Fun fact: the stock used to buy GeoCities would still be worth billions of dollars, even if the vesting/lock-in schedule was extraordinarily long. Anyway, the

Fun fact: the stock used to buy GeoCities would still be worth billions of dollars, even if the vesting/lock-in schedule was extraordinarily long. Anyway, the interesting thing about a lot of the big late '90s dot-com acquisitions that now look like sheer insanity is that they were all a product of everyone latching onto what they thought the current "big thing" was. Back then it was portals, aggregation, hosting, and ISPs. But it turned out that technological advancements erased a lot of the reasons why those things could be profitable (at least the way they were). Instead the next big things were search, web-apps, and social features (Web 2.0). Livejournal, blogger, flickr, google, google maps, etc. What people figured out, eventually, is that even if you have a million users that doesn't mean that it's easy to make even a million dollars a year. Now, of course, there are lots of people who think they know what the "big thing" is, and companies are again shelling out billions for acquisitions, few of which will seem sensible in 10 years, or even 5.