There's an interview with George Bell on TV that's just fascinating from a historical perspective.[1]<p>It's pretty amazing that the show host had installed an ad blocker plugin for his browser and was asking about the potential impact on revenues. I usually have low expectations when it comes to technology journalists. Here in Australia a one Marc Fennell, who is 28 years old and hosts technology and gaming programming on TV, called Heartbleed a "virus".<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd7VwynZOZI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd7VwynZOZI</a>
It's incredible to hear stories where businesses will self immolate just to protect a cherished cash cow. Microsoft's reluctance to make many of their products free online can be seen as a special case of this. And game theory wise Google was quite sharp to start offering under-featured products such as Google docs for free online. Despite the fact that these products had only a fraction of the features of e.g. Word, they were a direct attack on Microsoft's cherished cash cow (Office), and put Microsoft in the incredibly uncomfortable position of either having to begin innovating and offering their products online at deeply discounted prices (and hurting themselves further), or just sitting still while Google's initially awful offerings became more feature rich and a more threatening competitor.<p>In business inertia is often death.
I love reading anecdotes like this. I think my favorite is when Woz offered to sell HP the first Apple and the execs laughed him out of the room saying "who is ever going to want a home PC?".
Douglas Adams would have enjoyed that story. Success and the wonder of hindsight needs naysayers to dismiss things, whether it is those great authors and their rejection letters or something like this.<p>The thinking - 'it is too good' - actually persists with dating websites where hooking someone up with someone is a nightmare - it means no more subscription revenue. Maybe it is time for Google to do a dating website with some 'don't be evil' thinking behind it.<p>Google's early success was probably due to a) having a better product and b) word of mouth. I certainly remember sharing the tip with colleagues in the days before they had the text-only adverts. If I remember correctly they did not know how to monetize it then. But again, they might have known all along but pretended otherwise for the purposes of the legend.
Was anyone else surprised that Google would try to sell for only $1.6 million when they were apparently already large enough to have employees at the beginning of the dotcom boom? That number seems way too low.
I remember when Excite reviewed my website back in 1997. I thought I had won the Internet :) IIRC, they gave me 2.5 whatever their icon was called, excites?
Dear Submarine,<p>Your mobile page blows on iOS. You and all the sites like you need to stop hijacking the bottom touch event preventing me from bringing up the interface to press back. As far as I am concerned, this action is the new pop-up window or the web because it forces me to perform a different action than I expect to go back.
How many of you would have done the same if Twitter was pitched to you? I'm sure I would have, since even after a year it was around I could not understand why in the world would somebody be interested in "following" people and see what they're doing all the time. Every time there was another story on Techcrunch about Twitter, I thought to myself, they must be getting paid to push this over and over. It is only know I see how big an impact it has on our lives. Sometimes it is easy to miss the obvious.
Adapt or die<p>I guess putting technology in the hands of the non-visionary executive with a strong business sense is basically asking for your [tech] company to die. You need engineers or at least visionary product people in management positions making these kinds of decisions. While it would have been sad if excite had bought Google, it would never happen because they didn't have the vision. And if they did get the vision, Google probably could have continued to become a semi-success in that environment (although probably nothing like what it is today).
I think it's about time Merrill Chapman penned a new and updated edition of "In Search of Stupidity" geared towards internet tech firm calamities and stuff like this.
Is there a single example of some company buying another for a few million and the core of the acquisition (people or product) going on to being legitimately worth 100s of millions or billions?<p>A better headline might be "Excite never even close to buying Backrub".
Moral of the story: Don't let your current business model cloud your judgement. When evaluating something new and foreign, use first principles to see how this will impact the future state of the world.
I remember back when it was so easy to "game" Excite and get your site to rank really well. The site certainly sent a lot of traffic back then...
I remember my version of @home's ad fondly after buying Excite:<p>"I don't wanna grow, I wanna buy a crappy portal! (let's grow!)"
I think it's safe to say that Google never would have been the success that it is today, if they would have bought them.<p>They just would have degraded it to something like Altavista with tons of links and banners on the main page.
Here's George Bell on LinkedIn. <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgebell" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgebell</a>