Google-DoubleClick, memories of days of the Internet gone by

Reading the story of Google buying DoubleClick for 3.1 billion cash today made me reminisce back to the early days of the commercial internet, the height of the Web, the money and the companies back then.  I remember thinking back then on a particular day where my .com stocks were rocking, business was booming and I really thought we were in a new paradigm, that one day I would look back at that time as "the good old days".  How right I was. 

I remember when DoubleClick was out pioneering the on line advertising model. The argument went back and forth, do you pay CPM or per click. No matter what DC made money.  I remember the heady days down in Silicon Alley where Agency.com, Razorfish and others seemed to be major companies on the rise.  My own web hosting company, TriStar Web was based down at 55 John St..  We had a small data center there with 2 or 3 T-1 lines.  The rest of our stuff was housed out at LI.net in Smithtown.  Our competition was HiWay Hosting down in Florida, Verio (who was doing a major roll up in hosting), Value Web and the rest.  We all tried to get in good with the folks at Network Solutions who ran the domain game.  Verisign had not bought them yet. Our major marketing was by buying on line ads on thewebhostinglist.com. We only wanted to deal directly with them, figuring the DoubleClicks of the world were just middlemen who would never last (another prophetic business judgment, which is why I still have to work). 

Thinking about Google, it didn't exist.  Yahoo was still a plain page with a grey background.  No My Yahoo and stuff like that.  Their competition in search was Alta Vista (we thought they had the best technology), InfoSeek, Excite (before they were bought by @home).  IE was an up an comer trying to knock Netscape off of the throne.  My God, where did the years go? Can you believe I am still here? Where did all of these companies go? All those people I worked and partied with during those heady days. Well at least one of them really did cash out for billions after all this time.  Congratulations to the folks at DoubleClick. It has been a long strange trip.  Also, congratulations to Google, they have truly acquired one of the blue bloods of the old net.  Now lets see them continue to grow and make the business relevant in Web 2.0 and beyond.