Speaker unverified: observation

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…Yeah. And one thing that I think is worth separating out a little bit here is Overture nailed the product model. For the first time, somebody had a performance for-pay search model that totally turned the industry on its head. But that was really the product model. They were a B2B provider. They tried to be a B2C provider but couldn’t get the traffic to their search engine. And Google was the one that sort of ended up nailing the business model by stealing the product model from what Overture had created and then building that actual B2C business that has incredibly outsized returns. I think this is probably a well-known, well-researched thing but it really just occurred to me that if you think about the value chain and everyone that ends up contributing to the ultimate search results that you see or the ultimate social stories that you see on Facebook. The biggest companies that command the most market cap and capture the most value are these B2C companies. And if you’re deciding swing and a miss on B2C with GoTo.com, we’re going to be Overture and be a B2B provider, you may have pioneered the best product but you’re settling for a smaller opportunity in being a B2B provider if you’re in a single industry like that. I could see making a case for B2B having potentially larger upside if you’re serving multiple industries but, you know, search was this brand-new thing and the only companies that they could serve were the search engines themselves, so they naturally had to be smaller than the combined value of the search engine. And the way that they were positioned, you know, smaller than any single search engine or the largest single search engine anyway. That’s the original sin of GoTo-Overture anyway because remember, the reason they were in a precarious situation is because they didn’t actually own the underlying properties that were generating the traffic. They thought they solved that problem by hooking up with Yahoo. The problem is, is that Google did such a good job at being everybody’s favorite search engine, of being the best in search that by the time if we give them credit and say they eventually got their act together by 2007, it's way too late because everyone has already learned to Google it and at that point, Yahoo, as a search destination was significantly less in market share than Google was. Totally. And this is a really great transition into acquisition category. So for listeners that are new to the show, we assign a category to every acquisition and those buckets are people, technology, product, business line, asset, or other. I think so that when we look at this acquisition, it was really a vertical in Yahoo buying a horizontal in Overture, and Overture obviously trying to serve many search engines with their technology; Yahoo buying them to integrate with their one search engine. And, you know, these are sort of hard because let’s assume that a lot of the value created by Overture was by summing across all their different customers. Well, as soon as they get acquired by Yahoo, it's pretty easy to see that boy, if you’re prioritizing for the vertical for Yahoo, you don’t want them serving all these other customers. But the issue was, like even if you’re going to take that value destruction hammer and do that because you believe that the synergy and the sum of the parts created by that acquisition is better than all the previous value by serving all those customers for Overture, they actually didn’t pick. And the issue is, I think the acquisition category I'm going to assign is, the problem is they acquired a technology and they also acquired a business line and tried to keep both going. So, you know, they had the technology that they were integrating into Project Panama but they also had this business line and Overture continued to serve other customers. Like you got to pick one and you got to go hard at the strategy.…

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