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Compaq Trying to Sell AltaVista?
sohp writes "This Wired news story reports that
Compaq may be selling
off AltaVista, Zip2 and other properties. " and if you happen to have
a spare couple billion dollars burning a whole in your
mattress you might just wanna take a look.
Yeah. One more reason to sell it off: get their money out before the entire Internet Buble bursts. The whole hi-tech market is on a buble right now and is tempororaliy over valued (I'd sell it if I had it).
-The original AC
The inmates are running the asylum.
Around here the common treatment for a nosebleed (a bad quarter or two) seems to be amputation of the parts that are working just fine.
I watched Digital do the same thing when they were self-destructing prior to the Compaq buyout.
Now it seems like deja vu all over again.
--
An Anonymous Coward who doesn't want to lose his job yet.
Yes, that's a nice theory, but as someone that used to work with Engage and its products on a daily basis, I can assure you that they are buggy, bloated pieces of garbage.
Seems like a good deal for Compaq. Really, how reproduceable(sp?) is search engine technology.
You can't expect me to believe it cost $1 billion to develop a search engine.
Perhaps it is a good idea for compaq to cash in while they can, as well as lessen their baggage.
CMGI is an institutional investment company focusing on web properties.
They already own 18% of Lycos. David Wetherell was pivotal in getting the silly USA Networks deal dropped.
CMGI has been fairly smart until now. I have no doubts they would do much much more to develop Alta Vista than Compaq has. Compaq has enough troubles satisfying investors with its core business these days.
Altavista would provide a huge boost in demographic data for their Engage product, making it all the more valuable.
Check this recent article in Wired.
Here's the kicker: AltaVista [just the search engine part] Actually makes money!. I know [don't ask why] that they paid $250 mil for shopping.com and at least $200 mil for Zip2. I this climate that makes those holdings alone worth at least $600 mil now [even though they both suck]. The other thing is that while domestic traffic for AV is holding steady around # 10 or 11, international traffic is increasing exponentially.
Yes $2 billion is probably too much, but keep in mind that Priceline's market cap is $15 billion and they're losing money hand over fist... I for one hope this deal goes through, as the old Compaq management team is killing the focus of the company...
Their burning a whole in they're mattress. What part of that don't yew understand? Its quiet simple after awl.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Hmm, Altavista is making money, while the rest of Compaq is losing money (they project a loss of $0.15 per share this quarter). Odd.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I don't see why slashdot won't get an editor. I'm sure there are plenty of people with decent spelling and grammar who'd do it for free.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Interestingly, CMGI own Engage, who have a product known as "Engage Knowledge" - this allows you to compare the demographic and advertising data from your site with the data from *all* Engage sites, so you can see how your users differ from the "net average user".
Alta Vista would give this product a huge boost in terms of it's database, and vice versa, the revenue generation from Alta Vista will doubtless be enhanced by more sophisticated personalisation and targeting.
Watch AOL will probably buy it, they've been buying everything else.
matguy
Net. Admin.
matguy(.com)
I never really liked the AltaVista search engine, because it seemed that whenever I used it, it would find half the porn links in it's database (which wasn't entirely bad ") and the rest of the links would be for something entirely different. I do like the Babelfish translator, bad grammar and all, as it is really handy for those notorious foreign sites. Anyway, just my US$.02...
The one and (thankfully) only,
LafinJack
we are building a religion
a limited edition
we are now accepting callers
for these pendant key chains
Well, CMGI funded GeoCities, Raging Bull, PlanetAll, ThingWorld, Vicinity, etc etc etc. The thing I don't understand is why they would purchase Lycos -- they FUNDED Lycos to begin with. I doubt they owned it all, but still. Especially after the CEO of CMGI got in the spat with the CEO of Lycos about the merger with Barry Diller's company (Home shopping network, etc)
I can't see Altavista being even 100 million? How in the world did they come up with that figure? Billion dollars worth of hardware?
DrWatt
burning a whole what in my mattress?- -------------
--------------------------------------
Jamin Philip Gray
jgray@writeme.com
http://students.cec.wustl.edu/~jpg2/
Celebrate the finer things in life
Keep in mind that VC's do not always refer to technology when talking about "scalability". Revenue models are also considered to be scalable or not.
Altavista used to be my favorite search engine...seems like after Compaq bought them out they really didn't keep up with the industry. oh well.
I hope they keep the AV translations, or I'll start failing my Spanish class.
So who is CMGI? I'm surprised I haven't heard much about them before, but then again, this cubicle can be a nice dark cave sometimes.
What worries me is that CMGI is also thinking about purchasing Lycos as well. Would they be pondering pushing Altavista and Lycos together into one Big Ugly Portal Site? *sigh*
I wish some folks would learn to leave well enough alone. It was painful enough to watch DejaNews do this, I don't want to see it happen to a halfway-decent search engine, even if it's been bedeviled with ads and 'placement' fees in recent times.
Just don't touch Google, CMGI. That's all I ask.
Specificaly your eyes and ears. We're going to have an auction here (U.S) for various parts of the broadcast spectrum, just selling frequencies, strange world, huh?
+&x
Almost looks like a Tender Offer. Will Compaq retain any stock at all?
It's a thankless job, but I've got a lot of Karma to burn off
If I volunteer to edit, can I get free slashdot merchandise? That would be nice....
Geek-grrl in training
"Of course I still love you. Now stop whining and let me shoot you."
To truly understand recursion, you must first truly understand recursion.
My grammar and spelling are good, and I'd be happy to do it for free, I just want a T-shirt.
Geek-grrl in training
To truly understand recursion, you must first truly understand recursion.
Hmm.. dumping assets? What could this imply? A market shift perhaps. I can hear the suits at Compaq now...
Yes that's it. Quickly remove all assets from the internet as that is a fairly stable market now. Quickly divert all extra funds into building radiation proof cases to withstand the 1GHz chip we're gonna smash in there.
...and while we're at it...
Rumour has it that someone has found a way to remove those silly screws from the backs of our boxes. One million to R&D to come up with a new way to prevent kiddies from prying open their boxes.
From a duct tape manufacturing pant...signing off
Blackfire
I just don't have too much sympathy for Compaq. I feel it would almost be better for the industry if they were to go under. My concern lies with Alpha, though.
The reason I have little respect for Compaq is how they handle their own systems. A friend bought one and had to deal with cheap/proprietary hardware and had to pay for Win95 while not actually receiving the media. What was received instead was a "Compaq System CD" of sorts. Compaq was instrumental in building and supporting the WinTel empire, at the expense of better products.
So if Compaq sells Altavista and otherwise faces financial burdens, it would be not unlike the countless other companies that were shunned so the ever-profitable WinTel could thrive...
-Clump