
When Excite nearly bought Google - illdave
https://www.submarinecrm.com/blog/when-excite-nearly-bought-google
======
jkldotio
There's an interview with George Bell on TV that's just fascinating from a
historical perspective.[1]

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".

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd7VwynZOZI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd7VwynZOZI)

~~~
dccoolgai
To me, the most interesting thing about that clip has nothing to do with tech,
but with journalism - the show host is actually asking him some kind of tough
questions and putting him on the spot instead of just giving him a stage to
spew his talking points... I kind of remember when journalism worked that way,
but it's jarring to see it in the context of modern "talking point
regurgitation machine" journalism where the stories are written by corporate
press secretaries and copy-pasted into media.

~~~
jofo25
The UK still has a good selection of sharp, merciless interviewers. My
favourite is Jeremy Paxman, he's quite a polarising personality but cuts
through bs like paper.

~~~
lotsofpulp
I don't understand why interviews (for journalism purposes) are conducted face
to face. A written back and forth, such as in a forum or thread, is much more
useful at cutting through the BS rather than having to waste time listening to
evasive responses. I guess there may be some value in the facial reactions of
the subject, but most of the time, if there was a written transcript, I'd have
saved a lot of my time and energy.

~~~
untog
I absolutely disagree. It is far, far easier to be evasive by text -
especially when you have time to compose a reply. Face to face, real time
interviews show you when the interviewee doesn't want to answer a question,
when they're bluffing, etc.

~~~
timje1
There might be some people in the world for whom text reveals more of the
interviewee's secrets, and other people that pick up more via face to face
interviews.

I'm willing to bet that for most people the latter is more intuitive.

------
vijayboyapati
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.

In business inertia is often death.

~~~
mynameisvlad
Office is available for free online, and has been for 4 years now (it was
released to the public in June 2010). It's integrated into Sky/OneDrive and
available for anyone to use for reading and editing documents.

~~~
sesqu
That'd be Office Online, the document collaboration environment, not the full-
featured executables.

------
dccoolgai
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?".

~~~
altcognito
Not surprising though that they thought this.

When I worked computer sales in retail in 1995, I would frequently have people
come up and ask me during a sale or some such nonsense: "What would I use this
thing for?" Usually it went a little like this:

* Do you write letters or papers?

* Kids who write papers?

* Interested in looking on the internet? No?

* Have a college kid who is on the internet? (do you know what email is?) No?

* Play games? (fairly rare) No?

* Keep track of finances? Don't want to do that?

At this point I just kind of shrugged my shoulders. Outside of some attempts
to explain that computers were something good to learn about (in particular
for kids), it was a pretty hard sell.

Probably over 50% of the time they asked that question - "What is this thing
good for?", I knew where we would end up.

~~~
meleva
this is pretty much how my conversations go when I tell people that I want to
buy a 3d printer.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
I could probably build a 3D printer from scratch, controller, actuators, and
all, and I still ask myself the "What is this thing good for?" question.

Okay, sarcasm aside, it looks like these things are finally starting to slowly
crack the door open on the realm of real-world usability. This realization
dawned on me when I figured that some parts of the quadcopter I've been
toiling over in recent days, might as well be 3D printed: the battery holder,
maybe the motor mounts, etc. Gimbal parts would be pretty easy too.

And it dawned on me again yesterday, during SpaceX's dog and pony show for the
Dragon 2, when they showed the 3D printed rocket engines.

------
Theodores
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.

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.

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.

------
billmalarky
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.

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codva
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?

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batbomb
Dear Submarine,

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.

~~~
illdave
Noted, thanks for the headsup - I'll look into that and fix it. I've not spent
much time yet making it responsive, so haven't done much iOS testing, but I
will.

~~~
batbomb
Thanks, really. I know it's HN and I'm not trying to pick on you, but it's
seriously starting to drive me insane. I can't remember where else I saw it,
but in the last week I think I've ran into this several times (I think Salon
or TNW or somebody else started doing it too). It makes me think my phone is
broken or something.

In any case, it was a great article.

------
superasn
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.

~~~
sumedh
The execs didn't miss the obvious. The excite CEO and others acknowledged that
the Google's algorithm is much better. They were worried that its so good that
people won't stay on their portals. They just could not figure out how to
monetize it so they passed.

~~~
judk
This is why Google's IPO was headlined with the statement "Focus on the user
and all else will follow."

------
KhalPanda
I love reading little stories and tidbits about executive-level coulda-woulda-
shoulda moments.

~~~
yitchelle
It is interesting on things like this plays out. If the executive bought it
and it tanked, the exec would be blamed for make such a bad decision. However,
if the acquisition became 100x, the exec would be hailed as a visionary and a
hero.

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squigs25
Adapt or die

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).

~~~
judk
If Excite killed Google, it is likely someone else (perhaps even Googlers who
hadn't been hired yet in the hypothetical world) would build Google instead.

------
panzi
Is it a coincidence I never heard of "Excite"? Probably not.

~~~
brickmort
It's an internet company in the same vein as Yahoo and AOL (a hub for news,
weather, etc). It peaked in popularity around the late 90s, early 00s. I
almost said that it has since shut down but I just checked and, surprisingly,
it's still up today: [http://msxml.excite.com/](http://msxml.excite.com/)

~~~
antihero
The normal URL is more indicative of what it was like:

[http://excite.com/](http://excite.com/)

~~~
ronaldx
Noscript advice from that site:

"Tried everything and still can't sign in? It could be due to one of these
issues: Your computer's clock may be set ahead 10 years or more."

Mmm, sort of.

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teh_klev
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.

------
pbreit
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?

A better headline might be "Excite never even close to buying Backrub".

------
jpadkins
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.

------
bhartzer
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...

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happycube
I remember my version of @home's ad fondly after buying Excite:

"I don't wanna grow, I wanna buy a crappy portal! (let's grow!)"

------
rokhayakebe
This is the story I think of when I hear about Google founders described as if
they've always had this "Vision."

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DominikR
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.

They just would have degraded it to something like Altavista with tons of
links and banners on the main page.

~~~
wslh
Yes, I agree mainly because you need a lot of freedom to follow the original
Google path (gmail? adwords? google reader? pay per click?) and Google was a
gamechanger.

I imagine the new CEO saying that you need to put banners, pay per
impressions, don't try to reinvent the wheel with gmail, etc.

~~~
LaikaF
Excite already had a web mail product too.

It's what I had before gmail.

~~~
wslh
But not like gmail. Remember that gmail was a gamechanger too: AJAX + Threaded
Inbox including your sent e-mails.

~~~
sesqu
No one I knew cared about the ajax or the threaded inbox (sometimes considered
anti-features). It was all about the gigabyte free space, with labels over
folders a distant second.

~~~
wslh
Yes, you are right about the storage (now I can recall the feeling). But the
main point remains valid: Google was a gamechanger.

------
CletusTSJY
Here's George Bell on LinkedIn.
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgebell](https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgebell)

