internet.seekingalpha.com — As the market for acquiring fledgling Internet companies heats up, it's worth taking a look at all those acquisitions that didn't quite work out. For every Internet acquisition that's successful there seems to be dozens that die on the vine.
Nov 22, 2006 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountNov 23, 2006
Who said eBay wanted to integrate Skype with their auction business? Marked as inaccurate.
laundromatNov 23, 2006
@ foobar:At the time of the acquisition, Ebay did say it was thinking of integrating Skype in its business model. One way of doing so was providing telemarketing companies with the opportunity to call Ebay users about products that might interest them. Curiously, this brilliant idea was never further developed.
jkr06Nov 23, 2006
Didn't you hear about Skype 3.0's Click to Call feature.
brundlefly76Nov 23, 2006
I *love* that Mark Cuban/Broadcast.com is #1, and I love the comments they make about Cuban, which reflect my opinion perfectly. Why do people keep giving this loser face time?I disagree with the Hotmail aquisition being on that list however. I think that was an appropriate price, at the time they definitely needed to *aquire* that service, and hotmail has always been tremendously popular.No it hasnt improved them as a portal play but they are a huge free webmail player.
bonyicecreamNov 23, 2006
Probably because he makes an idiot of himself a lot :-)Not to mention he helped bring one of the losingest teams in NBA history into the finals...
derekj212Nov 23, 2006
Hmm, wonder what that high pressure sodium light was used for...
bbxboyNov 23, 2006
Personally, I think the worst acquisition ever was Quark buying up mFactory just to kill their technology (not wholly internet based, I know)... mFactory were the creators of mTropolis, a powerful application for building object-based multimedia projects (like Director but much easier to use) - pretty revolutionary stuff at the time. Quark was just about to release some lame-ass multimedia extension to Quark Xpress and realized that it would quickly die with mTropolis on the market (I think it died anyways just because it was so lame). It was a truly shameless display that only served to hurt the consumer and bury some very promising technology.
runoutNov 24, 2006
MySpace Bought for $580M:<a class="user" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4695495.stm">http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4695495.stm</a>MySpace $1 billion Search Deal with Google:<a class="user" href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/07/google-pegged-to-search-myspace/">http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/07/google-pegged-to-search-myspace/</a>Not too much of a mistake
acetracerNov 24, 2006
The dude claims never to have heard of Terra. It's one of the largest telcos in the world, supplying internet access to most Spanish-speaking countries. Their userbase is the fastest growing in the world, and the Spanish-speaking market is the largest in the world outside of China, which doesn't compete in the open market.Someone with his credentials should've known that. It's like being a studio executive and claiming to never have heard of Canal+. There is life outside this country you know.
Closed AccountNov 24, 2006
I remember when everyone either had a Hotmail or Rocketmail account. Hotmail has improved very little since it was bought. Most Hotmail accounts are people's SPAM addresses now. At one time, Hotmail was good. It just never improved with the times. MS treated it like they treated IE6.
yomimediaSep 18, 2008
Looking at all those failed acquisitions just lets me know those companies had a better chance of giving those billions up to me. Wow.. billions wasted which looking back look like failed experiments.
seoccMay 5, 2009
Wow - the influence of companies giving into shareholders wanting their company to acquire internet companies during the initial internet boom.
jamarketing1Apr 27, 2010
Wow that was eye opening. Great article.Justin<a class="user" href="http://article-marketing-made-easy.jamarketingsolutions.com/" rel="nofollow">http://article-marketing-made-easy.jamarketingsolu ...</a>