Ever heard of "MySimon"? CNET paid $700 million for it in '99. What about the online greeting card site "BlueMountain.com"? Excite@Home paid $780 million for it. So many billions of dollars down the drain.

That's right. Excite! Does anyone use it anymore!

I remember all of those mentioned. perhaps someone should start a "Where are they now" website.

Methinks it would be damn shocking, and educational, to read the list of the multitude of failed website and services in recent years.
Keeping the list up to date would be of interest as new endeavors are falling by the wayside as we speak. Alas many do not deserve such a fate.

Wonderful clip.

It looks like the big players bought the competition for the most part.

Actually, the purchases at the time didn't look as bad as they do now... I don't think the problem was with bad decisions to acquire so much as doing something meaningful AFTER the fact - something none of these companies did.

Excite, as one example, was a darling in the age of portals and personalization... of course it's nothing compared to Google Personalized now or PageFlakes etc. If they continued to innovate and keep their significant (at the time) marketshare - perhaps things would've turned out different for them.

But then again, the typical assumption when someone buys a company is that they know what they're doing. Of course the reality isn't so... as we've seen time and time again.

Does anyone here remember Napster?

I do. I never used it but I remember it.