Lots of folks taking aim at Kleiner-Perkins and the pending Google IPO:
John Robb: “Google’s KPCB hype machine must just be clearing its throat for the IPO.”
are looking back at Netscape and the VC’s role in making that offering huge (and over-inflated).
Dave Winer: “The possibility that talk of Microsoft buying Google was hype hadn’t occurred to me until I read John’s post.”
K-Praxis: Google IPO an experiment in opinion mining: “Google’s IPO is likened to Netscape IPO not only because what MS did to Netscape—but also because the Netscape IPO was highly over hyped and overpriced and almost started the dot-com-boom IPO frenzy rolling.”
Arnold Kling: “If you’re Jim Clark or Kleiner-Perkins, you can make a lot of money by convincing Wall Street that you are going to be the next Microsoft, even if you have no way of achieving that objective. So you “moon Microsoft” to pump up the stock, and then sell it. I think that there was a lot of that going on with Netscape.”
Bill Royle: “Heck, maybe we should just sell Google, Yahoo and Amazon off to pay for the war. ”