Ben Gilbert: preference

Transcript context

…Interesting. That touches on a few things here. I love that idea that if you are missing the current round, then you’re actually in a better position to take on the next around ala the iPhone or Apple being in a better position than Microsoft to go into mobile because they had nothing to lose, whereas Windows was hugely successful and was hard to move into a mobile phone factor. Sort of the same analogy of if Yahoo had really just totally lost the search ad war, would they be in a better spot for the display war? And for listeners not familiar DoubleClick, that’s basically the off-property Google ad network. So when you’re going to a publisher like New York Times and you see an ad there that’s provided by an ad network, that’s probably provided somewhere in the chain of Google and DoubleClick which they acquired delivering that ad off of the search page. So yeah, Brian, that's a super interesting What Would Have Happened Otherwise. Like Yahoo punting on paid search altogether. And just maybe a bit throw in the towel, say, “Yeah. You know what, just give us AdWords. We’ll put them at the top.” And our core competency is something that it turns out, Google had to chase. When Google buys DoubleClick, it is to expand beyond just search ads and into the broader internet advertising arena in general. So if Yahoo had just thrown in the towel there, seeded the game at that point, and then gone back to its core competency, then maybe we would have seen a situation where Google is knocking on Yahoo’s door asking to acquire them somewhere down the road.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.