iWon.com Picks Up Excite.com Portal for a Song
The New York Times reports that Irvington, NY-based iWon.com has purchased the remaining portions of web portal Excite.com for less than $10 million. The Times article essentially defines the story as an example of a sort of "last-mover advantage," in that iWon.com did not begin operations until 1999 and has never had more than 230 employees.
Oh how far the mighty have fallen! In the documentary Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet, produced in 1998, the founders of Excite are briefly seen writing code for their portal. The code, visible on the computer screen, was Perl. How successful could those original developers have been if they had grown their site organically, focused on performance improvements, and not gone hog wild with acquisitions?