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Topic: The most inflated "blue sky" market valuation EVER (Read 2243 times) |
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Walter Watts
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The most inflated "blue sky" market valuation EVER
« on: 2009-08-19 21:16:32 » |
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Warning! -- Walter takes a short trip in the "Way-Back" machine....
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The most inflated "blue sky" market valuation EVER
The January 19, 1999 - $6.7 billion merger of Excite and @Home became one of the largest mergers of two Internet companies ever; it combined @Home's high speed internet services and existing portal with Excite’s search engine and portal. The combined company also moved towards personalized web portal content.
The merger between Excite and @Home fell disastrously short of expectations. The stock which once soared at $128.34 a share in the first quarter of 1999 and had a market cap of $35 billion had fallen to $1 a share by the third quarter of 2001 when the company formally filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
[Walter]
IMHO, this merger had to have the most inflated "blue sky" market valuation EVER (relative to any real, put-your-hands-on assets) of any transaction I had ever seen to that date (and maybe even to now). I used Alta Vista as a search engine at the time and also made Excite my home page, ultimately using the two for what seemed like a very long time. (FYI--always with Netscape. NEVER used IE. NEVER got a virus.)
(Anyone remember Pointcast?) 
I mean hell! We're talking about a moderately-sized room full of 1999 server equipment and some crawler software, which is summarized by Wikipedia thusly:
"At launch, the Excite@Home service had two innovations which set it ahead of the other search engines. It used a fast, multi-threaded crawler (Scooter) which could cover a lot more Web pages than were believed to exist at the time and an efficient search back-end running on advanced hardware. As of 1998, it used 20 multi-processor machines using DEC's 64-bit Alpha processor. Together, the back-end machines had 130 GB of RAM and 500 GB of hard disk space, and received 13 million queries per day.This made AltaVista the first searchable, full-text database of a large part of the World Wide Web. The distinguishing feature of AltaVista was its minimalistic interface compared with other search engines of the time; a feature which was lost when it became a portal, but was regained when it refocused its efforts on its search function."
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Walter Watts
Tulsa Network Solutions, Inc.
No one gets to see the Wizard! Not nobody! Not no how!
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MoEnzyme
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Re:The most inflated "blue sky" market valuation EVER
« Reply #1 on: 2009-08-24 08:07:07 » |
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Hey,
That's not sooooooo way back. I know both of us were already in the CoV at that time.
:::me looks around, thinking of who all have left and arrived since then:::
okay, well maybe its kinda way back.
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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
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