this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2024
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Remember what that landscape looked like. The only major players we know today that existed then are Microsoft and Apple, and Apple had just been bailed out by MS to get in front of antitrust issues. Amazon existed as a bookstore, Google was not around yet, Facebook would still be several years out ... MySpace wasn't yet around. AOL was still a behemoth. Adobe sold perpetual licenses.
This is a far more recent development.
Google was the first example I thought of, because they were founded in 1998, solidly before the dotcom crash. They survived because they hoarded data.
My point was that every company going into the bubble thought they had a product they could monetize, but virtually all of them failed in favor of just hoarding everyone's data. Amazon and eBay were competing for ecomerce supremacy, but now even they are just privacy violators for various reasons (amazon via AWS and Alexa, eBay in the interest of detecting malicious account behaviour).
MySpace is an example of another unsustainable social media model in the vein of many dotcom era services. They died out as soon as Facebook realized they could hoard everyone's data.
All roads lead to privacy nightmares. It's the fossil fuel of the internet, and enshitification is the climate change.
I could swear Google wasn't broadly a thing yet. The startup I worked at in 1999 had an elevator pitch for how we "could be the next Yahoo." Not a great thing to aspire to in retrospect, but Google wasn't on our radar.
They were there and they were superior to the alternatives almost out of the gate. I was working for a video game company at the time and me and the rest of the IT dept made the switch almost immediately because the results were clearly superior. Made me an advocate for them for years, probably far beyond where I should have given up. I am not sure which product cancellation finally changed my mind on them. Probably it was around the mess of Google Talk/Chat/Hangouts mess of apps.
You're right, they weren't a "household name" yet. But they were probably more than a little worried about surviving at the time. Turns out they picked the winning strategy.