Buying a failed ISP’s business — and its name (2002)

The name outlived the company

What was bought was a million subscribers and the word livedoor. What On the Edge lacked, in order to get out of contract work, was not engineering but the power to gather people under a name of its own. The company whose chairman had said that being free was not by itself enough to make users choose you was picked up after it ran aground, and its name was fastened onto the buyer. Discarding a founding name twice in fifteen months was this company’s agility — and, at the same time, the thinness of its outline.

But the people the name gathered never turned into profit. The portal business was never once in the black; what earned was the finance division. The livedoor subsidiary was carved out in 2007 and sold off in 2010, passing out of the acquiring company altogether and under different capital. The company that bought a subscriber base and went so far as to take its name has gone; the name of the company that was bought remains. What the transfer of business really passed on, in the end, was the name.