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1999: Yahoo buys GeoCities for $3.5 billion 2009: Oracle buys Sun Microsystems for $5.6 billion (net of cash).

• potatolicious 17y ago
  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.
  • gamache 17y ago
    I think that was his point.
• chaosmachine 17y ago
  According to the article, Geocities claimed to have around 3.5 million sites at the time. That puts the acquisition cost at $1000 a user.. Wow.