I worked at Yahoo! when this was going on, I’m amazed the share holders didn’t sue Jerry Yang and the board for avoiding this sale. Yahoo had very little of technological value and was actively trying to destroy its own search business amongst other properties at the time. They really were in a prime position and bungled it extremely badly, I think they had maybe 20% of the search market at the time.
Carol Bartz later came and told everyone it was pointless to be in the search business because Google were too big and impossible to compete with on investment. She made it very clear the equation for success was money spent === great search engine results, ignoring how Google came into being in the first place. Pure Harvard Business School spreadsheet stuff.
It still feels like a wasted opportunity to me, it seems so weak to just throw your hands up in the air and say it’s too hard to make your extremely successful search engine better.
Carol Bartz later came and told everyone it was pointless to be in the search business because Google were too big and impossible to compete with on investment. She made it very clear the equation for success was money spent === great search engine results, ignoring how Google came into being in the first place. Pure Harvard Business School spreadsheet stuff.
It still feels like a wasted opportunity to me, it seems so weak to just throw your hands up in the air and say it’s too hard to make your extremely successful search engine better.