If you regret making a mistake, remember Yahoo: The giant “wrong” for decades, from a hundred billion dollar corporation to become its own shadow

Life is a series of choices, whether difficult or easy, you have to make a decision. If it’s a choice, there will be right and wrong, because if it’s all right, everyone is guaranteed to be rich, right?

But if thinking like that still doesn’t help you regret a bad choice you’ve made, remember Yahoo. In 2016, Yahoo sold its core Internet business to Verizon for $4.83 billion. A number that sounds huge, but is actually the result of a series of bad choices that the “giant” that once led the market over the past 20 years.

Opportunities come and go

The story originates in 1998, with 2 characters, Larry Page and Sergei Brin. Both are unknown names in the technology world. They proposed to AltaVista – a very successful search engine at the time – about a sale of the startup they founded for $ 1 million, in order to have money to continue their studies at Stanford University.

AltaVista felt that the amount was too high and decided to ignore this offer. But what they didn’t expect was that the company Page and Brin touted was the PageRank algorithm system – which was soon patented and became the core value of Google today!

AltaVista rejected Page and Brin, and it only took them 3 years to regret it because Google quickly emerged to take market share, pushed AltaVista out of the market and fell into the scene of being acquired by Yahoo in 2003. By 2013. , Yahoo was also forced to carry out the death of AltaVista, ending the existence of an Internet legend. But where did Yahoo go wrong? Yes, because before buying AltaVista, Yahoo also had the opportunity to buy Google. In 2002, CEO Terry Semel approached Google to negotiate an offer of $3 billion. Google said no and asked for 5 billion, Yahoo found it too expensive and refused. And now Google has a market capitalization of… over a trillion dollars.

The “close deal” phase goes underground

Yahoo’s business situation has been bleak over time. In 2008, Microsoft approached, offering to buy the entire company for $44.6 billion – or $31 per share. That price is 62% higher than Yahoo’s list price just 1 day before. Microsoft at the time thought that the combination with Yahoo could help the two dominate the online advertising market, creating a more efficient company and bringing in at least $1 billion in revenue a year.

But Yahoo says no! So 8 years later, they had to sell themselves to Verizon, for 10 times less!

Either way, you have to look back. Who knows that if Yahoo really bought Google, it might now be worth hundreds, trillions of dollars, or we wouldn’t have the optimal Google we have today. In general, nobody knows what will happen in advance, right?