Microsoft bids $44.6B to buy Yahoo (2008)

It's amazing how much the internet has changed in just 13 years. Makes me wonder if the tech giants of today will become irrelevant by 2030s or we're past the point where the giants are rich enough to just buy up anything with potential while their original products fade into obscurity.

Late 90's joke: Yahoo and Netscape are going to merge and move their headquarters to Israel: Net'n'Yahoo

The years from 2006 to 2010 gave rise to today's BigTech.

Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google were pioneers in the data-centers space. Amazon was only beginning to turn-up the heat. In retrospect, given the engineering talent and expertise at Y! at the time, it is a shame that in light of AWS' success they did not invest in Infrastructure-as-a-Service when their "web services" org was already churning out a range of tools and services on top of SOAP / REST. I mean, the Apache Hadoop ecosystem was mostly Yahoo!

As an outside observer, I think, with any luck, cloud computing could have saved Y!'s bacon, even as a late entrant (MSFT re-launched Azure in 2010). Y!'s focus on being a Media house now seems like a bad bet, which could have worked had they snapped Facebook for $1B.

Microsoft struggled with its initial "Red Dog" / "Windows Azure" release in 2008, too; so much so that parts of the company were EC2 customers back in the day.

I think this goes to show how stars had to align for AWS to stay a market leader as they started from a position of disadvantage (and needed a decade of exponential growth to consolidate only to contend with unrelenting competition from Azure), in face of companies that were are no slouches in terms of ability and product innovation, either. For Google though, around the same time Y! was floundering, their acquisitions and execution with Android, YouTube, and Chrome (I like to say Chrome was acquired because Google literally hired lead Firefox engineers to build it) ensured their relevance in the decade to come.

No wonder the folks who ran AWS, Azure, and Android/Chrome ended up as the eventual CEOs of their respective trillion-dollar mother-ships; whilst Y! has bitten the dust.

Shareholders did great holding onto Yahoo! stock, as it’s Alibaba holdings would perform magnificently.

If you look back a decade, things haven’t changed that much.

Facebook was public, growing, had figured out mobile and had already acquired Instagram. It was by far the top social media company.

Amazon had taken over online retail. It was already a behemoth. AWS was in its infancy, but it was growing.

Apple was already the most valuable company in the US.

Microsoft had been one of the top 10 most valuable companies for a decade.

Google was already a behemoth when it came to search. YouTube was massive and Android had just started gaining traction.

Out of the top five companies, Google is the only one that hasn’t been able to pivot or diversify. The rest of the companies have been able to learn from the mistakes of the previous generation.

In the case of Apple and Microsoft. They have both been around for 35+ years. Microsoft wrote the first version of the embedded AppleSoft Basic interpreter for Apple //e’s in 1980.