Internet search engine and news portal Yahoo! has been acquired by Verizon, to the tune of $4.83 billion dollars.
The former number one Internet portal keeps its Alibaba shares, Yahoo! Japan, and as many as 4,000 patents and other intellectual property.
The rest, goes to Verizon that already owns another Internet relic, AOL.
As hindsight is always 20/20, let’s have a look-see at the sad history of the Yahoo! executives’ decisions through the years, when it comes down to opportunities to retain its top spot in the business.
Yahoo! was formed in 1994, and four years later Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin approached Yahoo!, offering to sell them their PageRank system for as little as $1 million. That offer was declined.
In 2002, the Google founders went to Yahoo! once again, this time to raise funds worth $3 billion.
Yahoo! CEO at the time, Terry Semel, refused the offer, looking to build its own search engine to compete with Google.
For that purpose, Yahoo! acquired search engine Inktomi and ad revenue maker Overture, on its way to build the search engine that would attempt to kick Google off the top spot.
In 2006, Yahoo! attempted to acquire Facebook with a $1 billion dollar offer.
Mark Zuckerberg declined to sell, and reports suggest Facebook’s board would have forced Zuckerberg to sell, if that offer were increased by a “measly” $100 million dollars. Yahoo! CEO, Semel refused to increase the offer.
The cherry on the pie of bad-decision making came in 2008, when Microsoft made an offer to acquire Yahoo! for a massive $44.6 billion; that offer was declined by the Yahoo! board of directors.
Just one year later, Yahoo! gave up its efforts to create its own search engine, opting to sign a deal with Microsoft’s Bing instead.
Sorry, Yahoo! Not even Jean-Claude VanDamme was able to help you.
Can JCVD help Yahoo?
