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Lycos Sold To South Korean Company
maggeth writes "Terra Networks has finally decided to dump its struggling web portal, Lycos, to the South Korean-based Daum Communications Corp. Terra bought Lycos for $12.5 billion and they managed to sell if for $105 million. More details at the story on eWeek."
Speaking of ripped off, why does the design of Daum's logo look strangely familiar?
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
Lycos has really gone downhill apparently. They actually have the audacity to feature a "model search" (read: PORN) on their front page.
What a world we live in. What happened to the nice Lycos dog?
Let's all guess at what will happen to the CEO of a company that bought a company for 12.5 billion and sold it for 105 million.
a) He will be fired immediately and will lose all of his "golden parachute" benefits.
b) He will be demoted and will get a cut in pay.
c) He will be administratively punished perhaps by receiving a bad review from his board. It will go on his permanment record.
d) He will receive a bonus worth tens of millions of dollars, he will remain a CEO for a little while longer then he will quit and move on to another company where he will do it again.
evil is as evil does
When I was in High School (umm, awhile ago), Lycos was my favorite search engine, even over Yahoo!. I can't begin to imagine the management mishaps that had to have happened in order to drive that cart into the ground.
I also thought that they had plenty of interesting features, they really just failed to innovate in order to compete against the Yahoo!'s, Googles, and MSNs of today.
Terra belongs to Telefónica (biggest telecom in Spain, coming from a national monopoly). In year 2000 the CEO was Villalonga (close friends with ex-PM Aznar) whose strategy was expanding through the Americas, thus buying Lycos made sense. Villalonga was expelled by political pressure, since in Spain, american practices like stock options are considered bribery and corruption.
The new CEO (who has devalued the company substantially) had a completely different approach and Lycos no longer makes sense in the company.
Some investors were thinking Lyco was the beginning of Google as a portal. Unfortunately for Lycos, they aimed for advertisers dollars instead of providing consumer satisafaction. They lost the consumers as Google showed them how it's done. Even while Google was growing and passing Yahoo and AOL, Lycos didn't get a clue and thought more and bigger ads = more revenue. They missed the important step of obtaining market share. Oops!
On another note, I wonder if MS is going to be too overloaded and advertisement heavy in their new search engine. Are they going to take a page from Google? Are they going to try to embrace and extend IE to lock in users to the MS search? Will such a miss-step drive more users to vendor agnostic browsers other than IE?
It'll be fun to watch the MS attempt. Somehow I see it being driven by the same playbook as the X-box. A big money sink the first few years to get it linked into everything and then the advertising and paid content kicks in (tied to MS version of i-Tunes for example).
I see the web being diveded into the MS stuff and the rest of the WWW much like AOL and the Internet. MS will index partners and Google will index the rest of the web including all the good indie, OSS, and counter-culture stuff.
Win 98 lite will probably not show up in a MS search for windows speed enhancements.
The truth shall set you free!
They must know something we don't. I can tell you that every single Korean girl in our school has a Daum account - as amazing as that seems.
Daum is also consistantly the most visited portal in S. Korea. They are now what Yahoo was 3 years ago. Hell, they even LOOK like Yahoo!
So why would a top Korean site purchase Lycos? For SmartSearch perhaps? Dunno!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
A quote often attributed to Richard Branson is perhaps the best known variation. I don't know if it's true, but supposedly he was once asked how to become a millionaire and replied something along the lines of "begin as a billionaire and start an airline". Given the amounts he lost on Virgin Atlantic in the beginning it's a fairly plausible quote...
As an employee of Monster.com, I can tell you that ain't so. Monster is a huge company, with things like the largest yellow-pages directory service, military personnel support svcs, you name it. Even my little branch of Tickle.com. :-)
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