The $1,000,000 mistake that cost Yahoo a $3,300,000,000 company
Yahoo might have gone the way of the floppy disk or the tape recorder when it comes to younger generations, but the search engine giant was once the king of the internet before Google snatched the throne.
It wasn't always the case that you'd immediately head to Google if you had a question or something you wanted to look up, as before 'Googled' had become a verb people would regularly visit Yahoo! or Ask Jeeves for their needs on the world wide web.
Unfortunately, much like Nokia and Blackberry when Apple first introduced the iPhone, Yahoo failed to capitalize on its popularity and cement itself as the internet's welcome mat, making one critical mistake that cost them billions down the line.
As reported by UNILAD, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were looking for buyers for what was then just a small start-up company in 1998, offering it to companies like AltaVision for a 'measly' $1 million.
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AltaVision denied their offer in what can only be described as a significant blunder, but another company that said no to Page and Brin was Yahoo, who believed that users would opt for its own platform over what Google had to offer.
Of course, we all know how the story went from there, and it took just four years for Yahoo to approach Google with an offer of its own, putting forward a staggering $3 billion figure to buy the company outright — 3,000 times larger than what Brin and Page proposed.
The big wigs behind Google weren't exactly opposed to parting ways with what had by then become the biggest site on the web, but they did counter Yahoo's offer with a $5 billion proposal of their own, causing then-CEO Terry Semel to back out.
Despite the exuberant cost this would have been for Yahoo at the time, it has somehow turned into an even bigger mistake over two decades later, with Alphabet – Google's parent company – now being worth over $3.5 trillion, which works out to around 3.5 million times larger than the first offer, and around 700 times more than Google's counter-proposal.
This is far from Yahoo's only blunder over the years, as the company also refused a buyout offer worth around $44.6 billion from Microsoft back in 2008, which at the time was over 62% larger than its stock market price, and only slightly less than its current market cap 17 years later.
It has tried to make up for its mistakes in recent times, having recently attempted to purchase the Chrome browser from underneath Google's nose amid a monopoly lawsuit from the US Department of Justice, but it's been clear for several decades now that Yahoo is firmly out of the race when compared to its biggest rival when it could have prevented it from happening right at the very start.