David Rosenthal: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I’m just actually curious. Do you know the company I’m referring to? Do you know the the deal? It’s funny. The way you phrase that, I’m thinking like, oh, did Microsoft try and buy Google? I don’t know about it, but the number of course you’re talking about Yahoo. Yes. Let’s set some context before we get to this 2008 Yahoo attempted acquisition. There were two companies that had developed programmatic advertising technology to serve and target online ads, especially in search. There was DoubleClick the market leader, and there was aQuantive. Microsoft had lost the DoubleClick acquisition to Google. They bought aQuantive and that didn’t go well. It was $7 billion, and they ended up declaring basically the whole thing a write-off. Microsoft is desperate for search market share, and between their internal efforts with MSN search and I believe it was called Windows Live Search, they were not making much progress there. At the same time, Internet Explorer had totally languished. Microsoft had completely taken their eye off the ball of the browser wars from 10 years earlier, and IE was just widely regarded as a garbage browser. Web developers hated it because it made you write a bunch of weird, custom stuff, so randomly things wouldn’t work in IE. Users hated it because basically nothing new was coming. Every time a new version of the operating system would ship, it just felt like it’s the same old Internet Explorer over and over again. And you have Firefox coming on the scene starting around 2007, where it was really making a dent, and Google was the default search from Firefox. Firefox was awesome. It had tabs. IE didn’t have tabs at the time.…

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