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…Absolutely. Well, and there’s one more twist to the story before we can start to get into analyzing all of this. Remember, and everyone acknowledges this, Google basically copies Overture’s business. AdWords was not a direct copy of what Overture was doing because clearly Google did it better. But everyone noticed including Overture that Google had basically copied them. And so even before Yahoo acquired Overture, Overture sued Google for either copywrite infringement, IP infringement or something. It’s actually a little murky because it turns out that Yahoo who had acquired Overture at this point eventually settles with Google. If it was a slam dunk case, why would you settle with a competitor that basically has in your eyes stolen your business model and is having great success with it. In the end, before Google goes public in 2004, they settle the litigation with Overture/Yahoo. We were talking about this over email. The numbers we’re not sure about, I believe something like $400 million of Google stock pre-IPO Google stock, the only numbers that I'm sure about and then you can cut in and correct me if you know more is that I believe at some point in 2005, after Google goes public, Yahoo sells $4. 2 million shares of Google pocketing nearly a billion dollars which very much boosted its bottom line. So there’s further irony in the sense that all along, Google is still helping keep Yahoo afloat basically because Yahoo has so much Google stock. But this is something that’s always puzzled me, is I know why Google would want to settle. They want to have this litigation go away. They’re about to go public. But why would Overture/Yahoo have settled? The best that I can figure is that the patents that Overture originally had weren’t that good. I found in Steven Levy’s book about Google called In the Plex, I found a quote from Bill Gross where he’s talking about the patents. Before Overture itself goes public, apparently they hadn’t nailed down many patents and Bill Gross says that they’re rushing to patent everything they can. I don’t know why they hadn’t done this before. The quote is, “We patented everything else we could think of – a bunch of obscure things like the way we could accept the bids. But these were silly patents. The real patents would have been worth billions.” Interesting. Because in several places that refer to these patents, they talk about the “essential components related to the features and innovations surrounding our bid for placement products and our pay-per-performance search strategies.” It seems like, I don’t know, maybe they didn’t fully think it through and like you’re saying, patented a lot of the less valuable stuff. But there was a failure to see the forest through the trees there.…

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