[mmt]

> the Altavista or pets.com of the Internet, burning investor money

I'm not sure it's fair to lump Altavista with pets.com.

The latter burned through something like 300 megabucks in just over 2 years.

The former was the first full-text search engine for the web and generated tens of megabucks of revenue, though they couldn't come up with a business model to keep it going (and eventualy lost out to Google on search quality [1], IIRC). I'm not sure we'll ever know how much it cost DEC to build and run it, but it seems credible that they at least came close to breaking even.

[1] Though I still miss their richer query language, incuding the NEAR keyword.