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There are plenty of lispers left. I'm one of them. I also used to work at ITA. The bit that is breathtakingly wrong is the notion that you can just take some s

There are plenty of lispers left. I'm one of them. I also used to work at ITA. The bit that is breathtakingly wrong is the notion that you can just take some smart lisper, lock them in a room, and have them replicate what ITA did and have that be a viable business. See martincmartin's and my comments later in this thread to learn why that would be incredibly hard. With a smart enough team and enough time and money, you could certainly do it, but this is a project that would take many years and its unlikely anyone would be able to keep funding for that long. ITA had a much easier job: it was competing with very poorly designed systems that ran on mainframes and had very little CPU power available.

gruseom 16y ago
Given what you and martincmartin are saying, I am left wondering why Google was able to buy ITA for so little. How can such a thing be worth less than a billion dollars?
- MichaelSalib 16y ago
  Because there's a rather finite amount of money spent on air travel which means that the valuation of any one company in that sector will be well within Google's means?
  - gruseom 16y ago
    Perhaps. But in that case it's a much smaller market than I imagined. Also relevant is that ITA raised $100M in 2006, so their $700M exit is hardly a home run by VC standards. It doesn't seem to match the astonishingly strong technical and market position you (convincingly) describe. http://www.itasoftware.com/news-events/press-release.html?id=103 http://www.itasoftware.com/news-events/press-release.html?id.... Note that the round included Sequoia who are known for caring only about big markets.
    - jsnell 16y ago
      ITA raised all that money to build a reservation system to replace the old mainframe systems that are fabulously expensive to run. That would have been a market of the kind that required outside investement from a company that was already profitable (I think ITA had more people working on the reservation system than the search), and that a big VC would love to bet on. From what I hear it worked technically, but failed commercially due to the badly timed recession. It seems like a fair bet that Google's offer wasn't putting a lot of value on the reservation system. Even if it could be made to work, it's not the kind of a business that Google is usually in.
  - peterb 16y ago
    The margins in air travel are also slim. Google did a very smart thing here. There business model can support the ITA purchase, not many other businesses could do this. The kicker is they also just hired a lot of talent.

gruseom 16y ago

Given what you and martincmartin are saying, I am left wondering why Google was able to buy ITA for so little. How can such a thing be worth less than a billion dollars?

MichaelSalib 16y ago
Because there's a rather finite amount of money spent on air travel which means that the valuation of any one company in that sector will be well within Google's means?
- gruseom 16y ago
  Perhaps. But in that case it's a much smaller market than I imagined. Also relevant is that ITA raised $100M in 2006, so their $700M exit is hardly a home run by VC standards. It doesn't seem to match the astonishingly strong technical and market position you (convincingly) describe. http://www.itasoftware.com/news-events/press-release.html?id=103 http://www.itasoftware.com/news-events/press-release.html?id.... Note that the round included Sequoia who are known for caring only about big markets.
  - jsnell 16y ago
    ITA raised all that money to build a reservation system to replace the old mainframe systems that are fabulously expensive to run. That would have been a market of the kind that required outside investement from a company that was already profitable (I think ITA had more people working on the reservation system than the search), and that a big VC would love to bet on. From what I hear it worked technically, but failed commercially due to the badly timed recession. It seems like a fair bet that Google's offer wasn't putting a lot of value on the reservation system. Even if it could be made to work, it's not the kind of a business that Google is usually in.
- peterb 16y ago
  The margins in air travel are also slim. Google did a very smart thing here. There business model can support the ITA purchase, not many other businesses could do this. The kicker is they also just hired a lot of talent.