What is Digg?64 Comments
- chris9902, on 10/12/2007, -0/+41Hotmail. I wouldn't call it a failure. crap yes, but not a failure.
Skype?... time well tell on that one. - felchdonkey, on 10/12/2007, -2/+41"5. Netscape - acquired by AOL (TWX) in 1998 for $4.2 billion. "
-they left out the tragic epilogue - October 2005, Time Warner (AOL) buys Jason Calcanis' WebLogs Inc. for $25 million... leading to Calcanis taking over as the GM of Netscape's website, making it into a Digg clone, and causing a 70% drop in traffic, nearly overnight. - klepto, on 10/12/2007, -1/+29Hotmail boomed when Microsoft acquired it.....Everybody had a hotmail account, everybody.
- bennyboy371, on 10/12/2007, -0/+21I thought it was funny when Bolt acquired FileLodge, an online file host. The hilarious thing is that FileLodge was just created from some freely available Uploader script, so whoever decided to start FileLodge must've made some quick cash and laughed when he got his check.
- Brian48216, on 10/12/2007, -1/+18Whole heartedly agree with the broadcast.com purchase.
Mark Cuban is one of those people who shouldn't have that much money. - headzoo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+19Broadcast.com? Never heard of it. I guess that's why it failed. Now it's a $5 billion dollar redirect to yahoo.com.
- ldavid, on 10/12/2007, -4/+19Wow...for some of the worst internet acquisitions ever....that's some big money!
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+14Hotmail accusation wasn't a bad deal at all. At that time hotmail was one of the few free services around, and was one of the best too. The problem was that MS didn't improve it after that. Even after 6 years (in 2004) very little had changed. Then Google came in with Gmail and stirred up the stagnant market. The likes of hotmail and yahoo were left behind.
However, even to this date hotmail and msn messenger(windows live messenger) are one of the most used services around the world.
I am not sure how bluemountain is doing currently, but it has partnership with MS, and I suppose that should bring in a fair amount of cash.
I do agree with GeoCities. It was a great opportunity lost. - mrASSMAN, on 10/12/2007, -3/+17You'd have to be an idiot to think that Google has no plan for Youtube. It's going to become one of their largest sources of advertising revenue in the very near future. Plus owning the largest single share of internet users on the entire internet is an invaluable resource for an internet-company such as Google.
- Cglass, on 10/12/2007, -13/+26This list is bogus, they listed Skype and Hotmail as bad acquisitions, nuff' said.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+15This article brought to you by the kind folks at the I-Just-Made-This-*****-Up Department.
- danielxmorris, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11I wouldn't really call Hotmail a dud purchase, considering its the most popular web email available. Just because it "did little to improve Microsoft's internet portal ambitions" doesn't mean it hasn't made them plenty of money.
- nroose, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8If it weren't for Hotmail, MS would not be on the list of the top internet sites. Buying Hotmail made MS look like it was an internet company!
- gaqua, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9Hahaha, I used to work for @Home, and then they "merged" with Excite, which I thought was stupid, and they bought BlueMountain which I also thought was stupid. They also bought a bunch of other "content" sites like Webshots and crap like that. Terribly, terribly managed company.
If @Home had been run well, and never bought Excite or BlueMountain....well, who knows. No sense in re-imagining the past. Might as well say "If tacos were sentient..." - RoboPimp3000, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7"Yahoo's ludicrous overpayment for Broadcast.com gave Cuban the money to go out and buy the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and permanently implant himself on the American psyche. Unforgivable."
It can be argued that Yahoo is also directly responsible for the show "The Benefactor" - johnnyredcap, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Wow the memories. I can not believe how old I am getting. I mean it does not seem like that long ago that I thought Excite and Lycos were the greatest search engines ever made, and who the hell knew what a Google was. And yet I have not thought about either site in years. Just a few minutes ago was the first time I have even checked on those sites in forever. I can not believe they are even still around.
Excite doesn't look like it has changed at all. What a joke. However I like the way Lycos is currently laid out.
Go get it Lycos. - LaundroMat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6@ 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. - Pelapp, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Exactly... Plus the fact that it linked the users to Messenger. It greatly boosted the Microsoft/MSN presence on peoples online fare.
- Zippo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I miss the days when Hotmail wasn't littered with MSN ***** and when Geocities was actually a viable hosting option...
As for Blue Mountain, let's not forget that in 1999, online greeting card sites were pretty popular. Blue Mountain is still around today, making real greeting cards. - kasted, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Big money meaning, they got ripped off.
- appetite, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9Youtube will be on this list in two to three years. Give it time.
I've already had a couple instances where what I wanted wasn't on Youtube, but was on another site. A little more of that and people will begin to notice.
If Facebook goes for $1 billion then that will also be on the list in two to three years. - jenoosia, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Just had to laugh at the No.1 pick. I guess the world (or at least the NBA) would be a very different place right now if the blunder hadn't happened.
- leonwehttam, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I really dont understand why hotmail is on this list, every non-geek i know such as my family members seem to have a hotmail account and use it regularly...when i say hey do you want a gmail account? They just go whats gmail?
- jeriqo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4This list misses Mirabilis (ICQ) bought by AOL then killed like Netscape.
- jambox, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4HOTBOT!
Yeah man I loved that. Had a job years ago where I had to sort out these crappy old PCs for clients, get them working again - hotbot was the only search engine around at the time that could reliably find drivers based on the model number printed on a motherboard...
It is still around but I think it's just a wrapper for other search engines, shame since the old algorithm was a cracker.
Funny how the technology we use depends more on the decisions the people who own it make, rather than how good it is - but then we knew that already... Microsoft being a good example! - iamdanielj, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I was always a hotbot man, I swear that was the ultimate search engine.
And I had a geocities website, and a homestead website....lol. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4homestead online site builder FTW!!!
- brundlefly76, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I *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. - spacey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Finally a top 10 list of ***** that includes Excite@Home twice - once for Excite and once for Blue Mountain.
Gagua - yes it was poorly managed, but the acquisitions were not the dumbest things @Home did, it was their negotiations with the MSO's that caused the company to die. Rogers was making money with each new Rogers@Home subscriber, and @Home would lose money with each new Rogers customer. Not a very equal 'partnership'. - tsunamisteve, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@ assman
That sounds great for Google, but what about all the teenagers that want to look at 10 second clips of some dude busting his balls on a rail grind? I don't see how Google can possibly turn YouTube into a massive advertising engine without ruining the experience. - dstz, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4My worst acquisition on internet was a machine to make chocolated beverages (stupid). Best one a 400W HPS. What, that's not the subject ?
- moyness, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Hotmail should not have been in the list, If you asked me to name 3 free email providers i would say Gmail,yahoo and hotmail in that order, ask anyone else, chances are they would say the same,and if this means failure, then I don't know what success is..
while some of them are accurate, most of the entries in the list are just BS and opinionated asshattery, Bring us facts and figures before you write something like this. - DerekJ212, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Hmm, wonder what that high pressure sodium light was used for...
- mateo60, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I 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. - egrumling, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@drlha
I remember when @Home brought in George Bell for "adult supervision" at the request of the board (or something like that... memory is a little foggy and there's just too many press releases from that time to know for sure). AT&T was a majority shareholder after the TCI and Media One* acquisitions and thought that the founders of @Home didn't have a clue, so they wanted to get someone "with experience" to run the place. George Bell's prior experience was running, along with a few traditional media companies, QVC.
George didn't get it. The early business plan for @Home was written when AOL was still king, and there was still a lot of questions about how content was going to exist on the Internet. It was never revised. That, combined with poor network management**, led to the @Home fall from grace. At least it was easy to know when to sell (right after the announcement of the Excite deal).
*AT&T ruined the cable industry with the Media One purchase. Paid entirely too much for a poorly managed company. Comcast is still trying to exercise the ghosts from that one.
**Part of the perception problem with cable modems in the early days was directly due to @Home's poor capacity planning and over-reliance on proxy servers. When we launched cable modem service, @home provisioned 7 T-1 lines. We maxed them out in about 2 months. Several months later we finally got a DS-3 (45 Mbps) that was maxed out as soon as we got it "into production," but they had another on order. We finally got a few months out of the second, and the third, but by that time, Verizon was pushing a 4-5 month lead time for circuits. Strangely enough, this coincided with them launching their own bundled DSL service. The proxy servers did provide a little relief, but only if someone else had looked at the same static web page you did earlier. They never did do any deals to push content to them in advance (like what Akamai (sp?) does now). That would have made them work much better. - RunOut, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1MySpace Bought for $580M:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4695495.stm
MySpace $1 billion Search Deal with Google:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/07/google-pegged-to-search-myspace/
Not too much of a mistake - yomimedia, on 09/18/2008, -0/+1Looking 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.
- mrASSMAN, on 10/12/2007, -4/+5Everybody still has it.. I try to move them away from it because it's a horrible service, but it's reality. Yahoo and Hotmail control most of the email market.
- zoom1928, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1It's interesting how none of the comments hit upon why most of those acquisitions were failures. I was involved with two, and I know four of the others that happened almost exactly the same way. The accountants and investors made millions while in most of the cases the technical people that built the business got nothing. I wrote what I think was the second online card system (put it online about a week after I first saw the one from MIT that I believe was the first), and I was hired by Blue Mountain. The "millions" in stock I was given was class B, and the owners made it nearly worthless by voting to increase the number of class B shares by 100 fold. When it sold I made around $12k for three years of work. Of course the financial employees that contributed nothing to the company except complaints and whining made millions. Of course after that screwing most of the technical employees fled. When you make nearly nothing after being promised a part of the winnings and after the owners prove their extreme dishonesty and greed then you always lose good employees. After that happens most companies go down the drain.
I now work with a division of a large charity involved with acquisitions. I am very successful because up front when we negotiate we tell the investors that we will not allow them to screw-over the technical guys that built the company. Of course we're usually told, as happened last week, "***** you get out of my damn office. We'll rip them off if we want to." You got to keep the people that created the software and keep things running. It's too bad that most buyers of companies have no clue of that fact. Instead they play along with the idea that you should always screw over the engineers. Of course after the buy-out they're left without the ability to improve, or even in some cases, maintain what they have. Look at how many of the companies in the list have failed to improve their products after they screwed over their technical people. It's nearly all of them. - geronimo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I will never forgive yahoo for creating Mark Cuban.
I did some consulting for excite. They had a huge room full of drives for 2 terrbytes of storage and overprice EMC gear.
Google did away with those shenanigans thankfully. - bbxboy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Personally, 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.
- ICSU, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1That's just because MS owns it. It's firmly connected to average person's OS. They could have built their own email service, and it would have the same popularity, but they just didn't want to wait and bother, obviously.
- drlha, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The Excite purchase made no sense, at the time or in hindsight. I'm still baffled as to why they did it. @Home at the time was doing nice business providing cable internet to everyone, who was free to use Excite/Yahoo/MSN as they liked. Why did they need to purchase it? I can only assume they looked at the AOL business model and thought "that is where we should be heading", where everyone else in the business was thinking the whole market was heading away from AOL. Sure enough, @Home went out of business, and the cable companies figured out they didn't need @home to provide internet. Oh well.
- bonyicecream, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Probably 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... - jkr06, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Didn't you hear about Skype 3.0's Click to Call feature.
- sjalloul, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Hear me out here, I think MySpace is the worst mistake that has been made by Rupert Murdock. What was he thinking, perhaps it should improve it's overall look and create a clean interface but allow users to tailor limited aspect of their profile. As of now MySpace does not have a competitive edge over similar social networking websites. How could MySpace be in any position to compete? For all I know...I can keep creating generic accounts....Myspace you call that measuring success or how many users you have?!? Rubert is one miss guided fool...watch is all crumble in the next 5 years, I know i am not the only one with those views.
- seocc, on 05/05/2009, -0/+0Wow - the influence of companies giving into shareholders wanting their company to acquire internet companies during the initial internet boom.
- JuniorSample, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I know this is small potato's compared to these big numbers, but how about just the URL name "Business.com" for 7 million!!
- AceTracer, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1The 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. -
Show 51 - 64 of 64 discussions
Check out the new & improved 
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is