Orlando reminded me today about something I knew of a long time ago, but I couldn’t communicate openly because it was an internal affair at the moment. In time, after I concluded my collaboration with Netbridge Development, I forgot about the matter since it wasn’t relevant for me anymore. However, one of the last projects I worked on before I left Netbridge Development was to update the corporate website (a simple html page, in fact) to reflect the changes that were about to happen.
As Orlando mentioned in his post, in the Spring of 2007, Netbridge Investments (branded NetBridge at that moment) split its business in two, the original company keeping the online advertising business (Boom Online Advertising Agency), while a new company, Netbridge Development, took over the online publishing and services projects. Rumors said that the split was caused by top management conflicts rather than a strategic decision, since there could have been quite some synergies between the two parts of the business.
A year and a half later, the history repeats itself. Netbridge Development splits its projects again, keeping this time the online content publishing side in the mother company (auto.ro, animale.ro, hit.ro, bloombiz.ro, etc), while spinning off the online services side (okazii.ro, trafic.ro, myjob.ro, hr-romania.ro, etc) into a new company, Netbridge Services. I will refrain from saying what were the reasons for this move, but you can probably figure it out by yourself.
While in a sense I can see a business reason why one would split the original company in the three different parts that exist now, I can not stop thinking about the loss of synergies caused by this separation and what common projects could have been run better. However, NetBridge is now history and if you want to know more about the active projects of each of the now three Netbridge companies, check their website at www.netbridge.ro.