Geocities: Lessons So Far

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30 points·edw519··7 comments

I for one am happy that geocities is no more. In 1997 I put up a slightly embarrassing personal page there (I was 17 at the time) and then forgot a password. For years every time anyone (e.g. prospective employer) would search for my name they would come across that site. My numerous attempts to contact Yahoo about the password were unsuccessful.

well apparently it's going to be archived forever now...

Yahoo should throw this guy a fucking sitemap. That's the least they could do.

1999: Yahoo buys GeoCities for $3.5 billion

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

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.

I think that was his point.

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.

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