61–70 of 122 posts
I 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2011/dec/12/royal-bank-of-s...
This 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.
How is this relevant? Different era. Different CEO. Different corporate culture. Different demography. Different way people use the internet. Vastly different size of users. Tumblr could very well die on its own without anyone's help. Last I heard it was not making any profit yet, and took huge amount of money from investors. In the long term, investors don't care how many users you have if you are not making much mo…
This 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.
As a portal it failed because the basic concepts of free accounts and uploading made it a haven for spammers, as a commercial concept it failed because bulk display advertising rates dropped through the floor during the .com bust and in spite of losing money Yahoo kept it running for many years.
To 'fix' geocities would have meant grandfathering in a few million accounts, re-inventing the service in a way that would make it profitable against the rise of the new homepage provider: facebook.
I personally don't think that is something that they could have done, not with Yahoo's image and the legacy they were still hauling along. It needed a clean break with the past and ditching Geocities gave Yahoo an opportunity to do just that (which they then subsequently mostly wasted).
Yahoo did the right thing, but they went about it in a terribly callous way. All they had to do was to deny google crawling access to geocities, freeze the uploads, allow account archival and deletion in an automated way (easy for them to do). That way we wouldn't have this gaping hole in the web today, and we wouldn't have desperate people trying to find their old stuff through whatever means possible.
I'm sure 1 fte and a few hundred bucks worth of bandwidth would have been a price worth paying for Yahoo given the dent it gave their image, it definitely was worth paying that much to me to try to keep it running.
I 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?
If you had a site on geocities you can probably still get it from either the Archive team torrent or from http://reocities.com/ , simply append your old url. There is a 'self service' bit (see the FAQ) where you can archive your website and have a download link mailed to you. It's been running for a few years now and gets approximately 35K unique visitors daily. From a commercial point of view it is a complete failur…
Anyway, the interesting thing about a lot of the big late '90s dot-com acquisitions that now look like sheer insanity is that they were all a product of everyone latching onto what they thought the current "big thing" was. Back then it was portals, aggregation, hosting, and ISPs. But it turned out that technological advancements erased a lot of the reasons why those things could be profitable (at least the way they were). Instead the next big things were search, web-apps, and social features (Web 2.0). Livejournal, blogger, flickr, google, google maps, etc. What people figured out, eventually, is that even if you have a million users that doesn't mean that it's easy to make even a million dollars a year.
Now, of course, there are lots of people who think they know what the "big thing" is, and companies are again shelling out billions for acquisitions, few of which will seem sensible in 10 years, or even 5.
Fun fact: the stock used to buy GeoCities would still be worth billions of dollars, even if the vesting/lock-in schedule was extraordinarily long. Anyway, the interesting thing about a lot of the big late '90s dot-com acquisitions that now look like sheer insanity is that they were all a product of everyone latching onto what they thought the current "big thing" was. Back then it was portals, aggregation, hosting, an…
wow, 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.