11 Dumbest Tech Acquisitions of All-Time
11. Yahoo and Geocities: Yahoo bought Geocities (a web-hosting service) in 1999 for $4 billion, so that its users could put all of their content (i.e. web pages) under “cities” which had actual cities’ names. So for example, all technology-related content would go to the “Silicon Valley” city (and so on). Needless to say, Yahoo didn’t do much with the site, and in 2009, it made an announcement saying the service would be killed off.
10. HP and Palm: Hewlett-Packard bought Palm in 2010 for $1.2 billion, and other than the host of patents that it would have received, there’s not much else than HP did with it. Jon Rubinstein (the CEO of Palm), moved to HP with the acquisition and was named as a VP of innovation, while Stephen De Witt was put in charge of the webOS Business Unit (Rubinstein later left HP). In any case, webOS is still such a tiny platform that it’s hardly ever mentioned in the smartphone wars for marketshare.
