http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/224981

Granted, $430MM of it was paid in Excite@Home stock which was worthless in short order but still, the previous owners took $350MM in cash. Their grandchildren will never have to work.

Another awesome E@H acquisition: iMall.com. They provided little storefronts for people to sell Harley Davidson keychains and stuff like that. Selling price: $425MM in E@H stock.

What most authors don't realize and that they often fail to grasp is that the fads are necessary. The failures are necessary. Sure it burns to be on the losing side of history, but it is important for that side to exist nonetheless. It is important to try out things nonetheless. Take the great internet fad example, Pets.com. Hindsight tells us that it's a terrible idea but we forget that people weren't excited by the fact that someone was selling pet food. They were excited that they were selling pet food through the internet and because we didn't have any reliable models of the time their reasoning told them that through scale such a thing might make a lot of money due to its reach. They were groping in the dark, but they were trying to hit upon the - at least from my perspective - vein of modern internet retail. They got it tragically and hilariously wrong, wiping out a large amount of investment, but we are all better off from this failure as an example. It helped us to hone our models. All of those failures from the unknown two people in some garage / living room to the big expensive messes like WebVan taught someone something and in general as a society we inched closer to a more refined understanding of things resulting in a better understanding of things. We now know for instance that X, Y, and Z are constraints in e-commerce and to be successful you need A, B, and C. Those things weren't readily deducible in the past, they are now apparent as a result of all of these "fads."

Is there any underlying thesis over here? I don't know, but what I do know is that maybe it is a bit unwise to be so quick to judge someone's efforts and work just because their motivations, direction, and/or the end result doesn't jive with your internal model. Just saying.

I did not say that failures were unimportant or bad. Nor did I say that you should never do projects that are shallow.

But I do think that failing at something that is hard or original is preferable to failing at something everyone else is doing.

It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits -- like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing beautiful women, flying through the stratosphere, or landing on the moon. First-rate pursuits -- involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding -- inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napoleon, a Churchill, or a Roosevelt can feel himself to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, or a Blake. Understanding is forever unattainable. --Malcom Muggeridge

The real solution is to rewrite the cultural narrative that praises these sorts of runaway successes as being essential. We're being held hostage by individualism. When we deify success, we say "it's ok to neglect your SO/family/health!"

Guarantee a good portion of you were thinking the same thing while reading that.

(Whether or not that communication paradigm will ever break a profit is, of course, a separate issue.)

In other words, don't compare snapchat to carrier pigeons, compare it to what those people would be using without snapchat: google chat, whatsapp, text messages, email, or one of 1000 other very slightly different ways to chat.

Sure, even a small number multiplied by millions can still become important. But let's not pretend that they invented the printing press.

Another way to look at it is that the internet and mobile data are what's connecting people. The fact that a bunch of people happen to use the same extremely shallow layer on top doesn't mean a whole lot.

Compare this to technologies that will matter, which are things like mass mobile data coverage, cloud computing, open hardware, distributed data analytics frameworks, low cost gene sequencing, 3D printing, etc.

Which seems to be the attractor that Google is tending towards now.

Not to detract from the cool things that Google does do, but their main web properties are looking tattered and the metooism of Google+ is not lost on the audience.

Curiously, Yahoo was perhaps a bit ahead of its time with a product called Yahoo 360 which did many of the same things that Facebook does today. But it was too much too soon and I think users were just overwhelmed.

As for Google+, I think Facebook still does a better job at being Facebook. Google+ has a handful of small annoyances that push me away and it doesn't seem like Google are fixing them. I would like to use Google+ more, but for the most part I use Google+ for hangouts.

Quote of the week. Thanks!

The difference was that the idea (quality, uncluttered search results) was a good one. The anti-Pointcast stance is well taken.

In my mind, a company is either breaking an equilibrium or is a fluctuation as an equilibrium is forming (a wave vs. a ripple). Startups in the classical sense are supposed to be "equilibrium breakers" (at least that's an assumption of venture capital), but there's value in being a ripple, too.

It just gets problematic when you're a ripple and you pass yourself off as a wave.

Pointcast was essential network news on the data wire (the notion that it was all advertisements is the sort of asinine over-rationalization to pitch a point that completely devastates the speaker's argument), and it brought to the mainstream the concept of push information. Whether it could be duplicated was irrelevant to the value which was in a very well known, widely deployed name and product. Through the perfect clarity of hindsight we can now proclaim the idea an obvious failure given that the execution faltered, but I hope most see past that inanity.

But then the author holds as the counterpoint the papers of the Google founders. Their notion was, essentially, links count for ranking points, and the more ranking points the more your links count. Is that the brilliant heavy lifting? Because it really isn't, and the fact that Google has excelled doesn't prove some sort of point.

Most of the heavy lifting in the world has gone completely without herald, much of it leading to failure.

I like to use Google search as an example since I was involved in building a competing search engine roughly at the same time as Google, so I happen to know a thing or two about the difficulty of that task.

Everyone and their dog thinks Google won solely because of PageRank, but anyone who has ever worked on web scale search engine can tell you that long before you can start worrying about ranking, you have to solve a bunch of problems that are really hard. Like copying a sufficiently large portion of the web onto your servers and processing that copy. Or even removing all the duplicates you will get (which is certainly much harder than I had imagined when I was tasked with this problem).

Google did all of these things as well as, or better than the competition. And on top of that they put together a cocktail of ranking methods that they were able to apply to information amounts for which there was effectively no practically oriented literature to turn to for advice. (Sure you could find lots of neat algorithms for this and that, but very few people had any experience with these at web scale).

Oh, and Google were not alone in having PageRank, or algorithms similar to PageRank. All web search engines I have any inside knowledge of (2-3) had this within six months of Google popularizing the idea.

Ask any one of the dozen or so web search engine companies that did web search if any of this was "easy".

What Google did in the late 90s was indeed heavy lifting. What pointcast did was relatively trivial and easy to copy in a few months.

edit: fixed typo

And FWIW, Google's real strength -- I guess I'm not everyone and their dog? -- was that they made a business case for the individual searcher. In the collapse of the .COM bubble an individual searching was seen as a close to worthless commodity, which is why every once-vigorous search engine had largely abandoned engineering advances. Google at the time first saw being the premiere search engine as a way of selling search appliances to business, and then with their text ads reinvigorating web ads after, again, the .COM collapse.

Alas, herein we see the magic of the survivorship bias: Google won, therefore Google must have done everything right. Anyone who lost must have done everything wrong. This is cargo cult thinking that does nobody any good. How you so casually write off the engineering challenges of Pointcast (an incredibly popular, multimedia-rich product, including pooled and queued subscription for millions of people, when bandwidth and computing power were very limited. A whole industry of Pointcast caching appliances appeared).

It's also interesting how you create the caricature of executives decrying the Google interface, as if it were the vindicated underdog after all of those years. Yet in those early years, the simplistic interface of Google was overwhelmingly the number 1 lauded feature of the site. Even before it was featured for good and quick search results, it was heralded for its simplicity.

Yes.

Look at who is successful, note some random characteristics of these individuals or businesses and then come up with your own theory of how success is deliberately attained. The share it over the web.

What's even more amusing is when someone sings Google's praises as a company that "did things differently" and then proceeds to dismiss any future innovators (who choose to do things differently) in the markets that Google is in.

I have often thought Google is a grossly misunderstood company, despite many facts being readily available. I'm still waiting for someone to show me otherwise.

Some years back I watched a presentation where a representative of one of the internet's most respected infrastructure companies claimed that the secret of Google's success was diversification and not relying on one product (search). He suggested the winning strategy was to release numerous products and cited non-search Google's products as examples. However, every example was a product released by another company (who, go figure, focused exclusively on one product) that Google had acquired. Some folks do know the facts about Google, but I see an inordinately large number of folks who you think would know the facts, but sadly do not. Instead they have their theories and are eager to share.

Well, I'd say otherwise. It was hard and there were big differences in how efficient the various platforms were. And sadly, not all of them could keep up with the development pace and the growth of the web.

(I used to work for two of Google's competitors in the late 90s and early 2000s, I had some knowledge of the internals of a third competitor and I eventually ended up working at Google for a few years).

> Alas, herein we see the magic of the survivorship bias: Google > won, therefore Google must have done everything right.

That was not what I said. Please do not pretend that I said that. I said that what Google did represented heavy lifting and what Pointcast did wasn't. I didn't touch on why Google succeeded at all. In fact, Google's success is entirely irrelevant.

At this point I have absolutely no idea what it is you are trying to say, then, as you apparently want to have your argument work in any way way that you think has some sort of lesson.

Google is successful today because they made business bets after the .COM crash that no one else was making. They brought a new approach that earned them attention and customers, and the rest is history. They did good engineering, but so did countless companies that failed or continue in obscurity. I suppose that is the "heavy lifting"?

Pointcast obviously was doing good engineering (they had an engineering scale that was pretty much unprecedented at the time), but their business case completely fell apart and the organization was dissolved. There were literally zero issues with the engineering of Pointcast, nor were they replaced by competitors (despite that apparently being your angle?). It simply wasn't a viable business at the time, and they couldn't find a way to make money.

Heck, even Twitter and Facebook led to a fundamental change of view of the internet, namely comms and social networking.

Compare this to pointcast or snapchat. What is the fundamental shift in point of view that happened due to pointcast of snapchat?

That is the very premise of the WWW. There was nothing new in that.

There is a too common "the victors write the history" sort of way of looking at things. And FWIW, the notion of counting, weighting and sorting on links is hardly a novel premise, but the schism that Google really brought was that they had a business case to spend far more computer resources on any given search, and on the content that served those results, the results being a much better product. When they in-housed some custom ad serving, the ascent of Google began.

Every product along the way -- whether it is long gone or a thriving success -- has an influence on technologies that follow. Pointcast is absolute the ancestor of RSS and other so-called push technologies, which themselves could be considered the ancestor to things like Twitter. To write it off, rewriting history based upon some sort of survivorship bias, just clouds the topic.

Yet their competitors insisted on treating each document as standalone until after Google popularised this idea.

At the time it very much was seen as a new idea, and the idea that this was good enough to deprecate lots of advanced search operators was so alien that it took a lot of us a long time to stop trying to construct complicated searches of the type encouraged by e.g. Altavista.

That's not entirely true, but this is the simplified view that the press popularized because it made for a story that was easier to report.

When you say "insisted" that seems to imply that other search engines were opposed to the idea (whether that is what you meant is another matter). Back in the 90s there were a lot of things we wanted to do, but that we either didn't have the manpower/time/money/talent to do or that we just hadn't figured out how to implement efficiently.

Ideas are cheap, but implementation is what counts.

I can remember that we discussed various link-aware ranking factors long before we even had built a proper search engine, but we needed to solve a lot of more pressing problems before that was even on the agenda (like build a crawler that didn't break the internet :)).

Once on the agenda the question was how to implement it at scale. Remember that this was before AWS, before Hadoop, and before a lot of other things that the average developer has easy access to today. We had a finite set of machines and a finite amount of money to buy machines. And even if we could have had all the hardware in the world we still had to figure out how to turn a lot of algorithms implemented for single machine processing into distributed systems.

That being said, the fellow I shared an office with was able to crank out a sufficiently scalable PageRank-like implementation in a few weeks.

Not that this made much of a difference PR-wise (and initially, it didn't have quite the impact on the quality of search results we had hoped for). In the view of the public only Google used PageRank and PageRank was the thing that made them stand out. End of story. The fact that Google did dozens of other things much better than their competition was...well, too complicated for journalists to report.

As a side note: I think we reinvented, and implemented, various subsets of MapReduce at least a dozen times during 1998-2000. A lot of our processing systems were based around sort and linear disk scans. Two things we knew how to do fast. Google (at some point) had the good sense to recognize that this could be turned into an infrastructure, which allowed them to spend less time building systems that could be expressed using these primitives. They also took the time to solve things like reliably storing data without getting too hung up on traditional filesystem semantics. (When data-sizes grow to the point where you have to maintain large population of disks, you can't really trust a single disk to be there tomorrow. We did some testing with RAID systems, but were unable to find a solution that was both cheap enough and reliable enough. Not having something akin to GFS was, in retrospect, a major impediment)

Building world changing products like Google is more like winning olympic gold. You need luck in genetics, competitors and training in addition to the work.

Mainly, because I very distinctly got the sense that you didn't read the article, but I find the idea that people who lift are doing so to ameliorate some other inadequacy that they feel.

I don't "lift" in the traditional sense, but as someone whose close circle of friends has recently undertaken a workout mantra, I'll share with you that the number one motivation is "to live longer".

Self-esteem is a tricky thing. Sometimes I think we'd be better as a culture if we didn't value it so much. In any case though, lifting weights and other forms of intense exercise are pretty life-affirming activities that I suggest you try a few times just to see what you're missing.

There's something satisfying about pushing your limits in all areas of life. I hope you reconsider your viewpoint and give fitness an honest try. It doesn't need to be about vanity, though that is a common trap that people fall into.