

Geocities: Lessons So Far - edw519
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1961

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cptrfsn
I for one am happy that geocities is no more. In 1997 I put up a slightly
embarrassing personal page there (I was 17 at the time) and then forgot a
password. For years every time anyone (e.g. prospective employer) would search
for my name they would come across that site. My numerous attempts to contact
Yahoo about the password were unsuccessful.

~~~
there
well apparently it's going to be archived forever now...

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mahmud
Yahoo should throw this guy a fucking sitemap. That's the least they could do.

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briansmith
1999: Yahoo buys GeoCities for $3.5 billion

2009: Oracle buys Sun Microsystems for $5.6 billion (net of cash).

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potatolicious
Not the same. Sun owns the rights to numerous important bits of technology
that is widely used throughout the internet and very difficult (if not
impossible) to replicate (you try inventing your own programming language and
make it massively popular).

GeoCities... has... a bunch of servers? There's _no_ lock-in (people can move
anywhere else with almost no barrier). They sell a highly commoditized product
with no differentiation (in fact, they were competitively disadvantaged, even
in 1999).

One was a _much_ dumber purchase than the other. Time will tell how smart the
Sun purchase was, but I'm willing to bet it will be a lot smarter in hindsight
than Yahoo was with GeoCities.

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gamache
I think that was his point.

