Excite says ‘no thanks’ to purchasing Google.
Back in 1999 the internet was a very different place. Google was just the name of a company trying to gain traction and Excite was the most used search engine on the planet. In fact, Excite was at the core of the big dot-com boom that made so many people so wealthy, before taking it all back. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both founders of Google, saw how popular Excite was during those wild times and they attempted to get in on the action. The co-founders tried to sell their engine to Excite for a cool $1 million dollars. After negotiating Google lowered their number to $750,000. Excite still refused and Google walked away. Now Google is a huge company that has almost branded the internet after itself. Nobody looks for ‘search engines’ anymore. They look for Google. The company is worth over $180 billion dollars today and Excite was bought out by AskJeeves a few years after failing to negotiate a deal with Google. Such is life on the internet.
Excite says ‘no thanks’ to purchasing Google
Western Union declines purchase of the telephone.
Western Union existed as a statue of industry back in the late 1800’s thanks to their communications monopoly with the telegraph. Similar to Kodak listed above, Western Union did oen thing really well and they closed their eyes to other possible ventures. So when Gardiner Green Hubbard approach Western Union’s president, William Orton, holding the patent to the telephone things got interesting. Hubbard wanted to sell the patent for $100,000 at the time. Orton instead stuck to his firm belief in the telegraph and turned down the patent. To add insult to injury Orton reportedly claimed that the telephone was essentially an ‘electric toy’ and that it had ‘no commercial possibilities. A little company by the name of AT&T stepped up to the plate instead.
Western Union declines purchase of the telephone