6 ms·

When Excite nearly bought Google

82 points by illdave 12y ago

codva 12y ago
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?
squigs25 12y ago
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).
- illdave 12y ago
  According to In The Plex, that deal was actually very close to going through up until that moment. Excite's VCs pushed to get the new CEO on board at some point during the negotiations with Google (and up until that point, Excite's engineer-led founding team had the most control). Strange to think how different things might be if that deal had gone through.
- judk 12y ago
  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.
KhalPanda 12y ago
I love reading little stories and tidbits about executive-level coulda-woulda-shoulda moments.
- yitchelle 12y ago
  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.
- personlurking 12y ago
  There needs to be an Executive Stories of Note...(after Letters of Note)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
dccoolgai 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    this is pretty much how my conversations go when I tell people that I want to buy a 3d printer.
    - dccoolgai 12y ago
      That's precisely what makes me so excited about them (and physical computing in general). The next Jobs/Woz team is working on that stuff right now and it seems as weird to the layperson as PCs did back when the Berkley Homebrew Club was doing its thing.
    - Florin_Andrei 12y ago
      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.
DominikR 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    Excite already had a web mail product too. It's what I had before gmail.
    - wslh 12y ago
      But not like gmail. Remember that gmail was a gamechanger too: AJAX + Threaded Inbox including your sent e-mails.
      - sesqu 12y ago
        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 12y ago
        Yes, you are right about the storage (now I can recall the feeling). But the main point remains valid: Google was a gamechanger.
jkldotio 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      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.
      - mksaunders 12y ago
teh_klev 12y ago
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.
Theodores 12y ago
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.
bhartzer 12y ago
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...
superasn 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    This is why Google's IPO was headlined with the statement "Focus on the user and all else will follow."
jpadkins 12y ago
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.
panzi 12y ago
Is it a coincidence I never heard of "Excite"? Probably not.
- brickmort 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    The normal URL is more indicative of what it was like: http://excite.com/ http://excite.com/
    - LukeB_UK 12y ago
      It's like Yahoo! on steroids...
    - ronaldx 12y ago
      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.
    - adventured 12y ago
      Wow it still looks like it did, essentially, a decade ago.
    - koblas 12y ago
      It's pretty amazing that it's almost the same look that was the final iteration before the bankruptcy.
    - merrua 12y ago
      Its so ugly. I hate that shade of yellow in their colour scheme
rokhayakebe 12y ago
This is the story I think of when I hear about Google founders described as if they've always had this "Vision."
billmalarky 12y ago
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.
CletusTSJY 12y ago
Here's George Bell on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgebell https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgebell
batbomb 12y ago
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.
- untog 12y ago
  On the flip side (and I haven't used this site on iOS, so can't weigh in) the fact that Apple decided to turn over 50px of usable space at the bottom of the page to their UI and effectively make it unusable for touch events is really, utterly infuriating.
  - rm445 12y ago
    Hold on, you have to think about the users, not just of your site, but all the sites out there. It's utterly infuriating as a user to have your UI hijacked, by which I mean actions which are normally consistent across the system stopping working. And it's utterly certain that if UI can be hijacked some people will do so. Maybe there is some perfect-world solution where, if something totally wonderful can happen if the UI would get out of the way, and the user is happy with it, it could be made to happen. But in practical terms when dealing with the Web as the messy place it is, the only realistic way to limit the damage web designers can wreak, is to strictly limit the capacity to override system interfaces.
- raldi 12y ago
  What's a bottom touch event?
- illdave 12y ago
  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 12y ago
happycube 12y ago
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!)"
vijayboyapati 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    That'd be Office Online, the document collaboration environment, not the full-featured executables.
pbreit 12y ago
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".

82 points by illdave 12y ago

codva 12y ago

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?

squigs25 12y ago

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).

illdave 12y ago
According to In The Plex, that deal was actually very close to going through up until that moment. Excite's VCs pushed to get the new CEO on board at some point during the negotiations with Google (and up until that point, Excite's engineer-led founding team had the most control). Strange to think how different things might be if that deal had gone through.
judk 12y ago
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.

KhalPanda 12y ago

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

yitchelle 12y ago
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.
personlurking 12y ago
There needs to be an Executive Stories of Note...(after Letters of Note)

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

dccoolgai 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  this is pretty much how my conversations go when I tell people that I want to buy a 3d printer.
  - dccoolgai 12y ago
    That's precisely what makes me so excited about them (and physical computing in general). The next Jobs/Woz team is working on that stuff right now and it seems as weird to the layperson as PCs did back when the Berkley Homebrew Club was doing its thing.
  - Florin_Andrei 12y ago
    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.

DominikR 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  Excite already had a web mail product too. It's what I had before gmail.
  - wslh 12y ago
    But not like gmail. Remember that gmail was a gamechanger too: AJAX + Threaded Inbox including your sent e-mails.
    - sesqu 12y ago
      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 12y ago
        Yes, you are right about the storage (now I can recall the feeling). But the main point remains valid: Google was a gamechanger.

jkldotio 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.
    - mksaunders 12y ago

teh_klev 12y ago

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.

Theodores 12y ago

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.

bhartzer 12y ago

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...

superasn 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  This is why Google's IPO was headlined with the statement "Focus on the user and all else will follow."

jpadkins 12y ago

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.

panzi 12y ago

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

brickmort 12y ago
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 12y ago
  The normal URL is more indicative of what it was like: http://excite.com/ http://excite.com/
  - LukeB_UK 12y ago
    It's like Yahoo! on steroids...
  - ronaldx 12y ago
    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.
  - adventured 12y ago
    Wow it still looks like it did, essentially, a decade ago.
  - koblas 12y ago
    It's pretty amazing that it's almost the same look that was the final iteration before the bankruptcy.
  - merrua 12y ago
    Its so ugly. I hate that shade of yellow in their colour scheme

rokhayakebe 12y ago

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

billmalarky 12y ago

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.

CletusTSJY 12y ago

Here's George Bell on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgebell https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgebell

batbomb 12y ago

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.

untog 12y ago
On the flip side (and I haven't used this site on iOS, so can't weigh in) the fact that Apple decided to turn over 50px of usable space at the bottom of the page to their UI and effectively make it unusable for touch events is really, utterly infuriating.
- rm445 12y ago
  Hold on, you have to think about the users, not just of your site, but all the sites out there. It's utterly infuriating as a user to have your UI hijacked, by which I mean actions which are normally consistent across the system stopping working. And it's utterly certain that if UI can be hijacked some people will do so. Maybe there is some perfect-world solution where, if something totally wonderful can happen if the UI would get out of the way, and the user is happy with it, it could be made to happen. But in practical terms when dealing with the Web as the messy place it is, the only realistic way to limit the damage web designers can wreak, is to strictly limit the capacity to override system interfaces.
raldi 12y ago
What's a bottom touch event?
illdave 12y ago
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 12y ago

happycube 12y ago

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!)"

vijayboyapati 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  That'd be Office Online, the document collaboration environment, not the full-featured executables.

pbreit 12y ago

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".