean by the "dot com rush" but if there was a singular "dot com" starting-gun, it was the Netscape IPO a few years earlier.
Re: Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)
#44i was a part of the team that bought GeoCities at Yahoo, and i think it wasn't as dumb of a deal as it looks on paper, because a) YHOO stock was so high at the time that the $3.8B wasn't actually all that dilutive, and b) buying GeoCities ensured Yahoo was the #1 destination online, and thus we could command a disproportionate share of ad revenue. If you wanna look at a really silly deal that Yahoo did, how about the…
dilutive.
Re: Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)
#45wow, sounds like GeoCities is really going places. i hope it works out for them!
And the other two companys mentioned, Excite and AltaVista. They sound like great places to work.
Not to mention ABN Amro, which was effectively bailed out and nationalised during the global financial crisis. If only AltaVista had been considered too big to fail...
I say "effectively", because the many mergers and splits it went through in the 00s meant the large parts nationalise in the Netherland and the UK were not identical to what it was in '99 when this analyst was interviewed.
Re: Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this was part of what Larry Page was trying to get across yesterday after Google released a bunch of services that (potentially) trounced many hotly contested competing services. There's been a lot of billions thrown around over some relatively uninspired ideas and it seems like a concerted attempt to create a false, easily manipulated, bubbly marketplace.
I guess I don't understand what Page was trying to communicate? That there is still room in this world for people to make a living, as long as Google decides they aren't interested in that market? Do we really need, for example, another music streaming service from Google/Facebook/Amazon when we already have _several_ excellent, focused, and competitive streaming services out there? IMNSHO DoJ needs to hit Google and…
I think he was trying to say that current competition is incredibly trivial.
I think the Google streaming service utilizes Google's ability to personalize tastes pretty well. At least, so far, it's exceeded my Spotify and Rdio experiences.
Re: Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)
#47I think that http://cnnfn.cnn.com/1998/06/08/technology/yahoo/ was a much more reasonable purchase. Though just think of how much more that company could have made if they had waited until the market became frothier!
(Don't worry, the founders in that deal are doing quite well for themselves now...)
Re: Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)
#48I worked for Tripod.com back in the day, which eventually sold to Lycos for about $60M, just a few months before Yahoo bought Geocities for $3.6B. Needless to say, maybe we should have held out a bit longer. The late 90's were a strange time indeed.
Remember Angelfire as well?
Re: Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)
#49Geocities was my first website! As long as no one ever sees it/knows it was me who made what was quite possibly the ugliest website in the world, all I'll have is fond memories.
Congrats on the sale !
Have you got any of the $3.6 billion left ?
Re: Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)
#50if anyone's feeling nostalgic, http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/ try amazon.com :)
If you're really nostalgic you can still get the real thing; ReoCities [1] is an archive of GeoCities pages crawled before the service was shut down.