What ever happened to the dot.com millionaires?

**18493** · 02-13-2010, 07:40 PM

Mark Cuban owns the Dallas Mavericks and is still putting out new ventures left & right. He sold out to yahoo.com at the peak, and I think Cuban shorted yahoo.com after the sale.

**loudbeats.com** · 02-13-2010, 10:15 PM

Interesting about MongoMusic:

Link 1
Link 2

Jeremy Hinman is the director of Business Development for MSN® Music and is responsible for its strategic direction. He was the founder and president of Mongomusic Inc. and now finds himself at Microsoft Corp. after its successful acquisition of MongoMusic. Another link

**18493** · 02-13-2010, 10:49 PM

Has Microsoft made one purchase - in the past 20-years - that is worth anything? They have probably purchased 400-companies; copied 200-companies (Zune, Windows, Bing, etc) They bought hotmail.com, which I don't know anybody who uses that anymore. Webtv.com is no longer a product.

Now they buy yahoo's search and roll out bing.com. MSFT is the General Montors of the technology industry.

---------- Post added at 11:23 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:21 PM ----------

MSFT's co-founder Paul Allen's Holdings at least include the Portland Trailblazers and the Jimi Hendrix Museum.

But he is battling another cancer, this one a bit more serious - it sounds like - than the last...which caused him to leave MSFT.

http://www.paulallen.com/?contentId=1

---------- Post added at 11:49 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:23 PM ----------

I can still remember daytrading CMGI, YHOO, AOL, JDSU, AOL, LU, CSCO, JNPR, BRCM, GLW. Those were some great days!

**PokerPie** · 02-13-2010, 11:12 PM

Originally Posted by loudbeats.com

Interesting about MongoMusic:

Link 1
Link 2

Jeremy Hinman is the director of Business Development for MSN® Music and is responsible for its strategic direction. He was the founder and president of Mongomusic Inc. and now finds himself at Microsoft Corp. after its successful acquisition of MongoMusic. Another link

Sounds like 'hiring by acquisition'.

Has Microsoft made one purchase - in the past 20-years - that is worth anything?

See above. You can get a lot more out of an acquisition of an internet company than their domain name. You get customers, engineers, executives, technologies, patents, ideas, R&D departments, revenue streams and on and on. G and M both also seem to buy budding companies who may pose a threat to them down the road. See G acquiring FeedBurner and shunning it for the most part. It was a direct threat to Google Reader.

I've even done this on a small scale. I bought a competing website and basically shut it down over time - but I took their backend software which I was then leasing from them, took their revenue streams which would be invisible to anybody but me or the other site owner and still exist and are growing today, and removed a competitor in a niche market - along with obtaining a huge mailing list that I have used to promote my other website(s).

Now apply this to a huge corporation making a $50,000,000 purchase and imaging how may possible intangible benefits there may be from making an acquisition that have little to do with www.thatcompany.com. Not saying all of these huge deals are worth it or are good deals - just that there is often more than meets the eye and assuming G or M keep spending xx,xxx,xxx+ over and over and making losing bets is pretty naive. There shareholders would revolt if that were the case - there shareholders obviously understand these things. These companies are also run by some of the smartest people in the world. Smart people usually don't keep walking into the same window over and over and over again.

I'm a G shareholder and I have no problem with them acquiring all of these companies, even though to some they look like wasted money. If it were not a household name and such a big part of our daily lives, YouTube would probably seem like a flop acquisition...

**000** · 02-13-2010, 11:19 PM

Originally Posted by 18493

MSFT is the General Montors of the technology industry.

not in bean counting ...
market cap: MSFT 244.96B, MTLQQ.PK 364.44M
gross profit (ttm): MSFT 46.28B, MTLQQ.PK -1.62B
EBITDA (ttm): MSFT 24.43B, MTLQQ.PK -8.82B
total cash (mrq): MSFT 33.45B, MTLQQ.PK 11.58B
total debt (mrq): MSFT 6.00B, MTLQQ.PK 54.40B
operating cash flow (ttm): MSFT 20.96B, MTLQQ.PK -19.86B
annual eps estimate: MSFT 2.01 (jun-10), MTLQQ.PK -25.82 (dec-09)
etc ...

**PokerPie** · 02-13-2010, 11:27 PM

Ya but there is a reason their stock has been flat for a decade. They lose money in basically everything other than Windows and Office. Once those are obsolete (and that is a question of when, not if) - they will wither and die if they don't hand the company over to somebody who understands the internet.