So is doubleclick a company people look up to? I associate them with skeezy business practices, tracking people, privacy issues, and crappy advertising. I'm seriously trying to come up with one reason to like them.<p>Maybe it's that they're successful? But so is monsanto, and i don't look up to them.
It was 1995 and Kevin O’Connor was sitting in a basement in suburban Atlanta with Dwight Merriman trying to figure out how to build a business on this new thing called the internet.<p>“We thought maybe car sales would be big. We figured porn would be huge, but we didn’t want to get into that.” says Mr. O’Connor, who along with Dwight Merriman and Kevin Ryan, would go on to build the DoubleClick, Silicon Alley’s biggest exit and the engine behind Google’s profits. "Eventually we settled on ad sales."<p>What If these guys had decided to work on porn...
The title completely misses the point that it isn't what you buy, but what you do with it. Another proof that execution is the key.<p>If Yahoo had bought DoubleClick, they likely would not have come up with AdWords, which is where the big money is for Google. On top of that, Yahoo's search technology wasn't as good as google, so people would have still left Yahoo for google.
I don't see how they are mentioning a possibility of 'What if'. This article seems a little misleading. Its clear from reading this that the founders did not want to sell themselves to Yahoo. Also, hindsight is always 20/20 :)
It sure seems to be that whomever was in charge of M&A decisions/negotians at Yahoo was an utter failure. It appears that the common thread in the downfall of Yahoo is their inability to have successfully acquired some major assets that were either scooped up by google - or went on to become stellar successes.<p>I'd really like to know the internal dynamics that resulted in this. Although, if you heard that earnings call where Carol Bartz was totally called out - I can only imagine that the issues are intimately related to the arrogance of the exec staff.