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Comment by Rayzar | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this is a great find. I bet whoever wrote it painfully had to swallow his words as the years passed and Google became what it is today. It just shows that with the right strategy and ideas, any startup can unsettled an established field and come out tops.

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    > I bet whoever wrote it painfully had to swallow his words...
                                                      ^^^

her words, that is [it's by Kalpana Mohan] http://www.kalpanamohan.org/

and she doesn't seem to be particularly ashamed of her words: the article is listed in her list of writing samples: http://www.kalpanamohan.org/writing_samples.shtml

Wait, even Google was admitting that they were sacrificing short-term revenue for long-term gain. Why should she have to eat her words?

It's very clear that the founders had to be talked into advertising only after the search appliance failed. (I'm almost positive only RedHat actually purchased one of the damn things, which makes sense since PageRank/BackRub isn't going to help you find Word documents in an intranet.)

They had text-based ads back then, they even mention it in the article.

The critique the author was leveling was that they were resisting /banner/ ads, and therefore putting their scruples ahead of good sense. Definitely seems silly in hindsight.

    > Why should she have to eat her words?

I didn't say that, the parent of my first comment did:-)

I very much doubt whether the author had to swallow her own words a few years later. Google’s business model was awfully hazy about the time the article was written. The founders were clueless just as much as the author was about how they were going to scale the monetization. The two Stanford alums certainly did not foresee Google as what it evolved into a few years later.

I don't have a problem with what she wrote. She acknowledged that Google was successful in terms of market share.

She was just questioning their refusal to run certain ads. Adwords had been implemented, but Google was making more money off of customizing intrasite search tools for large corporations.

Sure, you can blame her for not seeing adwords as being disruptive and predicting a potential for huge profits. But it is so much easier to discern a disruptive technology as being successful once it starts making large amounts of money.

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