Sliding as they Foolishly relive the past : eBay, Yahoo, Amazon, AOL

[mandy]

From the ashes of the 2001-2002 crash there emerged four horsemen of the dot-com apocalypse: Amazon.com, Yahoo!, eBay, and AOL. This quartet of iconic companies, wounded but not destroyed in the crash, survived the plague years and flourished when the market recovered. But in recent weeks, at a time when online advertising and e-commerce are enjoying strong growth, all four have pulled up lame. The group that once led the Nasdaq's resurgence has generally lagged the tech-heavy index over the past year.

You can't blame it all on Google. Each of the horsemen is still a leader in its core business, Google or no Google. But each derives the lion's share of its revenues from a maturing U.S. market, each is finding profit margins slipping as it tries to diversify, and each has foolishly reached back to tried-and-failed ideas of the dot-com era for salvation...

full article: http://www.slate.com/id/2146541