Ever heard of Excite? There's a good chance you haven't because they made a mad mistake and went from heroes to zeros.

Launched in 1998, Excite like Yahoo and Google before Yahoo and Google.

The company purchased third-party search engines and began using those as its core business.

Unfortunately, their homepage, landing page and search engine quickly became laggy and slow because Excite had made them their way, on purpose.

In short, Excite wanted to maximise profit from ads but in order to do that, they felt like they had to make sure you'd spend as much time as possible on the landing page.

Surprise surprise, that was a bad strategy, and people quickly began looking for alternatives.

Excite joins the long list of companies that completely dominated a market before losing everything, generally because of mistakes they made.

Kodaq, Blackberry, BlockBuster, MySpace, Nokia.

The list goes on.

And, I'm afraid, it'll never stop.